Presentation by John Elder, drawn from his essay “Foregone Hillsides,”
Arundhati Roy, in a Financial Times essay published in April of 2020, described the era of Covid-19 as “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” This imagery, of a transformation to be accomplished by crossing a mysterious threshold, offers an alternative to the positivist language of political analysis and activist strategy. It suggests that collective experiences of suffering and loss may also be vehicles of change, not only in the context of a pandemic but also in the broader ecological political disasters of our day.
51 years before Roy’s piece appeared, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying prompted a new view of grief as essential to the full development of a human life. That book discussed the grieving process not just as an immersion in lamentation butrather as an opening to greater presentness and possibility, both for the both for the terminally ill and for those who will survive them. Such a perspective is pertinent to peoplein our own day who are stunned by the disastrous impacts of climate change on global systems of health and human communities alike.We need to view grievous loss as a portal to new ways of living. While sustainable policies will necessarily accompany such transformations, the deeper change will be a warmer sense of dedication to the surrounding fellowship of lives.
I would like to follow up on these suggestions by adapting and sharing part of an essay, called “Foregone Hillsides,” which I originally published in a journal called Archipelago. The background of this excerpt was that in Vermont, where I live, comrades in the environmental movement had fallen into fierce dispute with one another about the installation of 21 wind turbines on a remote ridge in the north of our state. Opponents of the project pointed to its devastating disruption of watercourses and wildlife corridors. Those, including me, who nonetheless supported it argued that the hemlocks, and even the sugar maples, in our mountains were already dying from global warming that interfered with their germination. Hope for us lay only in a move from fossil fuels to renewable energy.Amid the bitterness of this controversy, an old friend who was on the opposite side and I chose to hike in silence up to the site where the massive turbines were being erected. We would relinquish our argument, in a shared experience of grief for the forest whereour divergent passions wererooted. A tree in blossom on that day became an emblem for the way in which grief itself might lead us forward, through a reminder of our inseparable bonds with all of our neighbors in the landscape of home.
* * * * *
As we walked downhill again, leaving behind the sounds of heavy machinery, we paused from time to time to admire some of the early wildflowers in the woods. The dominant color was white. Beside our boots, the brilliant white petals of bunchberry, the sprays of Canada Mayflower and foamflower trembled in a breeze that breathed along the path. At the woods’ edge a scatter of blossoming trees could also be seen amid the darker boughs of spruce and fir.
When shadblow blooms in May, it marks Vermont’s long-awaited turning from the long weeks of mud season toward the delicacy, color, and brevity of spring. A native of our region, shadblow (Amelanchiercanadensis) most often appears as a leggy tree of twelve to twenty feet in height, growing in sparse woods or beside wet ground. Like those of apples and many other members of the rose family, its flowers have five white petals. But these are so slender and delicate that the crown of a tree in full blossom looks less like a cloud than like a drift of smoke—clinging together for just a moment before dissipating. To a hiker, or to a distracted driver who happens to glance from a car window at the right time, a flowering shadblow is all the more arresting because of its lovely recessiveness. Its emotional impact is less reminiscent of a trumpet-peal or a sudden shaft of light than of a mysterious, lingering scent.
The tree’s name reflects its association with the annual migration of shad up the rivers of New England. Shad are anadromous, like salmon: they hatch in fresh water, but then spend most of their adult lives, and also reproduce in the ocean. Just as the shadblow open, these namesake fish are beginning to return inland, after six or seven years in the salt, so that they can spawn in their native streams. This correlation between the flowering world and an ancient, dramatic migration prevails all the way from southeastern Canada down the mid-Atlantic coast. Over much of that range it also parallels the distinctive skein of bedrock shared by western Ireland, the Maritimes, and the northern Appalachians. Such a continuity among widely separated bioregions reflects the fact that, just as the blossoming is keyed to air temperature, so too the timing of anadromous fishes’ migration relates closely to rising temperatures in the freshwater systems to which they are returning. As is true of so many ecological associations, this one between shad and shadblow mirrors a larger concord of climatic and chemical factors.
