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Visitors to my adopted hometown of Augusta, Georgia have often complained of its strip mall ugliness and billboard-cluttered thoroughfares. The complaint also runs that the town boasts little to do other than play golf (as home to the annual Masters tournament), although I suspect it has more than its fair share of bars and tattoo parlors. My older colleagues at the University in nearby Aiken, South Carolina describe the downtown as “seedy,” which is fair enough, although my family and I love the festivals that come to the Commons and the Saturday market at 8th and Reynolds, which features fresh vegetables and homemade crafts. Many projects to renovate crumbling downtown buildings have gone over-budget or halted altogether because the money ran dry, the demand faltered, or the walls caved. The heyday of the 1970s is now at enough of a remove that the old Miller Theater sat abandoned for years, but now it is the new home for the Augusta Symphony and other concerts and events. One shopkeeper downtown told me that some locations have deteriorated so much that they will have to be bulldozed, but there are definitely signs of gentrification, with the good and bad that this process entails. A few blocks boast restaurants, galleries, and stores, along with the older African-American owned clothing stores and a record shop. A new cyber center is almost completed, and new hotels are being built.
A nearby corridor within the city makes living there worthwhile, and it hasn’t received much attention from the press. The Savannah River runs through downtown, separating Georgia from South Carolina. Right next to that, the Augusta Canal wends its way through woods next to the train tracks. Mules used to pull goods to and from the cotton mills on Petersburg boats floating in the canal. Now the whole area has become a haven for kayakers, cyclists, runners, and wildlife. Miles of trails and roads connect the headgates, a lock and dam complex, in the north to the marina downtown. On the South Carolina side, the Greenway network, a rails-to-trails project, runs a parallel course, making it possible for the ambitious athlete to make a complete loop of over twenty miles (double that if you want to include the nearby Forks Area Trail System). The Brick Pond Park in North Augusta, South Carolina, built on the site of the old Augusta brick works, is a good place to see alligators and turtles on a Sunday afternoon. On either side of the river, cormorants, egrets, and herons dive in the waters for fish. Red -tailed hawks and, more recently, bald eagles wheel in the sky. I don’t want to give the impression of pristine nature, though, as hydroelectric works, train trestles, and industrial sites (including an active quarry) can be seen from the trails. Highways lie alongside their nineteenth-century counterparts, the canal and the railroads. This intersection of wildness with industry and transportation makes the site more interesting to my mind, a potential model for what nature will look like for our children and grandchildren.
Once as I was running along the dirt road beside the canal, near the old Confederate powder mill, now a textile mill, I saw a brilliant purple flower blooming in the vines along the path. I recognized it instantly as Passiflora incarnata, or passionflower, named by the Spanish conquistadors, who saw in the large blossom the crown of thorns and the liturgical color of the passion of Christ. The vine grows an edible fruit, and the flowers and leaves have medicinal value. It is a weedy plant native to the Americas now available to gardeners in a multitude of colors and varieties. The plant, situated halfway between a weed and an ornamental, reminded me of the canal and its environs, situated between utility and beauty. In my more purist moments, I hate the sound of traffic on Interstate 20 ruining the quiet of my run through the woods, but at the same time I am grateful that the city planners thought to set aside some space for recreation and trees. A big box retail area has been built very close to the river, but at least some areas of the corridor will remain safe for the turtles and cormorants for the foreseeable future. Urban wilderness has the advantage over pristine wilderness that it can accommodate the occasional interruption: the soda can, the factory, the tunnel, the bridge. This is not to say that things couldn’t be done better: who wouldn’t want more park right in their backyard? But some wildness is better than none at all, and the animals don’t seem to care if the place they frequent was built for industry and not for them.
