Reimagining Environmental History: Ecological Memory in the Wake of Landscape Change

By Christian Knoeller

Christian Knoeller presents a radical reinterpretation of environmental history set in the heartland of America. In an excellent model of narrative-based scholarship, this book dynamically reimagines American environmentalism across generations of writers, artists, and scientists. Knoeller starts out with Audubon, and cites Thoreau’s journals in the 1850s as he assesses an early 17th century account of New England’s natural resources by William Wood, showing the epic decline in game and bird populations in Concord. This reading of environmental history is replicated throughout with a gallery of novelists, poets, essayists, and other commentators as they explore ecological memory and environmental destruction. In apt discussions of Matthiessen, Lopez, Wendell Berry, William Stafford and many others, Knoeller offers vibrant insights into literary history. He also cites his own memoir of perpetual development on his family’s farm in Indiana, enriching the scholarship and making an urgent plea for the healing aesthetics of the imagination.
 
Reading across centuries and genres, Knoeller gives us a vibrant new appraisal of Midwestern/North American interior literary traditions and makes clear how vital environmental writing is to this region. To date, no one has written such an eloquent and comprehensive cross-genre analysis of Midwestern environmental literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: Oct 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9780874176049

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Index

Preface

We try to save what is passing, if only by describing it, telling it,

knowing all the time we can’t do any of these things.

—W. S. MERWIN, W. S. Merwin, The Art of Poetry

Reimagining Environmental History presents an ecocritical study examining representations of landscape change, from nineteenth-century artist-naturalists to pioneering ecologists to twentieth-century poets, Native American novelists, and contemporary literary naturalists associated with the Midwest. While the scope is expansive in terms of period and genre, the volume as a whole is unified by focusing on the depiction of environmental history in the region. Many of the authors addressed cross-conventional disciplinary and cultural boundaries: whether they are artists writing about wildlife, Native American novelists tracing the connection of indigenous languages to nature in particular places, ecologists writing literary natural history, poets expressing environmental sensibilities, or contemporary literary naturalists incorporating anthropology, archaeology, geology, and linguistics into essays about nature and place. While each chapter explores the work of a single author in depth, cohesion of the whole is maintained by making connections between and among these writers, as well as by considering how their work speaks to current concerns such as stemming extinctions and perpetuating species biodiversity. Each of the authors examined engages place in direct and personal ways, informed by a sense of environmental history, whether in their own bioregion or as they sojourn through less familiar terrain, as well as when contemplating the idea of what is ancient, indigenous, and ongoing. For as Scott Russell Sanders observes, To become intimate with your home region, to know the territory as well as you can, to understand your life as woven into the local lives does not prevent you from recognizing and honoring the diversity of other places, cultures, ways.¹ It seems high time to take stock of how this written record of environmental history might in turn inform our efforts toward preservation and restoration going forward—especially in an era of cascading environmental decline, when the very ideals of wilderness and wild are being redefined.

By examining landscape change depicted in several genres of texts spanning two centuries, this study is situated on the cusp of ecocriticism and environmental history. What unexpected insights might arise by analysis conjoining the two in light of repeated calls over the past decade for examining how these fields might interact in fruitful new ways (e.g., Cohen, Slovic, Bergthaller)? In what sense might they even prove to be mutually illuminating? Specifically, what insights could these two potentially synergistic disciplines provide together when addressing such complex and perplexing questions as how historical and cultural context shape our perception of, interpretation of, and response to centuries of landscape change? I hope that this work contributes to the ongoing exploration of territory at the confluence of two such complementary bodies of thought. Above all, what forms might ecological restoration best take today—and to accomplish just what enduring aims? Lest we underestimate the remarkable resilience of this living earth, consider the truth of naturalist Paul Gruchow’s declaration that one of the fundamental qualities of life is that it is organized to endure.²

What has made the representation of landscape change in the American Midwest especially prescient and compelling has been the severity and pace of the change. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the American Midwest became a crucible for forward-looking environmental thought, summoning the courage to hope that we might—indeed, we must—find a way to stay the forces of perpetual development before it is too late to save any remaining semblance of the endemic prairie biome and its legacy of fertile soils that have endowed the nation and the world with such agricultural abundance. As prairie and wetland biomes were converted to cropland, the pace of landscape change and its cumulative ecological impact became too rampant and widespread to escape notice. Technology assuredly played a central role in accelerating the process, as steam dredges for the first time enabled the draining of wetlands, steel ploughs broke prairie sod irreparably, and railroads transported crops to burgeoning urban markets from coast to coast. Taken together, such technological advances precipitated the region-wide erasure of entire wild landscapes with their self-perpetuating communities of indigenous plant and animal species.

