Recovery Work
photo credit: McKay Jenkins
On the late July day that President Trump called my hometown a “rat and rodent-infested mess” where “no human being would want to live,” I found myself dumping 200 pounds of compost into a vegetable garden across the street from a Baltimore methadone clinic. The compost had been cooking in my backyard for almost a year and included a dozen large Hefty bags of leaves from our silver maple and black cherry trees and all the watermelon rinds, avocado skins, and broccoli stems my family of four had eaten over the last 12 months.
The finished compost was a beautiful thing, full of vast colonies of red wriggler worms that had been turning in a green metal barrel beneath the sour cherry tree in our backyard. Every ounce of organic matter that had fallen onto our one-eighth of an acre or been tossed from our kitchen had been transformed into a rich, integrated growth medium whose diverse, biochemical interactions would help transform depleted soil into a potent source of community nourishment.
Even more beautiful were the garden beds where we turned the compost. Planted on an abandoned lot, the gardens were situated across the street from the Glenwood Life Counseling Center, an addiction clinic in northeast Baltimore. The neighborhood was a “food desert” in more ways than one: there were no supermarkets in the area, so people had no access to fresh produce; and there were very few native plants, so songbirds and butterflies no longer came around looking for a meal. But on the day I arrived, children scrambled on a new swing set, in what the neighborhood was now referring to as “the park.” Raised vegetable beds were bursting with bright yellow cherry tomatoes. Native black-eyed Susan, coneflowers, and butterfly weed formed a tapestry of yellow, purple, and orange, mobbed by monarch and tiger swallowtail butterflies. The garden absorbed rain that once cascaded off the abandoned lot and joined storm water and trash in the Chesapeake Bay.
This “recovery garden” is a powerful example of a community’s strength arising from relationships and interdependence: people in recovery work alongside volunteer Master Gardeners; local school children and visiting church groups help pull weeds and gather produce. Clients of the clinic and their kids can walk across the street and gather pots of collard greens or bags of freshly dug carrots. They can sit in the sun, put their hands in the dirt, visit with friends, or just enjoy the quiet.
The garden is the brainchild of Precious Fraling, a recovering addict who sees the place as a tangible metaphor for human and ecological transformation. For Precious, as she is universally known, the capacity of the garden to improve the health of local people, birds, and rivers is all of a piece. Baltimore is rich in people working to restore both social and ecological diversity to a recovering industrial town that has suffered decades of economic abandonment, racist zoning laws, and embarrassing ineptitude in city government. It also reverberates with the kind of community resilience that only comes when people have learned that help from the outside is unlikely.
Baltimore is smack in the center of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, one of the world’s richest—and most embattled—estuaries in the world. The Chesapeake’s 64,000 square miles range from Cooperstown, New York all the way to Virginia Beach, and the watershed’s health depends on a complex web of ecological and economic relationships. Streams in the city, fed by runoff from chemically-treated suburban lawns and private golf courses, run through beleaguered urban forests before disappearing under highway overpasses and emerging in the Inner Harbor, hub of Baltimore’s tourism industry. Fertilizers used by farmers 200 miles upstream impact the habitat of our oysters and crabs. Every native tree cut down to make way for a new subdivision or golf course depletes the food source and habitat for migratory birds. If a suburban homeowner sprays insecticides on his yard, those chemicals (along with the antifreeze and gasoline running off parking lots and unmetabolized pharmaceuticals flushed down millions of toilets) appear in our drinking water; water treatment plants, built 150 years ago to deal with biological pathogens like cholera and dysentery, are not equipped to remove man-made chemicals.
Yet Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay are also among the country’s most promising examples of watershed recovery. Even as other cities continue to lose their tree canopy, Baltimore’s canopy has actually grown by some 200 acres in recent years, thanks in no small part to the efforts of countless volunteers like Precious Fraling and the work of nonprofits like Blue Water Baltimore, a major engine for tree planting, the construction of raingardens, and the removal of pavement; and Interfaith Partners for the Chesapeake, an ecumenical collection of congregations focused on improving water quality and ecological restoration. Farther afield, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, based in Annapolis, Maryland, is leading an effort to plant 10 million trees upstream in Pennsylvania.
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I have planted trees all over the watershed: along streets in East and West Baltimore, in the grounds of underfunded public schools, and on what were once vast, manicured lawns surrounding suburban churches and synagogues. Alongside dozens of other volunteers, I have also spent many long afternoons removing invasive plants from the forests in the city’s many parks and woodlots. For nearly a quarter century, I have also integrated this labor into my professional work as an environmental journalism and literature professor at the University of Delaware, an hour north of Baltimore on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. Most of my Environmental Humanities students are white and come from the suburbs that stretch from Long Island to Washington, D.C. Most have not been exposed to the challenges faced by cities like Baltimore—but most are also oblivious to the damage these suburban subdivisions have done to the American landscape.