For both the indigenous Western Abenaki and the European settlers who put down roots in New England about four centuries years ago, the sudden arrival of these plentiful and delicious fish could not have come at a better time of year. Early spring has historically been a hungry season in the North, with the previous harvest largely exhausted, deer moving back up into the remote heights, and new crops just being planted. Reaching weights of four to ten pounds, shad are the largest members of the herring family, so that their value as a nutritional resource at this straitened moment in the calendar has been enormous. Both native communities and settlers could eat their fill, dry some fish for the future, and use still others to enrich the soil of fields beside the rivers. Attaching the fish’s name to the tree thus expressed both hunger and hope in a flinty land where starvation was often a real danger.
Serviceberry is a second name used interchangeably with shadblow. Some scholars have traced it to the resemblance between this North American species and European members of the rose family that are called Sorbus in the Linnaean system and have been known as sarviss in the British Isles. Accordingly, serviceberry is often taken to be a corruption of its original New England name of sarviss berry. Be that as it may, New Englanders have also developed another deep connection between the name serviceberry and an aspect of local natural history as specific and significant as the timing of the shad run. Frosts extend deep into the soil here. When the white petals of shadblow appear, that has traditionally been taken to show that the ground has finally thawed enough for families to bury their winter’s dead. The name serviceberry signals the possibility for long-deferred funeral services as eloquently as the name shadblow does the reappearance of shad in their native streams. Both speak to the ways in which recurrent natural phenomena have become both personally and culturally meaningful in this challenging landscape.
Starting in the late nineteenth century and continuing until fairly recently, the shad run was eliminated in most of northern New England. First came a wave of clear-cutting, even on the slopes of steep mountain valleys that deposited enough silt in the streams to suppress many populations of fish. Then dams were built throughout southern New England for the purposes of powering mills, diverting water to cities for drinking, and controlling flooding. An unintended consequence of damming was the creation of barriers preventing anadromous species from making their ways back up many of their native streams. Emerging technologies were thus disrupting migrations that had been vital to human beings in this region for thousands of years.
An equally dramatic development in the last couple of decades, however, has been the reintroduction of shad to Vermont and our neighboring states. The water quality in our streams has been improved by policies that limit agricultural runoff as well as encourage hedgerows and riparian fencing in order to impede erosion and limit cattle’s ability to walk into fragile brooks. State environmental agencies have taken the lead in releasing fry into headwaters that traditionally sup- ported shad, mandating removal of some dams altogether, and installing more effective fish ladders in those that are allowed to remain. Though the numbers of returning fish are still in the tens of thousands rather than the millions found at the time of European settlement, there is reason to hope that they may recover more substantially when the fish hatched a few years ago in restocked streams begin to make their way back to them from the sea.
The return of shad to Vermont—like the return of peregrine falcons to our family’s own town of Bristol, Vermont because of Rachel Carson’s leadership in restricting agricultural applications of DDT—inspires feelings of chastened hope. An awareness of ecological fragility in the face of human carelessness is coupled with experiences of reversing such damage through scientifically informed efforts of restoration. The return of iconic species like shad and peregrines reinforces our potential for a deeper sense of emotional, ethical, and social affiliation with our home landscapes.
Such encouraging developments are of course shadowedby the accelerating pace of climate change. The shad and the serviceberry, whose simultaneous reappearance was once a reminder of a natural providence in the turning of the seasons and the continuation of our lives, are no longer aligned. The coming of spring itself has become much more of an intermittent change than a continuous and predictable one. Though the shad run is recovering from the clear-cutting that made Vermont an ecological wasteland in the early nineteenth century and from the sheep industry that briefly flourished thereafter, the fact remains thatbecause of climate change the forests as we have known them will not survive.
Disruption of the ecological sequences once attuned to what Linnaeus called “the floral calendar” is one of the griefs of climate instability. But beloved flowers do continue to return, offering gauges not only for what we have lost but also for what endures, and what may be restored. Such recovery will neither be quick nor complete but it may nonetheless orient us to a more generous vision of community within what David Abram has called the more-than-human world. Even when spring slips out of kilter with our expectations, the persistence of familiar beauty can help us to affirm the motivating bonds of love when we might otherwise have fallen mute. In “Flowers at Loughcrew,” from her collection Hands, the Irish poet Moya Cannon reflects on the fossil pollen found at prehistoric burial sites, with its evidence that flowers have immemorially solemnized and adorned our relinquishment of the dead. Such discoveries show that the blossoming world has long lifted up our narrative of loss, making of it “our ceremony of grief / attended by what is most beautiful, / most fragrant on this earth.” May we step through the portal of our present crises in such a spirit of solemn and ceremonious hope.
John Elder
Bristol, Vermont