Rivers have a storied history in human culture, from the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamian civilization to the Ganges and the Jordan, waters that gave birth to the preponderance of the world’s religions. I think of the Savannah River as our own local Ganges, our Georgian Jordan. So far I haven’t seen anyone bathing in it, at least not in a ceremonial sense, but I suspect that it has many of the same features of renewal associated with water in religion. People go there to get away from it all, to put work and school out of mind and relax for a spell. As soon as I set foot on crunchy gravel or look out across the water, a palpable sense of relaxation moves over me. Deep breathing comes more naturally, and I feel more myself. Peace comes more easily sitting next to the river, even if I am looking across at the North Augusta mansions that dominate the view in one stretch downtown. I know that I will never be able to afford a house like that on my professor’s salary, but fortunately, no one can truly own the landscape itself. The river cuts across economic divides. I often see people fishing next to a particular cemetery, and I think that at least some of them might actually need the food (as opposed to just fishing for sport). Within a square mile can be found $10,000 “shotgun” houses and multi-million dollar homes. The river, an ancient symbol of impermanence, does not care about such differences.
Roads and rivers share a common role as dividing lines between regions, as serpentine markers of territory. Asphalt rivers can be more dangerous to our non-human kin, and I always try to notice which species get flattened on my way to work, which requires crossing the Savannah on the 5th Street bridge or the Gordon Highway one block south. I have seen numerous dogs and cats, opossums, raccoons, and some unidentifiable corpses, either because they were too decomposed or because my 60 miles per hour prohibited inspection. Since childhood I have dreamed of wooded overpasses that would allow creatures to cross over roads safely, and I have since learned that such migratory bridges have already been built in Canada. Just a few days before this writing, I came close to hitting two whitetail deer on my way to work, and I think that such bridges here would give me and the deer some peace of mind. Bridges make boundaries permeable, and I think our culture could stand to learn something about penetrable borders. I read once that something as simple as a walking trail can keep species like salamanders from crossing from one side to the other, as the exposed soil on the path desiccates their bodies. A few fallen leaves can be enough to act as a bridge for them, so perhaps we should be a little less obsessed with tidiness and efficiency, should allow some leaves to simply rest on the ground. If we allow the boundaries between civilized and wild to blur, we might find our own lives a little more exciting, and the other creatures would find us more hospitable.
I once took a group of students to the Silver Bluff Audubon Center, which sits in a large tract of pine forest on the east side of the river below Augusta. The Center, little more than a classroom building and a few sheds down a dirt road, models the interface of human activity with nature. The land was used for farming before being donated to the Audubon Society, and the property grew through a gift of land from the Department of Energy. The nearby Savannah River Site (a Cold War “bomb plant,” now a nuclear energy facility) contributed to thermal pollution in the streams, and the land was given as an environmental offset. Endangered wood storks now nest in the area, and lucky birdwatchers can see them at the right times of year. Talking with the director of the Center, I learned that the ponds where the storks nest frequently run low on water. Development between Augusta and Aiken has led to much more paved surface area, which leads to higher runoff. The larger amount of runoff means that the streams and ponds see a huge influx of water followed by nothing at all, so that the net effect is a lowering of the water table. I think about all of those parking lots, roads, and driveways, and how much of it is really necessary. Maybe gravel roads are more “high tech” than asphalt, because they return more water to the soil.
The practicality of the Audubon Center impresses me. The teaching mission of the place—school groups routinely visit—receives funding from the sale of pine straw raked from the forest floor. Prescribed burns keep the trees tall and healthy, and a network of trails for biking, walking, and bird-watching runs through them. It’s just the sort of impure wilderness that I think may be the key to making a sustainable link between humans and nature in the coming century.
I had the opportunity to learn a similar lesson while visiting the Phinizy Swamp Nature Education Center, on the Phinizy Creek, which once held raw sewage flowing southward out of Augusta and into the River on its way downstream. These days the swamp still treats Augusta’s sewage, but today it does so through an artificial wetland rather than having the sewage dumped directly in the creek. A series of ponds contained by earthen berms take the effluent into successively less-dangerous forms until it can safely rejoin the natural wetland. The artificial wetland is significantly uglier to my eye than its natural counterpart: the ponds are squarish and grid-like, often surrounded by chain-link fence, and devoid of trees. The shrub growth is kept bush-hogged: I have been told to discourage populations of muskrat that some factions thought were eroding the banks. Officials at the local airport nearby have also complained about the wetland because flocks of migrating birds block the view of pilots attempting to take off and land. The water authority tries to keep the artificial wetland as artificial as possible so that nature doesn’t get in the way. That said, the artificial wetland is a great place to see egrets, herons, and ducks, and I have seen deer, crayfish, turtles, and snakes in the vicinity.
