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The Kent State University Press - Deborah Fleming

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An impassioned call for recognizing and preserving the ecological wonders of the Allegheny Plateau Yosemite National Park, Louisiana's bayou, the rocky coasts of New England, the desert Southwest-America's more dramatic locations are frequently celebrated for their natural beauty, but far less has been written about Ohio's unique and beautiful environment. Author Deborah Fleming, who has lived in rural Ohio and cared for its land for decades, shares fourteen interrelated essays, blending her own experiences with both scientific and literary research. Resurrection of the Wild discusses both natural and human histories as it focuses on the Allegheny Plateau and hill country in Ohio's eastern counties. These lyrical meditations delve into life on Fleming's farm, the impacts of the mining and drilling industries, fox hunting, homesteading families, the lives of agriculturalist Louis Bromfield and John Chapman (better known as Johnny Appleseed), and Ohio's Amish community. Fleming finds that our very concept of freedom must be redefined to include preservation and respect for the natural world. Ultimately, Resurrection of the Wild becomes a compelling argument for the importance of ecological preservation in Ohio, and Fleming's perspective will resonate with readers both within and beyond this "forgotten" state's borders.

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Sciences et techniques

Natural history

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Publié par	The Kent State University Press
Date de parution	14 avril 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781631012181
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1260€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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PRAISE FOR RESURRECTION OF THE WILD
“Fleming reenvisions how natural history is to be practiced in a rural Ohio landscape that is both wild and settled, both green fields and brown, both indigenous and colonized, both diminished and resilient. Rather than pining for wilderness that has been long lost, the author attends to the regenerative capacities of the land here and now. This book’s chief virtue is its detailed fluency in the local coupled with a personal feel for the topics raised. The cyclical time of the landscape—expressed in its seasons and ecological processes—is brought into conjunction with the flow of the historical as framed by the author’s personal interactions with the land.”
— James Hatley , coeditor of Facing Nature: Levinas and Environmental Thought
“Deborah Fleming’s warm and wryly humorous persona pervades ‘Waiting for the Foal’ and other marvelous personal essays about her life in rural southeastern Ohio. Further, broader pieces address the area’s history, the Amish community and other unusual people, as well as material threats to the hill country’s ecology. Resurrection of the Wild will sit on my bookshelf right next to David Kline’s classic Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer’s Journal , for repeated reading.”
— Carolyn V. Platt , author of Ohio Hill Country: A Rewoven Landscape and Cuyahoga Valley National Park Handbook
“Whether writing about her garden, or raising horses, or the impact of coal mining, Deborah Fleming offers an intimate natural history of her farm and her state. By book’s end, Ohio is no longer dull, barren flyover land, but one beautiful, fragile web of ecological relationships to which Fleming belongs and is committed.”
— Tom Montgomery Fate , author of Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father’s Search for the Wild
“Every place on Earth needs a writer as attentive as Deborah Fleming, to study it with a loving and clear-eyed gaze. In these essays, she explores the natural and human history of her home ground, the hill country of eastern Ohio, a landscape battered by strip mining, careless farming, and deforestation. Yet wildness persists, there as everywhere, an irrepressible creative force. With a wealth of examples, Fleming demonstrates how nature’s resilience, aided by human care, can restore the land to health. May her book inspire readers to join such healing efforts in their own home places.”
— Scott Russell Sanders , author of Earth Works: Selected Essays
“Just as Aldo Leopold chronicles and celebrates the landscape around his ‘shack’ in Sauk County, Wisconsin, in Resurrection of the Wild Deborah Fleming conveys the history and character of her home on eastern Ohio’s Allegheny Plateau. This region, like the cutover terrain Leopold calls ‘Sand County,’ is one in which a broad collapse of agriculture and depopulation of settlements have ushered in a resurgence of forests and wildlife. An elegiac story from one perspective thus becomes a tale of rewilding from another, as well as a field of new opportunities for independent-minded and scientifically oriented settlers. I loved the precise and energetic way Fleming interweaves descriptions of her home landscape’s geology, such notable figures from its past as Johnny Appleseed and Louis Bromfield of Malabar Farm, and her own special fascination with horses.”
— John Elder , author of Reading the Mountains of Home
Resurrection of the Wild
Resurrection of the Wild
Meditations on Ohio’s Natural Landscape