All too often, however, when the erasure of native ecosystems across North America has taken place incrementally over many years, characterized by increasingly fragmented habitat and the gradual extirpation of wildlife populations, each successive generation perceives nature in terms of the diminished landscape that it has inherited (referred to as shifting baselines). We cross a daunting threshold when what has been lost is also forgotten, so that we lose track of the extent of that loss. The converse might be thought of as ecological memory: the interpretation of environmental history by a variety of writers representing ongoing landscape change in places they have lived or traveled in light of concerns about its overall extent and cumulative consequences. In this respect, earlier accounts such as John James Audubon’s (1785–1851) from the first half of the nineteenth century provide an essential ecological baseline by describing a level of natural abundance almost unimaginable today. Many writers in the centuries since have lamented both the pace and extent of pervasive landscape change they personally witnessed in the region, while often attempting to reconcile their own accounts with the written record of past abundance. Their testimony inspires this reconsideration of writing about nature in the Midwest from an ecocritical perspective. The authors examined in this study each witnessed natural landscapes fundamentally disrupted or altered entirely, places that inspired them aesthetically, scientifically, and spiritually. In effect, each becomes a case study in ways of engaging and representing nature, envisioning environmental history, and conceptualizing stewardship.

The purpose of this book is to contribute to the scholarship of environmental history in several ways: (1) to recover the work of several of the region’s critically overlooked literary naturalists, including Gene Stratton-Porter (1863–1924) and Paul Errington (1902–62), as well as to discover several more recent writers such as Paul Gruchow (1947–2004) and Elizabeth Dodd (b. 1962) who are yet to receive adequate recognition for their contributions to environmental history of the Midwest; (2) to explore connections and lineage among the region’s literary naturalists from an ecocritical perspective; and (3) to reassess how the legacy of Native American history and culture has been represented in midwestern literature as well as how the region’s indigenous languages evolved in relation to nature and are therefore inextricably linked to place.

Gene Stratton-Porter was an early and arguably seminal figure unfairly dismissed by literary critics of her time, yet she was also a groundbreaking, albeit self-taught, naturalist. Her fiction and nonfiction carry a prescient environmental message so compelling as to command our attention today. Moreover, the unprecedented restoration of her own land in Indiana, involving the transplanting of tens of thousands of native plant specimens, parallels Aldo Leopold’s celebrated experiment, though it actually preceded his by a generation and arguably even foreshadowed recent developments in ecological restoration. Similarly, pioneering ecologist Paul Errington—a close associate of Leopold—has also been largely overlooked. Both recognized interrelationships between the members of ecological communities, appreciated the complex interdependence among species, and questioned the conventional wisdom about predation in ways that anticipated current thinking about the essential role played by keystone species, and the reintroduction of major predators such as wolves to portions of their historical range.

Important correspondences emerge when several authors write about visiting the same places and attempt to interpret ancient traces inscribed on the landscape by indigenous peoples: the pictographs in the Boundary Waters region of northern Minnesota and southern Canada, for example. In Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, Louise Erdrich describes images painted on rock faces encountered while traveling through the area by canoe. Scott Russell Sanders and Paul Gruchow also write about their experiences contemplating the pictographs while canoeing there. Similarly, both Gruchow and Elizabeth Dodd have written about visiting the Medicine Wheel monument high in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming and reflecting on its enigmatic history, recognizing the difficulty of interpreting the significance of such sites fully since cultural memory had been disrupted—including lost or forgotten narratives of their creation, meaning, and function. Poets expressing environmental sensibilities such as Theodore Roethke (1908–63) and William Stafford (1914–93) contemplate the surviving cultural legacy of Native American cultures, as do contemporary literary naturalists such as Sanders and Dodd. I read Dodd in relation to celebrated essayist Loren Eiseley, while devoting the culminating chapter to Gruchow. Above all, I wish to explore their visions—individually and collectively—for preservation, restoration, and stewardship in the wake of the region’s history of agricultural development, habitat loss, and environmental decline.

