A Witness Tree on the Land, Part Two

Presenting: A Witness Tree on the Land 

Content: cemeteries and death care, the politics of restoration, land development, logics of “cure” 

Featuring:

• Main Voice(s): Emerson Cram 
• Special Guests: 
  • V Fixmer-Oraiz 
  • Rod Sullivan 
  • Dr. Jennifer Mack 
  • Chant Eicke 
  • Geoff Mouming 
  • Jason Grimm 

Highlights
This episode picks up with the preservation challenges of the early 2000s, as Johnson County debated what should happen to the publicly held land. Proposals for development varied from a golf course, a new county jail, housing development, all of which would have required the county sell off portions of the land. Preservation advocates organized to dissuade the county from developing the land for these uses, arguing that doing so would generate incalculable loss. Emerson explores these debates in the 2000s as quintessential tensions between preservation and development, but the significance of choosing preservation is remarkable, especially within a rural area. As an extension of these tensions over land use, Emerson talks again with Dr. Mack about the cemetery.

Conclusion
Can design unlock the intersections of food justice and disability justice? How can land tenure systems shape long standing conversations about poverty and modern life? What does “restoration” mean in the bigger picture of our relationships with the land and each other? The Monarch Super Highway.  

Transcript
For a full transcript of this episode, visit: disabilityecologiespodcast.buzzsprout.com

Credits
Episode written and narrated by Emerson Cram, University of Iowa. Recorded with Riverside FM. Production and Sound Editing by Maura De Cicco. 

All media clips are used for educational purposes only. Sound effects licensed through Pixabay.  

Funding
Research, writing, and production have benefitted from generous support from multiple sources, including: the National Communication Association’s Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award; UI OVPR Arts and Humanities Initiative Standard Grant; UI Provost Investment in Strategic Priorities;  UI College of Liberal Arts DSHB Humanities Scholar; CLAS Summer Humanities Award.

Special Thanks
With thanks to Maura De Cicco; University of Iowa Departments of Communication Studies, Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, and American Studies (Especially Angie Looney, Kembrew McLeod, Eric Vázquez, Naomi Greyser, and Hallie Abelman); The Johnson County Local Food & Farm Team (Julie Watkins & Ilsa DeWald), State Historical Society of Iowa (especially Hang Nguyen, Allison Johnson, and Anu Tiwari); Sarah Keen, University Archivist, University of Iowa; V Fixmer-Oraiz, Johnson County Board of Supervisors; Kim Painter, Johnson County Recorder; Rebecca Dewing, Johnson County Historical Society; GROW Johnson County (especially Jason Grimm, Emmaly Renshaw and Malik Salsberry); the 2024 Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities Seminar Participants; Claire Fox; Teresa Mangum; Jennifer New; Phaedra C. Pezzullo; Constance Gordon; and Jesse Waggoner.   

Audience Participation

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Transcript

Transcript for Disability Ecologies Podcast Chapter Four, Part Two, A Witness Tree on the Land 

Emerson Narrates, 00:00
Welcome Back. You are listening to Disability Ecologies, Chapter 4, A Witness Tree on the Land, part 2. 

[audio of guitar strumming and soft ooo vocals underneath Emerson’s spoken narrative]: 

V Fixmer-Oraiz, 00:25:
So, when I first came to the farm in 2016, it felt like a private farm because it was corn and soy and it was 114 acres of corn and soy. And yeah, it just felt like I was on somebody's private land. And so it just shocked me to realize that this was public land. There weren't any people around and Grow was pretty small operation at that point. It's significantly grown since then in terms of volunteers and staffing. But at the time it just felt like, what is going on here? How is this publicly owned? And then the rent costs that they were getting were just very small, but it was better than nothing. So, for decades, instead of developing it or selling it to the city, I mean I have to give the county some props and that it was like, well, we're going to keep it farmland.