Deborah Fleming

The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio
© 2019 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242 All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Number 2018052635 ISBN 978-1-60635-375-2 Manufactured in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fleming, Deborah, author.
Title: Resurrection of the wild : meditations on Ohio’s natural landscape / Deborah Fleming.
Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018052635 | ISBN 9781606353752 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Natural areas--Ohio. | Agriculturists--Ohio--History.
Classification: LCC QH76.5.O3 F54 2019 | DDC 508.771--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052635
23  22  21  20  19 5  4  3  2  1
For my father, Lawrence A. Fleming
Contents
Acknowledgments
  1 Resurrection of the Wild
  2 Walking
  3 Waiting for the Foal
  4 Wedding Pines
  5 The Garden
  6 Inhabitants
  7 John Chapman, 1774–1845
  8 Bridge of Dreams
  9 Thrill of the Chase
10 Louis Bromfield, Malabar Farm, and Faith in the Earth
11 A Gift to Be Simple
12 A Tale Better Told in the Retelling
13 Falling Rock Area
14 Preservation and Freedom
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Dr. Denise Ellsworth, entomologist at Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center; to Dr. Steven H. Emmerman of Utah Valley University who helped me get my geology right; to David Fitzsimmons, nature photographer, for evenings spent watching the dancing salamanders; and to Irv Oslin, naturalist and reporter for the Ashland Times Gazette .
“Falling Rock Area” was published in Between Coasts , January 2018.
“John Chapman” was published in Organization and Environment 15, no. 4 (December 2002): 475–81.
“Louis Bromfield, Malabar Farm, and Faith in the Earth” was published in Organization and Environment 19, no. 3 (September 2006): 309–20.
“Preservation and Freedom” was published in Organization and Environment 20, no. 1 (March 2007): 106–9.
“Resurrection of the Wild” was published in Organization and Environment 13, no. 4 (December 2000): 486–92.
There will be a resurrection of the wild. Already it stands in wait at the pasture fences. — Wendell Berry, excerpt from “Window Poems”

Wine-hearted solitude, our mother the wilderness, Men’s failures are often as beautiful as men’s triumphs, but your returnings Are even more precious than your first presence. — Robinson Jeffers, “Bixby’s Landing”
Chapter One
Resurrection of the Wild
Ohio Ecology as Regeneration

I N EASTERN O HIO , the northern reaches of the Allegheny foothills rise in a rumpled panorama, tree-covered, with deep watersheds, cliffs, gorges, and narrow valleys. Upper Paleozoic rock layers characterize the landscape: erosion-resistant sandstone forms the tops of higher and steeper hills; lower, more rounded formations indicate softer shales lying near the surface. Seventy percent of the state’s woodlands lie in about 30 percent of its area, the unglaciated south and east where the river—called “Oyo” or “Ohi yo” by some indigenous people—bends westward. Growing up in Jefferson County, I believed the state to be a succession of forested hills; in later years, hiking the steep trails of the southeastern state forests prepared me to climb Mounts Katahdin and Rainier.
Still, the state’s geological formations are too subtle to be appreciated by those who think only mountains, deserts, and ocean shorelines worth preserving, who denigrate the middle of the country with epithets like “corn belt, “rust belt,” “Bible belt,” or “flyover land.” Years ago a young woman from New York asked me where I was from; my answer, “Ohio,” prompted an undisguised sneer. The state contains only one national forest, one national park, no “wilderness.” Scott Russell Sanders points out in his essay “Buckeye” that the Ohio landscape does not show up often on postcards or in films (notable exceptions are Brubaker and The Shawshank Redemption , both filmed partly in historic prisons), seldom even figures in books. The state’s location east of the Mississippi and its richness of soil, water, and mineral wealth ensured its early settlement and exploitation, prompting many to dismiss environmental efforts as doomed from the start. Ohio’s natural history, however, holds the key to its rejuvenation. As William Cronon argues in “The Trouble with Wilderness,” the problem of deleting long-abused land from an environmental ethic means that we idealize a distant landscape at the expense of neglecting the one in which we live, the one we call home.
Ohio contains five physiographic sections. Just under a third of the total area, the unglaciated hill country of the eastern and southeastern counties—called the Allegheny-Kanawha Plateau—is part of a larger division, the Appalachian Highlands, one of the most biologically diverse regions in the world’s temperate forests and the most diverse in North America, a fact overlooked by those who dismiss the area as not worth caring about. The Till Plains cover the north, central, and southern reaches of the western half of the state where the soil was formed from glacial deposits over limestone sedimentary rock. Slightly smaller in area than the hill country, the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau angles nearly three hundred miles from Lake Erie’s northeast shore to south-central Ohio. Prior to the ice ages, the plateau was hilly and steep; when the glaciers moved southward, they eroded the soft shale in the north, scouring the eastern basin of the lake and Grand River Valley north of what is now Warren. The plateau, while not as dramatic as the hill country, contains some spectacular woodlands such as the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and attractive farmlands in the Amish country of Holmes, Knox, Wayne, Tuscarawas, and Ashland Counties. Still smaller physiographic sections are the Bluegrass and Huron-Erie Lake Plains. Smallest of Ohio’s five sections, the Blue-grass extends northward in a crescent-shaped wedge from the Ohio River and includes the Brush Creek drainage area, characterized by hilly terrain and steep watersheds. The section called the Huron-Erie Lake Plains skirts the northern coast from east to west, where it fans out over several counties.