Consider the ecological legacy inherited by those born and reared in the Midwest today. Over the years I have invited university students to describe a place that had awakened their own appreciation of nature, and whose destruction by development they later witnessed; they reflect on the emotional impact back then and as they recount it years later. Reading their responses—most of them were born in the Midwest during the closing decade of the twentieth century—I am stunned by the litany of loss they describe. Psychologically leaning schools of environmental history recognize the emotional intensity of lamenting such a loss as deeply personal grief—as if we had lost a part of ourselves. Clearly we can no longer afford to dismiss as quaint or nostalgic accounts of environmental decline across North America, particularly those from the second half of the nineteenth century forward. Since the forces of climate change we face today continue to accelerate exponentially the rate of wildlife extirpation and species extinction, the alarm sounded by writers over the last century and a half takes on a heightened significance; indeed, their message has never seemed more timely or urgent.

In all our attempts to renew or correct ourselves,

to shake off despair and have hope, our starting place is always

and only our own experience. We can begin (and we must always

be beginning) only where our history has brought us.

—WENDELL BERRY, Ignorance

On a personal note, I would like to describe what moved me to write this book. My wife and I reside in a Victorian farmhouse in central Indiana on the banks of Deer Creek, a tributary of the Tippecanoe and Wabash Rivers. Our house was built soon after the Civil War of rough-hewn timber frame posts and beams cut locally, probably from the property’s own woodlot, as was customary in the days before commercial lumber became available. Floors are tulip poplar and red oak, wainscoting black walnut. Initials carved into barn doors by previous generations of residents date back to the nineteenth century. In its day, this homestead was in a small way the embodiment of Jefferson’s vision of self-sufficient yeomen livelihood: a family farmstead surrounded by pastures for livestock and woodlots that provided ample natural habitat. By the time we acquired the property in the summer of 1999, adjoining acres had been cleared, ploughed, and planted with row crops for over a century, cultivated now in the manner of industrial agriculture with its massive machinery and petrochemical fertilizers as well as a suite of toxic herbicides and insecticides, in tandem with genetically modified seed. One of the central narratives of this book concerns all that has been lost in the process—as well as the implications for the forms of restoration that might take place today.

A third of a mile south of our house stood a small marsh—a circular depression toward the eastern edge of the upper field, not more than thirty feet higher than the banks of Deer Creek that Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley rhapsodized in his sentimental nineteenth-century lyrical verse. In fact, the real estate listing shamelessly yet aptly proclaimed that this was just the kind of place he would have felt right at home. That tiny wetland was an ecological wonder: a tangle of cattails the roots of which alone stood head high when water subsided each summer. Such a marsh represents a microcosm of environmental and evolutionary history: an island of deep time providing habitat uniquely suited to a suite of ancient species. In spring, snapping turtles that had burrowed beneath to hibernate emerged, carrying up to a foot of mud caked on top of their shells. Every summer night tree frogs, known regionally as peepers, raised a chorus that carried a mile or more. Deer bedded there, especially during hunting season, since the tangle of cattails provided nearly impenetrable cover. Most awe inspiring of all was that moment every year when huge dragonflies would circle upward by the hundreds in columns of tightly synchronized flight.

News reached me that the neighboring farmer had other plans for the small wetland adjoining our property. So when the day came that the cattails would be burned, I had been forewarned. It took just a few men to ignite the flames and spread enough accelerant to keep them burning the entire day. As I watched in disbelief, I was overcome not so much by the vile black smoke rising but by a sense of grief that gripped me so deeply I could hardly breathe. The process that followed was workmanlike, involving a backhoe and front-end loader, as the embers of roots reaching back millennia were buried in shallow trenches, and a system of drainage pipes or tiles was installed to funnel groundwater down to the lower field toward the river. Immediately, the peepers in their sonorous multitudes were silenced. The snapping turtles also disappeared that season. Memories of those swirling columns of dragonflies that once rose triumphantly above our home—emissaries from deep time, 300 million years ago—still haunt me.