Emerson Narrates, 1:18:
You just heard Supervisor Fixmer-Oraiz recount what it felt like to encounter the land for the first time as a project manager in 2016, at the start of the implementation of the restoration master plan. Farming use persisted from the early 1980s through the time of Fixmer-Oraiz’s encounter—nearly 40 years. And in that moment, once again, the land was on the precipice of change, with a clear mandate from the community. Amidst all of the change and transformation that I’ve narrated so far—the chapter yet to come would operate under the banner of “restoration.” What was it that the county was “restoring”? Certainly not the original design of the so-called poor farm, to remove people from public or to compel their work under conditions of their confinement? What does land restoration even mean in the context of so much radical alteration? The new imagination of land use at this stage would become a stark contrast to both the land’s history in addition to common patterns of repurposing rural land in the U.S. But to know why these events again rise to significance, we need to take a brief detour. 

[audio of guitar strumming and soft ooo vocals underneath Emerson’s spoken narrative]: 

Emerson Narrates, 3:01:
In the early 2000s, county supervisors once again stood at a crossroads. In April of 2001, members of the board requested a site study through the Johnson County Council of Governments, otherwise known at the time as JCOGs. The goal? To develop a site plan that spanned education, historic preservation, and environmental conservation. Jeff Davidson, then Executive Director of JCOGS and Iowa City’s Assistant City Planner, also recommended the county explore the possibility of selling a portion of the property for housing development, potentially annexing the land to Iowa City. Alas, I did not live in Iowa City at the time, but from newspaper accounts covering those public forums, I heard concerns unique to this region and the historic site, yes, but these were also very common tensions between conservation, education, and private development. In our 2023 conversation, Supervisor Rod Sullivan recounted the feeling of that time…

Rod Sullivan, 4:14: 
I was the chair of the Johnson County Democratic Party starting in the late 90s. And occasionally at our meetings, people would talk about this property, and there were a number of people who were active in the Democratic Party who were, I guess I would say maybe not professional, but amateur, historic preservationists who were concerned that the board was going to just sell it all or develop it all. And the board was getting bombarded at the time with offers. I remember there were two golf course ones, and I was talking to a couple people who were supervisors at the time about these offers to buy it and develop a golf course there. This group of people was pretty adamant about preserving the land. And so, I got that message pretty clearly before I took office.

Emerson Narrates, 5:18:
Most often, these tensions speak to concerns of loss. Reading back through some of the public comments from that meeting now twenty-five years ago, I can’t help but hear some of the echoes of that dominant metaphor of “waste” that you’ve heard before. Other residents asked: what would the county lose if this land was sold off for development? What kinds of living relationships would we lose? How should we honor the people who lived and worked here; to do justice to their lives?

In retrospect, these moments of community decision-making about land use were some of the most pivotal, even watershed events. They were consequential to the extent of Supervisor Burns’ efforts to preserve the asylum. Like the role of watersheds in producing shifts, the community’s insistence on preserving public land for collective good, enabled something truly remarkable: the grounds to cultivate a local foods infrastructure to meet collective needs; and an open system to adapt and grow into the future. 

Just as the Bur Oak witnessed the movement of people out to the farm in the 1850s, now it witnesses those movements again. As much as it is still neatly bound to city and county regulations, this time, land use becomes a tool to align the site’s multiple needs. The Bur Oak gently watches over the still unknown names of people laying rest in the cemetery, while in the distance, farmers at either Grow Johnson County or the Global Food Project cultivate the land for growing, connecting, and sustenance. Perhaps this alignment—of honoring the past and those in the present—can become its own gift of restorative relationships and historical repair. I want to return, briefly, to the unnamed. 