On balance, an artificial wetland is much better for wildlife than a traditional water treatment plant, and the site serves a utilitarian purpose while still providing people and animals with important habitat. The place doesn’t stink, and it’s good for running and walking. The Nature Center even has an annual 5k fundraiser, where people run laps around both the artificial and natural wetland. The “artificial” and the “natural” bleed together, perhaps not seamlessly, but more smoothly than expected. It is quite easy to tell where the artificial wetland ends, because tall trees laden with Spanish moss loom over the dark waters in the more “natural” section. Nothing else marks the boundaries between these parts of the swamp, and, one wonders, if the ducks don’t seem to mind the difference, should I? I am sure that a trained ecologist could take a population survey of the species in both areas and compare the relative health of the habitats. But against, say, a treatment plant or a runway, the artificial wetland has to win hands down.
Our culture needs to come to a happy medium between hatred and love for non-human nature. I pay attention to newspaper stories about people who seem to genuinely hate animals. Many municipalities poison geese, because they don’t like the droppings and feathers that the birds leave behind. That seems indefensible to me—to kill animals simply because they get in the way. A controversial government program would sterilize or kill the remaining wild mustang left in the west in a similar fashion. And then there are the real sickos, like a guy who broke into a local woman’s house and put her dogs in the oven just for the cruelty of it. On the other side of the spectrum, there is the sort of calendar photo love of nature, that only wants to protect the really pristine, beautiful places like Yosemite or Yellowstone. I know that we can’t even take that kind of conservation for granted, but to my thinking, even less charismatic places deserve some consideration. I played as a child in a fringe of woods between parallel backyards, and that little strip of trees—maybe a quarter the size of a city block—had a tremendous impact on my childhood. I know those trees didn’t get the axe because of a storm drain that ran the length of the woods, making development impractical. Still, that little patch of forest invested my childhood with a pantheistic sense of reverence for nature, something that I hope my own children will find. By sword-fighting with sticks and building tree houses, we commingled with our environment in ways that video games would not have allowed.
Cities can rethink those little outposts of green that were perhaps accidentally preserved and become conscientious about extending their reach and restoring their degraded areas. In Augusta, a corridor of land between river and canal, train tracks and industrial sites, has become a mark of pride for the community that connects people to their plant and animal neighbors. That gets me thinking about all of the other neglected scraps of the city—the empty lots, the defunct developments, the ground next to a highway or underneath high tension power lines. Maybe these little areas can become seeds for a new conservation that builds on the bits left behind after the ravages of development. Those forgotten parts are a lot like ourselves—isolated, disconnected, degraded. As we restore our surroundings, we also restore our sense of connection to the environment, to animals, and to each other. Nothing brings people together like pride of place, like shared commitment, and initiatives to make cities green, even around the wreckage, renew communities and not just wetlands and woods.
When it comes to environmental debate, a bad sort of either / or thinking dominates the discourse: either people or animals, development or wilderness, jobs or the environment. Due to the anthropocentric bias of Western thinking, animals and the environment lose every time in this setup. If we can make our categories less pure, and learn to dwell in the middle, in the weeds, then maybe we have a chance at building a future with a place for trees and wild animals. On my way to work, I pass an abandoned house next to a convenience store where people sit on crates in the front yard and drink malt liquor from paper bags. I don’t think environmental restoration necessarily means gentrifying or sanitizing these gritty bits of the city. I wouldn’t want my little southern city to be so yuppie-friendly that I couldn’t afford to live there anymore. But I do want to live in a place that takes seriously the connections that people have with the places where they travel, live, and work. A city likely will have some places where people can sit and drink out of paper bags, but hopefully it also has some places where a downy woodpecker taps on tree trunk, even if that tree happens to be located next to a rail yard or retention pond. Maybe this sounds like settling for less, but it’s the lesson learned from watching a river that has been here a lot longer than me.