Given the environmental desecration that I have witnessed personally, the preservation of wetlands strikes an especially deep chord. The burning and burial of the marsh seemed to me an unspeakable crime against nature that represents in microcosm the whole region’s environmental history over the last century and a half. What cut to the quick was the utter erasure of a place that had awakened such wonder. This, I think, is a universal story, albeit localized, a wrenching reminder of environmental decline writ large. If a phrase like declensionist narrative evokes a whiff of cliché—a story we have already heard all too often before, or worse yet, nostalgia, that hopeless yearning for what is perceived to be irretrievably lost—so be it. Perhaps this is the crux of the problem. The moment that we relegate laments for the seemingly never-ending assaults on the environment to the category of old news, and see calls for measures to stay or reverse such forces as an exercise in futility, is the moment we run the risk of losing hope itself.

Here on Deer Creek, the spring after the marsh was burned, we discovered, as unlikely as it might seem, tentative shoots of cattails rising from the remnants of roots that had been bulldozed and buried. This minor miracle (which, we would learn, would happen just once) was the working of what landscape restoration has termed ecological memory, the biological processes of regeneration enabling indigenous species to return and reassert themselves following disruption. We set about transplanting these remnant cattails onto our own land beside a spring below the house—first dozens, then hundreds—and on a soggy slope beyond the barn where none had grown before, at least not in our time, where they have since naturalized and a small colony of leopard frogs now thrives.

My fascination with natural history was undoubtedly instilled by formative, childhood experiences of exploring the outdoors. My earliest memories of engaging nature, however, are hardly an agrarian idyll, the place being Long Island, New York, not far from Levittown, the community that became the prototype for suburban development across the country immediately following World War II.

At about ten years of age, I began collecting butterflies that haunted feral edges of our neighborhood—islands of habitat preserved purely by chance, such as narrow meadows of native wildflowers thriving beyond the cyclone fence of the elementary schoolyard. To this day, I cannot imagine summers there without calling their erratic flight to mind. Among my prized specimens at the time were the Black and Tiger Swallowtails, Buckeyes and Question Marks, Mourning Cloaks and Red Admirals. Monarchs meandered in mid-September as autumn approached before beginning their long flight south. They appeared to be a consummate survivor—enduring an epic migration, over the course of two generations, to wintering grounds in Mexico. Given their longevity, in fact, these delicate insects could live all winter indoors and be released again when weather warmed in the spring. Who would have imagined that the seemingly resilient population of a species once numbering in the billions could utterly collapse only half a century later to below thirty-five million due to rampant habitat destruction coupled with the ubiquitous use of broad-spectrum herbicides? Indeed, the future of the species that had always ushered in our autumns is presently imperiled by agricultural practices that have eradicated incidental habitat along the edges of cropland across the continent, erasing a once vast network of microhabitats, especially the milkweed essential to sustaining such monumental migrations.

Among the magnificent moths that captured my imagination as a child, the hauntingly beautiful luna occasionally made what seemed to me spectral visitations, all the more precious by their scarcity—maybe half a dozen personal sightings in my entire lifetime. I even became intimately acquainted with the seemingly miraculous metamorphosis of the spectacular cecropia moth, a species that enchanted Hoosier naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter above all others. Having found a huge cocoon tethered to twigs in brush along the road, I brought it home and kept it in a large jar, hammering holes in the lid since even creatures that hibernate whole seasons, I reasoned, need to breathe, then set it on the nightstand beside my bed. All winter, sleeping side by side, we changed from night to night, its embryonic wings layered in quarters too tight to unfold. I still remember watching it hatch: a slow crawling toward light, the pained extrication, that tentative unfolding, spreading out, attempting balance, finding patience for pigments to dry and the intricate architecture of veins to stiffen.

Even while still a sixth grader, I marveled at traces of ancient abundance that unaccountably remained in the heart of suburbia. Walking the bank of a shallow creek linking a pair of modest, man-made lakes on Long Island one summer, I found the entire channel choked with juvenile American or glass eels, anticipating upcoming spawning runs in subsequent years, before their drastic decline beginning in the mid-1980s. That experience echoed a still earlier one: a forest floor teeming with bright orange salamanders (Notophthalmus viridescens in its intermediate, red eft terrestrial stage)—inordinate hordes of Eastern newts swarming along woodland creeks, presumably seeking to breed along the shore of Lake George in upstate New York.