[audio of guitar strumming and soft ooo vocals underneath Emerson’s spoken narrative] 

Emerson Narrates, 7:54:
In the middle of the asylum building on one of many recent tours, the door of the asylum facing south opens to a scene of new growth. Depending on the season, one might find hot peppers, chrysanthemums, or maybe even Lenga Lenga, a leafy green grown by GROW’s neighbors at the Global Food Project. In the distance, you’ll also find a savanna of oak trees keeping watch over the poor farm’s historic cemetery. At this point, the graves here are still unmarked, but studied over several decades through partnerships with the University in addition to state archeologists. Unless you already know of its location, few signs currently mark its presence, though there are plans in store to do so in the near future. Supervisor Sullivan remembered how the value of the cemetery still relatively unknown—prevented earlier county supervisors from moving forward with some proposals to develop the land for purposes disconnected from its history. I asked him to talk about the broader conversation of these development conversations:  

Rod Sullivan, 9:14: 
Well, there was a lot more talk back then about taxes are too high and we need to reduce property taxes and we need more income coming into the county and one of the ways we can do that is to sell it all or sell part of it or whatever. And for me, the number one priority was we've really never had anybody with any expertise look at this place. We know there's a cemetery there. It's very vague, other than the fact that we're told there's a cemetery there. To me that's very sacrosanct, and I just don't think anybody should be considering messing around with that until we know really what we're dealing with. And to be honest, we didn't get that type of data, that type of info, until just last year. So, at that time, it was I think really premature to talk about anything in that area.

Emerson Narrates, 10:08:
One of the individuals who played a central role in developing recommendations for the cemetery was Jennifer Mack, who worked in the office of the state archeologist at the time: 

Jennifer Mack, 10:20:
Archeology is the study of past cultures through physical materials that they leave behind. It's a very broad study because the umbrella of physical materials encompasses everything from tiny little grains of pollen to entire preserved structures.

Emerson Narrates, 10:38:
Prior to working on the study of the Poor Farm’s Cemetery, Mack did research related to cemeteries in Dubuque, and later would become the Lead Bioarcheologist for the Asylum Hill Project, a project currently underway in Mississippi to investigate and interpret the public history and scientific value of what was formerly called the Mississippi State Insane Asylum, and now the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Central to their work is a commitment to understanding the legacies and impacts of individual patients, by doing close interview work with descendant communities. Mack’s work with the Johnson County Historic Poor Farm was especially crucial in proposing recommendations for how to honor and memorialize those who are buried there: 

Jennifer Mack, 11:33: 
And in my work I look not only at the skeleton itself and what it can tell us about the person, but also the way the person was buried and evidence of funeral rituals and traditions that you can find along with the preserved remains.

Emerson Narrates, 11:49:
Given the layers of stigma connected to poor farms and poverty, I asked Dr. Mack to elaborate why a so-called “pauper’s cemetery” was culturally significant: 

Jennifer Mack, 12:02:
Care for the dead can mean completely different things in different cultures. It's very culturally specific, and even groups that otherwise share a lot of traditions might have really widely varying mortuary rituals. For instance, Catholic churches in Italy and Germany and the Czech Republic are decorated with the bones of the dead who were previously buried in the cemeteries and then dug up to make room for more bodies. It’s something that Italian and German and Czech communities in the United States would never dream of doing, but you know, back in the home countries, it wasn’t considered disrespectful. So, it’s sometimes hard to really project what constitutes care of the dead. But we do know when the Johnson County Poor Farm Cemetery was used probably from around 1855 to around 1901, those were the rough dates. And that was the time in America when cemeteries were taking on very different look and a new significance. It was during the beautification of death movement, which was the mid to late 19th century where people were really changing their attitudes towards death and mourning. And they created these rural garden-like cemeteries that were sprouting up all over the country that had landscaping and exotic plants and flower beds and elaborate stone monuments. It's very different from the old, crowded churchyard look. And these cemeteries were meant to be pleasant for visitors, casual visitors, as well as actual mourners, place for them to commune with nature and sort of contemplate, I guess, life and death. So that was what was going on with death care in the rest of the country, sort of apart from institutions. And I believe that's one of the reasons that there was this great fear of a pauper's grave, which was a commonly expressed fear at the time, is the fear of being buried in a place unmarked, inaccessible and unvisited. Sort of a fear of being forgotten, I think, was why people didn't want to end up in a cemetery like the one at the poor farm.