The mid-Atlantic, like the rest of the East Coast, has just 20 percent of the tree cover it once did, in large part because 75 years of post-war development has taken virtually no interest in the ecological (or aesthetic, or spiritual) value of trees or native plants. Recent research by scientists like my colleague Doug Tallamy has shown that in Delaware, for example, fully 92 percent of the landscape is ecologically useless lawn, 79 percent of the plants are introduced species, and only 10 percent of the trees that could be planted have been planted. In other words, our suburbs have damaged the region’s ecological balance every bit as much as our cities, Tallamy writes: “Lawns do not support pollinators, do not support natural enemies of pest species, do not sequester much carbon, do not support the food webs that support animals, and they degrade our watersheds.” Part of my response to this has been to require that my students spend as much time outside as they do in the classroom. At the university, we are fortunate to have a 5,000-acre forest, surrounding the federally-protected White Clay Creek, just a mile from campus. I send my students into the forest to compose weekly journal entries.
They return with essays about a great blue heron standing vigil in the creek; a pileated woodpecker hammering a white oak tree; a kingfisher cruising the streambank. But they also wrestle with what such diversity and balance reveals about its opposite. They become more aware of our country’s obsession with monoculture lawns and non-native trees. They grieve the damage that blind attachment to industrial agriculture and consumerism has done to wildlife. They wonder where their forests have gone, why the tiny patches that remain are so compromised by invasive plants, and how we have allowed more than 430 native American birds—more than a third of all species—to hit the brink of extinction.
In recent years, I have expanded this project. I used a university-supported grant to buy a carload of clippers, loppers, and shovels. I packed them into a big plastic bin that I padlocked to a tree in the state park and started taking my students into the woods to do some physical work. I begin by introducing them to the invasive plants that torment our local forests, notably Asian bittersweet, Japanese honeysuckle, autumn olive, Japanese barberry, and multiflora rose. I outfit the students with gloves and tools and set them loose. Within minutes, my students are enthusiastically, even urgently, coming to grips with the scale of the work that needs to be done. Our forests—in wealthy states like Delaware or poor cities like Baltimore—require work far beyond the scale of publicly available funds. In some areas of the forest near White Clay Creek, and in countless forest patches around Baltimore, nearly 100 percent of the trees are wrapped in invasive vines. No skeleton crew of state or city forest managers could possibly deal with this on their own.
Which is, if you think about it, the way it ought to be. Our watersheds are not the “responsibility” of state park employees, any more than our beleaguered urban neighborhoods are the “responsibility” of city bureaucrats. Our watersheds and our neighborhoods belong to all of us, and require much of us, especially during a time of shocking neglect by our elected officials. The grotesquerie of the Trump presidency has been amply catalogued, and will doubtless be remembered as a reprehensible stain on the quivering American experiment. To the many of us working to repair decades, and even centuries, of environmental and cultural damage, Trump’s rant was a stark reminder of the damage that polluted language can do to a city and those who love it.
As Precious Fraling knows, and Trump does not, ecological and human systems function best when they are integrated, complex, and diverse.
Editors’ note: This piece was invited as part of an ongoing dialogue with the Penn Program on Environmental Humanities (PPEH), a conversation that extends beyond the waters of New York City. We met McKay Jenkins in May 2019 at the Teaching and Learning with Rising Waters Convening, where he presented alongside UNY Founding Editor Nicki Pombier Berger about Mid-Atlantic Waters.
Object
Raised Vegetable Beds, Fertilizers, Red Wriggler Worms
Body of Water
Cheseapeake Bay
About the Artist
McKay Jenkins is a journalist, nonfiction writer, and scholar of American studies, specializing in environmental studies and the history, journalism, and literature of race relations and social justice. The Cornelius Tilghman Professor of English, Journalism, and Environmental Humanities, he has been writing about people and the natural world for 25 years. Jenkins is the author of the books Food Fight: GMOs and the Future of the American Diet (Avery, January, 2017) and ContamiNation (Avery, 2016), and the co-author (with E.G. Vallianatos) of Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA (Bloomsbury, 2014). His other books include Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness and Murder in the Arctic Barren Lands (Random House, 2005), The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler’s Europe (Random House, 2003), The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone (Random House, 2000), and The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999). Jenkins is also the editor of The Peter Matthiessen Reader (Vintage, 2000). He holds degrees from Amherst College, Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and Princeton, where he received a PhD in English. A former staff writer for the Atlanta Constitution, he has also written for Outside, Orion, The New Republic, and many other publications. He teaches classes in nonfiction writing, nature writing, the journalism of genocide, the journalism of terrorism, and twentieth century American literature. He is a recipient of both the University Excellence in Teaching Award and the College of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award.