WRITING NATURE: 
DISCOURSES OF ECOLOGY

As a native Illinois resident, I have seen a wide variety of landscapes, from the densely forested countryside, to the urban development of Chicago. Just several miles north of my home, there used to be a forested area that was largely undeveloped. Theroads weren't all in place and commercial centers were still only in their infancy. Therewas a farmer who owned a small plot of land just east of this forest and his rows of cornlined the fields far into the horizon. I remember how as kids, my friends and I would sometimes ask our parents to drop us off at this forest where we would play games in the shade of the oak trees. Their trunks were large and among the branches, countless birds found refuge from the sun and other predators. Towering above the green shrubs beneath them, these trees became like another home, shielding us from the heat of the afternoon sun and quieting the steady hum of car engines on the roads.

Deep inside the forest where we could barely see the sunlight and all that we could hear was the utter silence broken by the swaying branches, we would have fun throwing rocks into the stream that was the water source for the one forest's creatures. Our voices would echo through the forest as we shouted to one another, splashed in the stream, and enjoyed the quiet of our second "home." Yet, unlike in my physical home, here the circle of nature existed in harmony, for there was no dominance by a single species but an abundance of predators and prey. Every animal and plant found its rightful place in the ecological cycle, and life and death as much as life became a normal occurrence, as if to suggest a balance between nature's creatures and nature's resources. In her essay "Fecundity," Anne Dillard points out that "as far as lower animals go, if you lead a simple life you probably face a boring death. Some animals, however, lead such complicated lives that not only do the chances for one animal's birth at any minute multiply greatly, but so also do the varieties of the deaths it might die" (174). An ant does not lead such a complex life as we do and cannot understand what it means to die in a car accident: a simple death follows a simple life, and likewise, a variety of deaths are possible for the most complex creatures like us. Nonetheless, the message remains the same for all species: death, like life, is a natural part of existence in order to keep nature's creatures and resources in check.

And yet, even while this forest was rather remote from any large cities and industry, just like Michael Pollan's grandfather, I could not drown out the oncoming noise of city expansion. Pollan, the editor-at-large at Harper's Magazine who has written numerous articles about nature and has had them published in such magazines as The New York Times Magazine, writes that "Grandpa worked the leading edge of the suburban advance, speculating in the land that suburbanization was steadily translating from farm into tract house and shopping center" (11). I could feel the presence of Chicago moving closer and closer to my smaller city, but the suburbanization occurring was happening more radically than I could have imagined. The demographics soon favored the growing number of those who lived in the suburbs but commuted to Chicago for work; commercial properties thus developed beyond Chicago city boundaries to keep pace with the residential expansion. Like the other surrounding Chicago surburbs, families poured into Naperville, and with them came the construction of new homes and shopping centers that hand once been farmland.

Through my junior high and high school years, I remember that my parents would drive me past my forest en route to piano, and each time, I would see that a new tree had been cut down. Mechanical arms and bulldozers continued to tear away at the forest that had been a part of my childhood world. Slowly, the forest shrank until one day I could see clear across the field to the horizon and my heart jumped: "Where are the trees?" I shouted to my parents to stop the car and as they did, I ran to the heart of what used to be the forest and where the stream used to be was now just dry earth.

The ground no longer had the soft feel of soil or the blackness indicating the rich nutrients available for plant growth. A few tree stumps still remained and were all but the last reminder of what had been here before. I took a seat on one and wondered what had happened. I wanted to cry, to yell, and to ask whoever had destroyed this the question why. I looked around but there was no one to ask. The blackbirds whose songs I had grown accustomed to hearing, the water that had flowed between the rocks, and even the bugs that had crawled the ground were nowhere to be seen. All I could turn to were the mechanical yellow-orange plows still standing in the field.

Today, the forest has been replaced by a Menards store. On one side, there is a new shopping mall. On the other, the street is now paved with two lanes in each direction, and the street itself is lined with car dealerships and other commercial properties. My city has expanded from its original small town to a sprawling city of over 130,000&emdash;and we continue to be one of the fastest growing in Illinois. This forest, however, wasn't the only one in the area. There are still others&emdash;designated and protected as forest preserves&emdash;that I still visit whenever I return home and am looking for a quiet get-away from the bustle of the city. I look into the woodlands at another forest close to my former elementary school and am saddened when I think that their cool shelter, the greenness of the ground, and the immensity of these trees may be at the same risk for destruction.

Walking by the trees near my school, I wonder what is inside the thicket of green. Countless species, I'm sure, live, eat, and sleep there. Looking at the green, I am reminded that the forests I see are not the only ones in the world. I feel comforted knowing that there are still other places, such as national parks or wildlife refuges, where I can smell the scent of the trees untainted by the smog of factories and look up into a bewildering variety of green and brown, not the a cloud of exhaust fumes. But at the same time, this same comfort also fills me with an alarming realization that many of the same transformations I have witnessed are happening in other areas, too.