Emerson Narrates, 13:55:
One of Dr. Mack’s responsibilities entailed providing guidance to the supervisors about what to do with the cemetery: how should it be beautified? What would be the most respectful? Should respect for those buried be shaped by the standards of the early 1900s or the 21st century? These are not easy questions to answer, and community members naturally held different and competing perspectives. I heard these frictions through conflicting ideas of how to show dignity to those buried, but the added layer was that those obligations from a living community were also laden with the cultural stigma of being remembered as a “pauper.” It’s a tricky situation, and I think for different reasons, all these concerns were responses to an imagined desire to hold those here as belonging to us in death. Dr. Mack emphasized the heart of the conflict: 

Jennifer Mack, 15:03:
And then at the same time, there are some who think it's sort of a violation to out the people who died at the poor farm by listing their names on a monument because they might be embarrassed to have died that way or in that place. While others in the community might think that it's disrespectful to leave them anonymous if we can find their names, then to continue to conceal their names is to continue to place a stigma on the institution and people who had to make use of the institution.

Emerson Narrates, 15:35:
I think one of the most enlightening parts of our conversation revolved around the specificity of what death care practices symbolize respect for those who are buried. What is respected ground? And how did maintaining that commitment challenge the overall desire to care for the cemetery (and by extension, those buried here) by confronting how the space had fallen into an atmosphere of neglect? In earlier years, the space was full of fallen trees damaged by derecho, weeds, and invasive plants. But again, what might seem as neglect to some might otherwise be sacred in a different cultural context. 

Jennifer Mack, 16:26: 
There was a period of time... For instance, in Ireland, there was a cultural belief that it was bad luck or disrespectful to pull up vegetation from a cemetery. So that led to cemeteries being very unkempt looking. Which could make you think, "Oh, they're being disrespectful, they're neglecting the dead." But instead it was following a tradition that says, "No, don't yank up the weeds. Let everything grow."

Emerson Narrates, 16:52:
I then asked Dr. Mack how she negotiated those tensions in the context of the revitalization of the land and prairies.

Jennifer Mack, 17:02: 
It's a very good question. Normally, if I were making recommendations for a cemetery, I guess my primary concern would be before I really think of the sacred spaces, just with preserving the historic appearance of the site and doing no harm. So, in a cemetery with damaged or illegible grave markers, I would only offer recommendations that align with the National Park Service best practices for cleaning and repairing gravestones. Usually there's an effort to preserve a site's original appearance or return a site to its original appearance of, there was a little bit more that went into this because at the poor farm, we have no idea what the cemetery looked like while it was in use. And another thing, I tend to turn to direct descendants or descendant communities for guidance for what they would like for their ancestors. But in this case, we don't really have direct descendants, and the only descendant community would be the entire city of Iowa City, even though most people living in Iowa City I don't think have very long histories with the town. So it was a little trickier. I was really guided by the overall goals of the larger poor farm project of trying to create space for public education, discussions of these persistent issues. And I knew that there was also this very large environmental aspect of the restoration, which I think the majority of the population of Iowa City was really in favor of this prairie restoration and ideas like that with the native vegetation. So I was more inclined to think that that would be consistent with keeping this a sacred space since it's something that was important to the community now.

Emerson Narrates, 18:54: 
At this point in our conversation, Dr. Mack reframed for me, at least, how to talk about the symbolism of the term “isolation.” Given everything I know and have read about systems of confinement—which includes the asylum of the historic poor farm, I’m not sure how else to make sense of literal bars. Isolation is one of the feelings attached to discard—the movement away of people who are unable to work for various reasons, into a system to contain them. In respect to the cemetery, her written recommendations noted the need to “bring the community of the dead out of isolation.” I asked her to say more about that, and in the process, she elaborated how her work with Asylum Hill also impacted in retrospect how she now made sense of the question: 

Jennifer Mack, 19:57: 
So the recommendation to bring them out of isolation was sort of a way of addressing this archaic fear of being forgotten in an unmarked pauper's grave. What I've really learned more and more, even since I did this project for Johnson County, especially with my current project dealing with the Mississippi State Asylum, because there's so much more preservation of historic documents and institutional records. I have a lot more to work with.

