We drove to Indy the other day and were taken aback by all the construction. New housing, cleared woodlands, new pipelines, improved roadways— everything that accompanies progress and an economy on the mend.
Oliver Johnson grew up in Indianapolis with his parents and eleven siblings. His earliest memories were of a deep forest and a log cabin and meals of fried squirrel and cornbread. The family arrived in 1822 and settled on a piece of land that would one day be a part of the Indiana state fairgrounds.
The Johnson cabin measured 18’ by 20’ with walls of logs saddled and notched into place. The floor was made of wooden slabs pinned to log joists. Door hinges and latches were carved from wood. The hearth was a mass of pounded clay and its opening lined with bricks of soil and grass. The chimney was framed with a crib of oak limbs, then packed and smoothed with fine clay. On the roof was a series of overlapping boards split and held in place with “weight poles” notched into the gable logs. Not a single nail was used.
The cabin stood in a clearing, and beyond it the black forest rose from a thick layer of dank and molding leaves. There were few roads, so men and their wagons carved and slashed their way through great stands of timber and brush. The streams were ripe with fish, the forest abundant with game. Oliver once shot 18 squirrels from a single tree without changing position.
Buckskin was the standard dress among pioneers, but not the Johnsons. Oliver’s mother owned a spinning wheel and gathered armloads of flax that grew along wetland edges. From the cured stems she spun fiber into strong thread, then bartered with a neighbor who owned a loom and fine linen was the result. Mrs. Johnson saw to it that her family wore nothing less.
Clearing land for grain production was a primary objective. The work was arduous and continuous and wherever mineral soil was scraped clean, corn was planted. Eventually wooden plows gave way to steel, and old stumps rotted and more land was cleared and more corn planted. The corn not ground into meal was sold or fed to livestock. When fat hogs were ready for market they were herded overland to slaughterhouses on the Ohio River, a destination requiring more than two exhausting weeks to reach.
Young Oliver loved it all— the days of hard labor, the tending of livestock, the hunting of game. He relished the deep woods, appreciated its abundant and varied life and never felt alone in it. But his concept of land use differed from those who had occupied the region for thousands of years before his family arrived. He was bent on carving out a piece of wilderness and transforming it from what it was to what it could be. His ambition was shared by all settlers and their combined efforts brought change to the landscape that was reinforced by succeeding generations. A mere two centuries later and the White River winding through Indianapolis might be the only landmark those early settlers would recognize.
We are a reckoning force, and our resolve to build a better world has often been with little consideration for long term consequence. The sixth great extinction is underway and it’s no less life-altering than an ice age or comet impact. It’s happening due to our land use, manufacturing processes, and utilization of resources. Some studies estimate current extinction rates 10,000 times greater than historic norms, and a UN Report concludes that one million animal and plant species are threatened.
Agriculture accounts for 90 percent of global deforestation and relies on a cocktail of poisons which destroy soils and kill invertebrates and disrupt food chains. What we eat and how it’s produced can be vastly improved by shifts in diet and the use of farm practices proven beneficial to local ecologies. If everyone in the US ate a vegan diet for one day, it could save 190 billion gallons of water (enough to supply every household in the country for a week) and the equivalent of 78 million gallons of gasoline. Our reliance on carbon rich fuels, our rampant use of petroleum-based plastics, the environmental contamination from persistent chemicals, the immense volume of waste going to landfills— all point to a short sighted civilization.
Oliver Johnson likely considered the forest and the resources it held inexhaustible. The concept of sustainability would have been foreign to him, and few people of his time could have anticipated what lay ahead. Now, with a clear understanding of multiple environmental threats, few of us are responding with justified urgency.
A warm front moved in and overnight the lawn became an uninterrupted sea of green. The wood anemones have opened, buckeye leaves are unfurling, wood ducks have claimed the nest boxes. It’s spring in the northern hemisphere and our planet responds as it has for millions of years, ushering in a glorious season of renewal. This blue sphere is a life-sustaining marvel but offers no guarantees.
Oliver could not have anticipated what his city would look like in 2023– the infrastructure and machinery, the technologies and comforts we take for granted. We are equally uncertain of our future and are deciding whether or not we’ll have one.
Reference: A Home in the Woods, Pioneer Life in Indiana. Indiana University Press.