I again glimpsed traces of age-old abundance as an adolescent, after our family moved to a wooded neighborhood in northern New Jersey. On sweltering summer nights, sleeping on a screened-in porch, I would drift off listening to the chorus of untold numbers of katydids, crickets, and other nocturnal insects, trying to imagine the dimensions of a wild universe that surrounds suburban existence even now with its primordial sound. Waking before sunrise, sometimes I would wander the woods where our dead-end street began, following an intermittent stream to the little bog that then still held developers at bay. One morning, I encountered bevies of box turtles on the move, dozens on dozens marching across the forest floor to lay eggs, as they have for 300 million years, before returning to burrows deep enough to wait out the next winter.

But perhaps most arresting of all, in the midst of suburban sprawl on the edge of a small historical park just twenty miles from home, a remnant population of native brook trout still thrived. I had been shown the way there by a high school friend on the condition that I never reveal the location to anyone. But I brought my father there once, and later a fiancé, that they too might witness what seemed such a timeless wonder. This population of indigenous fish—so tiny yet fierce—had apparently survived since the last Ice Age in the little woodland brook, bearing to this day their exquisite markings in hues rivaling the intensity of jewels.

To put into perspective why such an unintended refuge for native brook trout seemed so utterly unlikely and precarious, consider the state of neighboring waterways in New Jersey at that time. In the mid-1960s, the Passaic River that flowed through my hometown had been named one of the ten most polluted in the nation. If you waded to the waist against its sluggish current to cast for catfish, carp, and the occasional stray pickerel, the water was so opaque that you could not see as deep as your own knees. And as implausible as it may seem today, decades after the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1977, a toxic cocktail of chemicals was continuously dumped into such waterways. Possibly the most egregious affront of all were the large blocks of a dense Styrofoam-like substance, presumably an industrial by-product of some kind, recklessly discharged and routinely left to float downstream. Suburban families living along the banks would scavenge pieces nearly the circumference of compact cars to use as primitive rafts, or even to chisel into dugout canoes. I would question such a recollection, if it were not so utterly unforgettable—and the memory still so vivid to this day of that dull cinnabar flotsam shot through with a hint of autumnal orange. How could this happen, I wondered, in such unthinkably close proximity to that seemingly pristine trout stream? Struggling to make sense of such incongruities ignited my lifelong penchant for reading about natural history and ecological topics, particularly environmental history.

Several seminal works by literary naturalists have fundamentally reshaped my understanding of ongoing landscape change. I will describe briefly how each catalyzed my interest in environmental history, as well as touch on their continued relevance. Such books take on heightened significance today in light of ecological quandaries accelerated by climate change. But first, to establish a baseline for gauging the cumulative impact of ongoing environmental decline, consider the fabled bounty of the New World testified to by European explorers. My initial encounter with this written historical record came while I was still in high school. America as Seen by Its First Explorers by historian John Bakeless purported to provide a composite portrait of North America in what was then presumed to be a primal and largely unadulterated state, one deemed unspoiled and untamed. The book opens with an earnest attempt at addressing the history of indigenous peoples in North America; being published in 1950, however, the work predates—and consequently failed to anticipate—a postcolonial perspective.

The veracity of Bakewell’s expansive narrative is dependent on the credibility of those who observed America’s early natural wonders firsthand from the remarkable abundance of verdant forests teeming with wildlife to watersheds incredibly rich in anadromous as well as freshwater fish. Accordingly, America incorporates a host of primary source documents, drawing extensively on previously unpublished archival materials such as period letters and journals. Organized chronologically, the volume proceeds from ships’ logs kept while mapping the Atlantic coastline of the Eastern Seaboard, to the quixotic overland journeys of conquistadors, including Cortés and Coronado, and later expeditions into the interior by river from Champlain at the dawn of the seventeenth century to George Catlin on the upper Missouri in the first half of the nineteenth. Analogies to Eden abound in these early accounts, as explorers attempted to depict what astonished them in terms that would not be dismissed as implausible by their contemporaries, let alone those of us reading in the wake of centuries of profound landscape change. The impression America left on me was the legacy of monumental ecological alteration on a continental scale—a logical precursor to the concept of ecological memory to be explored in the course of this book.