Emerson Narrates, 20:26:
I’m remembering now, back at the first open house event, I had a short exchange with a community member while I was near the cemetery. During a break in the programming, I wandered down rows of sunflowers to come across the historic cemetery. The light in the trees, for an amateur photographer like myself, neared perfection, making the whole scene come alive in a dance of movement and shadow. The community member and I chatted briefly, and I listened to their voice carry a heaviness, a want. They looked on toward the cross that Mary Donovan had posted all those years ago, and uttered. “I just want their lives to mean something.” As the years passed, I wonder now what they might think about where we are. That perhaps the decisions, and time, and change…all of these might live up to that desire for meaning for those resting here.  

[audio of guitar strings and a flute playing]
 
When we talk about restoration, we talk about the decisions we have to make within a set of circumstances not of our own making. In the context of wetlands, prairies, and soils, restoration are principles and values intended to repair the ecosystem services otherwise diminished by systems designed for something else. And so, listening to a different perspective of “restoration” from Geoff and Chant made me hear the term in a different register, with the sense-making tools of restoration ecologists. Chant unpacked for me how the vision statement of the project aligned with the practices of wetlands and soil restoration. That vision statement reads: “to preserve and elevate the health and diversity of species within the Historic Poor Farm of Johnson County, Iowa, and to nurture the stability and natural abundance of the land; promoting the ecosystem services that supported historic land use as well as encouraging the natural regenerative processes of soil, water, and biotic life.”

Chant Eicke, 23:03: 
So if we’re going to put the time and effort into putting together a succinct plan that hopefully sets the groundwork you know in seven short years for generations of health on the landscape…I wanted to start with putting what we were doing out there and what the intention of that was…As a restoration ecologist, we recognize there’s a lot of complex interaction between things like land use, agriculture, land preservation. You throw in cultural heritage things…just the human centered legacy that’s on the farm, you throw that in there, you through in diverse views on the roles that humans play in the natural environment and supporting the human experience…For me, natural area management is about maintaining and restoring resilience in a changing world. That’s what restoration is.”

Emerson Narrates, 24:08:
What I heard from Chant was not an emphasis on overbearing human-centered design, but a reflective orientation to the question of how humans can be better relationship partners. Ecosystem services certainly support humans on a human-oriented time scale; and they are our own way of describing how human actions constitute feedback loops of damage to us. What I mean is: we are fundamentally dependent on soil, water, and air for biological sustenance, wherein our literal survival depends on the quality of relationships we form and practice and learn from with the more than human world. Restoration, then, is about the decisions that become necessary within the conditions of external constraints. Those constraints can be political, they can be historical, and they can be us reckoning with the best way to live. So, too, they can force us to reckon with the decisions of our ancestors in a hopeful and reparative way—so that we might be better ancestors to the future.  

Listening to Chant, I was struck by the ways that ecosystem services teach us how needs are enmeshed together. We so often efface connections. Enmeshed needs connect the prairie restoration of the farm to the resilience and flourishing of the food projects sustained by Grow and the Global Food Project. Just like Patty taught us, we can thrive when we imagine ourselves as interdependent with a whole massive web of life. Geoff echoed this sentiment in our conversation as well. 

Geoff Mouming, 26:19: 
Yeah, one thing I would want to add to that too, and I’m sure Chant is thinking of this, one thing that we think a lot about in arboriculture is kind of the fungal web under the ground too. So, there are unique communities of microbes and fungi, all that stuff that’s going on under the ground too. What does that contribute to the health and resilience? We wonder about the disappearance of Bur Oaks in particular with things like Bur Oak blight. What role is kind of the loss of that kind of fungal interconnection or interconnectivity playing in the ability of the various plants to be able to continue to thrive, fight off disease, fight off invaders, that kind of thing too. So, it’s very, very complicated and we only scarcely understand it.  