Now you won't find any lynx, bears, or moose in the woods nearby my home, but you will find that there are still many other species that consider these woods their home. The birds find shelter in the tree limbs, the squirrels jump from tree to tree, and even the insects find a home in the rich, black soil. Our forests won't be cut down for logging purposes, but nonetheless they are also in danger of becoming casualties of commerce. In the end, the effects are the same: humans do what they want and get what they desire, but at the expense of other creatures. My childhood world, then, wasn't just a comfort for me to escape to the quiet of the thickets, but also served as other species' habitats. I realized that like a bug so small that I couldn't see, or the birds flying overhead, we were all part of the same environment.

Annie Dillard suggests that "the planet is less like an enclosed spaceship&emdash; spaceship earth&emdash;than it is like an exposed mangrove island beautiful and loose" (164). Her words emphasize the intimacy of our existence with the planet. Whereas an enclosed spaceship can be regulated, for instance, by heaters, fences, and smaller enclosures to designate living quarters, an island is subject to the elements of nature. The island is also "exposed" in the sense that all of us play a role in determining its course: those living on continents halfway across the world can affect the planet just as much as we can right here. It became readily apparent to me that as inhabitants of the same island, we need to all take part in maintaining it.

These memories of my childhood come flooding back to me while I am thinking of the forest I used to know, and yet, looking the remnants of a forest I never knew.

But the feelings are the same. The trees are gone and the creatures within no longer have a home. The severed trunks remind me much of what this forest once was: green, lively, and peaceful. Many feelings sweep over my mind, but there is still the same question I sought an answer to only a few years ago while sitting in an empty field looking at the destruction of my childhood world: why did this happen? It's no question that with our expanding cities, we need new areas in which to live, but every species faces that concern: population expansion and migration. But then why does it seem that every other species can coexist with their surroundings enough that they don't need to destroy it and reshape the landscape to their own tastes? The question is whether we are overstepping the boundary of our existence and acting as though we are superior to nature's way of keeping its creatures and resources in balance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that "nature is consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and at the same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it" (423). But what is the animal that destroys us? Indeed, when we cut down the forest, there is no animal that comes to devour us, no other creature to evict us from our lands. Yet, as nature has a way of bringing even the most remote things back into its grasp and circle, it must be the same for us. Even the forests cannot escape, for they can dwindle to half their size with the outbreak of a natural wildfire; however, there is nothing to keep us in check, except perhaps with the outbreak of diseases&emdash;even that is somewhat becoming a thing of the past with our medical discoveries that have now created vaccines for diseases such as Polio. In Noel Perrin's aquarium analogy, we are goldfish, and clever ones at that, for have found a way to rise above the balance of needs, wants, and available resources. We've become manipulators rather than creatures. The dangerous question is, as Perrin asks, "What if we make a mistake, and wreck the aquarium entirely? We couldn't live outside it" (378). It isn't so much that we step beyond the boundaries of our existence as a species to become manipulators; it's what happens when we manipulate too many things too drastically.

Looking at the photo, I can imagine what the scene might be a year later&emdash;but what about in ten or twenty years? I think back to the forest that was so central to my childhood and I wonder the same question. The land we clear and the animals we evict have become overlooked in our movement to new areas that most don't think about where a forest has gone when it is suddenly transformed into a shopping complex. Many of us sometimes tend to assume "that here is an inexhaustible new world, with plenty of everything for everybody" (Perrin 379), but just what is "everybody"? Not the animals that are suddenly homeless. Not the forests that must make room for our homes. Perhaps what Perrin might rather be saying is that we believe there is plenty of everything for us. The danger, however, is that because our world exists within in a system of checks and balances between one creature and the next, we are destroying the equilibrium to the point at which where our species risks being eliminated to preserve the continuation of life itself on earth. While there may be no physical creature to threaten our survival, one enemy that no species has yet to fully overcome is disease. Even with our medical advances, there are still untreatable conditions and diseases continuously change in response to our new antibiotics. Perhaps if we cannot or do not choose to re-position ourselves in nature's system of checks and balances, then we risk facing an epidemic that will force us to change our ways&emdash;and wipe out a significant number of people. Thus, though it is apparent that there is no other creature to encroach on our existence as we have onto others, we must realize that we are not above nature or risk facing nature's own more subtle and deadly controlling agents: disease.

"Canadian Lynx Postcard." Rainforest Action Network. 28 November 2002. <http://www.ran.org/action/postcard_images/6.jpg> (10 December 2002).

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. 1973. New York: Harper Collins Publishing, 1998.

Dillard, Annie. "Sojourner." Writing Nature. Ed. Carolyn Ross. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Nature." Writing Nature. Ed. Carolyn Ross. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.

"Greenpeace Multimedia." Greenpeace International. 10 December 2002. <http://www.greenpeace.org/multimedia/> (10 December 2002).

Perrin, Noel. "Forever Virgin." Writing Nature. Ed. Carolyn Ross. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.

Pollan, Michael. Second Nature: A Gardener's Education. New York: Dell Publishing, 1991.