Reimagining environmental history involves recognizing cumulative changes to the landscape such as the destruction of natural habitat, whether the result of extractive activities such as logging or development for agricultural use. Improvements that typically accompanied initial settlement—whether felling trees, clearing fields, draining swamps, or breaking prairie sod—are shadowed by native species that would readily return in our wake, an instance of ecological memory in the biological sense. Elements of prior ecosystems can often be rejuvenated, at least partially, from traces that remain. Roots and seeds, dormant perhaps but still viable, awaiting rejuvenation or germination, are among the agents enabling regeneration. Corresponding processes of plant succession and species diversification ensue the moment any land is left fallow. In the parlance of modern landscape restoration, ecological memory refers to the dynamic biological capacity of ecosystems to recover from disruption.³ Yet the concept of ecological memory can also be extended and reconstrued in cultural terms: our collective recognition of the environmental consequences and cumulative extent of landscape change.⁴

I can date my initial acquaintance with many of the concerns addressed in this book to the moment in the late 1970s when by sheer serendipity I purchased from a used bookseller in Eugene, Oregon, an early trade paperback edition of Peter Matthiessen’s Wildlife in America. It seemed at first glance to be a standard volume of natural history, presumably celebrating the magnificence of the continent’s megafauna, perhaps above all trophy game. Yet the book’s benign title was belied by cover copy declaring it to be the first history of man’s effect on . . . extinct and vanishing species.⁵ The contents proved to be profoundly troubling: a historical recounting of the precipitous decline in wildlife since European colonization of North America, as the edge of frontier settlement swept ever westward. This groundbreaking and now classic depiction of environmental history, originally published in 1959, struck me with the force of revelation.

Matthiessen’s saga of environmental history and its litany of wildlife decline was mapped in my imagination onto a visceral impression of the topography of North America that I had acquired while bicycling coast to coast during the nation’s bicentennial only a few years earlier. We pedaled for six months from the woodlands of Appalachia to the Pacific headlands along the Oregon Coast. In Kansas cafés, descendants of Great Plains pioneers likened our transcontinental ride on two wheels to that of their kin, whose prairie schooners had halted for them to settle the region more than a century before. Unwittingly, we had pedaled our way into the legacy of Manifest Destiny, or so it seemed to some of them. In truth, we were simply cyclists at the mercy of prevailing headwinds and afternoon temperatures soaring above one hundred degrees. A day riding across that prairie landscape might cover seventy-five miles or more of gently rolling slopes of grassland, cactus, and sunflowers, with an occasional antelope startled from grazing. In the course of the journey, I had in fact internalized majesty and desolation, as well as developed a fledgling sense of interlocking biomes spanning the Great Plains, followed by basin and range, and ultimately a succession of mountain ranges culminating with the Rockies and Cascades.

In retrospect, Matthiessen’s Wildlife in America seems prescient in many respects, addressing issues that seem equally pressing today: extinction and the spread of invasive species, as well as the cumulative consequences of toxic herbicides that have become more pervasive in the decades since. Emphasizing regional suites of species, Wildlife is organized geographically, presenting a catalog of population decline, regional extirpation, and ultimately absolute extinction of several species. It contrasts the case of American bison, brought back from the brink, with the once bounteous passenger pigeon, which has been lost forever to extinction. The counterpoint of their respective fates, he reminds us, ranks among the founding narratives of the modern conservation movement.

The causes of wildlife decline that Matthiessen cites are legion: monumental habitat loss due to settlement, development, and widespread overgrazing, as well as ecological destruction wrought by extractive industries such as mining and logging. Moreover, nearly the entire prairie biome has been converted to cropland. The forces driving the environmental decline he described, of course, remain very much with us today. Consider the ongoing use of herbicides to eradicate large swaths of exotics. The current fervor for battling particularly aggressive species can unleash massive quantities of highly toxic substances into the environment—ironically in the name of conservation. The poisoning of ecological communities in order to return to some previous state—often idealized—ultimately proves unattainable. Eradicating invasive plants that have outcompeted native species can exacerbate environmental disruption, impacting entire ecosystems already impaired by development. Moreover, industrial agriculture has become so dependent on the use of proprietary herbicides in conjunction with genetically modified seeds that common weeds have already become resistant. Some ancient species such as horsetail have begun evolving into super weeds that appear to mutate and thrive on repeated applications of the very chemicals intended to control them. Other weed species will inevitably develop similar resistance. Should such trends continue, farmers will likely be forced to spray their crops with increasing frequency. This pattern of environmental degradation by agricultural chemicals follows logically from Matthiessen’s dire warnings—as well as those raised three years later by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring—almost sixty years