Emerson Narrates, 27:00:
As a lay person, I was riveted by Geoff challenging my attention to move underground—into the realm of fungal webs, prairie roots, and life building. All of these processes are acts of life making that we take for granted because they are rendered invisible by the very condition of being located underground. But, we can also choose to adapt how we sense those processes. Geoff emphasized the relationships of mutuality between the natural areas restoration and the food related work now happening on site.

Geoff Mouming, 27:42:
I think an interesting experiment going on out there too…you talked about the soil test, I think, originally in one of your questions, too. My first connection with the poor farm in more recent history was through Grow Johnson County. And I know the people who started that. My office was across the street from theirs. So when they came up with this idea, we had talked a little bit about it, sent in to have a soil test done out there just to see what they were dealing with before they started growing a crop out there and actually was in decent shape. But you’ve seen out there what Grow Johnson County, what Iowa Valley Resource Conservation Development have turned that into. And I think the fact that that’s going on concurrent and adjacent to a natural areas restoration makes for a really interesting laboratory, right? Because these natural plants are in there, and abundance of pollinators. What is that going to mean for the improvement of not only soil improvement, reducing erosion, those kinds of things, but the presence of pollinators, too. How is this going to improve the crops there? Will it reduce the number of pests that they have? So that’s a really, really interesting ongoing kind of experiment that’s going to be fun to see as it moves forward. And it also provides value to the community. That’s feeding a lot of people, what’s going on there. 

Emerson Narrates, 28:56:
By sharing their expertise and passion, Geoff and Chant invited me to consider the promise of restoration in a different register: not a turning backwards, but as an emergence story. What can restoration create when it serves connection rather than individuation? I find myself lingering with this question not only on the level of organic matter and biological systems. I want to take it further and speculate how disrupting old patterns of land use might generate different desires—politically and otherwise. At the end of the day, these conversations made me consider how disconnection—between people, between humans and the soils we need to live—is a naturalized consequence of a particular social design. 

In the next chapter, I turn to the people whose vision, labor, and energy has reimagined an old poor farm as the grounds for meeting contemporary needs. Those needs include access to land and infrastructure for small scale farming businesses, cultivation of culturally relevant foods for hunger relief and food sovereignty and developing a “proof of concept” for new practices and support systems for growers across the state. 

In turning again to the question of healing, then, we can turn our attention to modes of organizing pathways of repair. By this, I mean rather than pontificate if and in what ways that land might heal individuals, we can consider healing on a bigger scale. For example, Jason Grimm, the executive director of Iowa Valley Resource Conservation and Development, spoke to me in 2023 about his role in developing the restoration plan. He observed how a fundamental disconnection is embedded in the design of our food system… 

Jason Grimm, 31:07:
I wanted to think about from a design and planning perspective of how to bring food production and food systems back into our urban environment as an infrastructure component, just like water and electricity and stuff like that. So, I was really interested in regional planning as well from a multi-county area or food shed perspective. So that kind of drove me to this interest. I also grew up on a farm since the day I was born, and so I was very knowledgeable about just the aspects of farm life…

Emerson Narrates, 31:34: 
Looking back at those conversations now, in the last months of 2025, I can’t help but wonder: what if the design of our food system—itself indebted to hundreds of years of development and land use—could be otherwise? In the words Mary Helen used in the last chapter, what if we designed our food system to better meet people’s needs? Growers, consumers, environmental needs—and why do we have a system that falls short of those goals? Jason spoke again, to this disconnect from our agricultural systems: 

Jason Grimm, 32:18:
But I also had this belief that... I believe that the reason why we don't really value our agricultural systems as much as we do, especially here in Iowa, is that there's so many people in our society today that drive down the interstate and don't even know the difference between what a corn plant and a soybean plant looks in the field, and that's because we're so disconnected, and that's because agriculture is always outside of the city and food production is not happening inside close to our home. So farms on the edge of cities are just always looked at as like, "Oh, that'll be a house in 20 years." We're not valuing it as where we get our sustenance to feed ourselves.

[audio of guitar strumming and soft ooo vocals underneath Emerson’s spoken narrative]: 

Emerson Narrates, 33:00:
This chapter has taken us on quite a journey of time travel—from the earliest moments of Iowa’s formation by glacial drift, to their mineral deposits sustaining communities growing “three sisters” of corn, beans, and squash, to the hurried pace of settlement and institution of a new biological regime. If we turn our attention again to that legacy Bur Oak, their concentric circles of accumulated time underneath corky bark, what new perspective do we have about this place? 

On one hand, that Bur Oak’s witnessing encouraged me to rethink my own beliefs about restoration, especially in the context of disability politics and history of land in the United States. Typically, “restoration” suggests a scene of loss, even impairment. From its etymological origins, restore “cures,” or “renews health.” These senses of the term populate the imaginations of medicine as much as the gritty work of structural rehabilitation or preservation work, ways of thinking that work on the scale of individual bodies or built structures. When it comes to disability, “restoration” holds thorny contradictions. The writer and historic voice for disability justice, Eli Clare, has helped me make sense of these connections across human and non-human worlds. Restoration can contain the wish of a “cure,” that can potentially negate disability as a creative asset; restoration also can invoke the memory of some of the most painful moments of hearing the lament of “burdensome.” 

But… in the face of these negations, Clare also teaches us that there is no “original,” no clean slate of non-disabled life. There is simply the idea of “normal” and “natural.” Most important, Clare teaches us to hold open our curiosity when we encounter narratives that would claim otherwise. In a world rendered for us only because of radical transformation—that fundamental gift of glacial grandeur that made the tall grass prairie come into being—how could we possibly lose the humility to assume “natural” and “normal” are one in the same? We live in a constant of change and adaptation; and we also live in a moment of confronting the long-term impacts of earlier decisions—this is what it means to inhabit the perspective of tree time. 

The question I find myself lingering with these days when I’m walking in the footsteps of the people who used their body’s energy to grow things on the land is this: how does our story of poverty change if we take seriously these patterns of settlement and land use? Instead of Horatio Alger and the Poor House, is there a story that looks elsewhere for explanation? Instead of John Gillin and social reformers who were invested in the story of biological defect, is there a story closer to the ground? Those are questions worth considering, even wrestling with in discomforting ways. They are questions I know that I want to ask in conversation with others who grow their livelihoods from the land and hold close to their heart their own reasons for the time, and the energy, and the sacrifice of cultivating. Perhaps our conversations would start with our differences or agreements with the statement: “in the United States, all wealth is rooted in the land.” 

[guitar strumming and flute sounds]

Restoration, then, is a way of naming the relationships with a difference: restored by bringing people back to the land in a public capacity. Those relationships ride on first and foremost, an acknowledgement of harm done and a commitment to actions that might make us worthy of forgiveness. Saying “dignity” out loud might bring us into a different space, as does the promise of repair in every brush stroke, or staff meeting, or volunteer labor hour. Restoration is a way of naming the moments of listening with needful attention. And sure, commitment without action may not feel like enough given the weight of time. But it can be an opening, a provisional act of rendering a different world, a turning of the timeline away from the patterned and expected. 

In the end, I imagine restoration as embodied in the time and energy of blooming golden rod on the autumn equinox. As Geoff and I continue walking towards the Bur Oak legacy tree, I inquire how the native plant species are feeding the “super generation” of monarch butterflies. At the time of our walk, headlines and social media chatter buzzed with stories of monarchs beginning their 3,000-mile journey to the south. Nectar from plants like Goldenrod were vital for the migration ahead…

Emerson, 39:36:
I asked about the goldenrod just because I’ve seen a lot of reminders about the monarch migration this season and about they need their fuel stops to keep them going…

Geoff Mouming, 39:54: 
And what a wonderful rest stop this is, on the monarch highway, right?...

Emerson, 39:58
Yeah, it is really, really beautiful… [fade, into music transition]

[audio of guitar strumming and soft ooo vocals, and then a prominent strum]