Earth Day
What do I owe the earth? How do I go about giving what I owe? This pair of questions has followed me around for a few weeks now as I’ve thought about Earth Day and considered the vitality of the land on which we built our home and live.
The sun has been shining intermittently each day for about a week and the spring growth is on. There’s not a bare scrap of soil anywhere save the brand new layer of mulch Alex has just added around our picnic table and firepit. Even that will be covered with growing things in another month, such is spring’s insistence.
Five years ago, Alex and I bought a little less than an acre of land on the south end of Bainbridge Island. We began building our home, a 720 square foot living space perched above a woodworking and ceramic studio of the same footprint, in 2019. In January of 2021, we moved in.
A building site had been cleared by the original developers of our lane more than twenty years prior to our purchase. It turned into a thicket of invasive blackberry and forearm-stout Scotch broom in the intervening years, and our very first endeavor on the land was to remove this towering bramble with chainsaws. The root wads had to be dug out with an excavator. When we finished this task what remained was hard packed, weed seed infested, and depleted soil. We scraped it back to hardpan and started over.
A friend pointed me to the work of “reformed landscape architect” Mary Reynolds who is passionately calling all who will hear to “build an ark!” The first step of rewilding land, according to Reynolds’ non-profit “We Are the Ark,” is to sow native, organic wildflower seed everywhere you might have or be inclined to grow a resource intensive monocrop like a green grass lawn. Let it go, mowing only necessary footpaths and removing only noxious weeds. Slowly the succession of species is underway.
Trees will sprout up. Leave them if you can, says Reynolds. Most of the earth wants to become forest. She insists there is no room for chemicals in a natural environment, that building healthy soil is paramount and that begins with only beneficial inputs. This is the work of habitat restoration, and, Reynolds urges, our own yards and gardens, however small, are the places to start.
Reynolds’ philosophy of land care immediately resonated with me. We trucked in loads of top soil that we spread in thick layers across the hardpan. We discovered Northwest Meadowscapes, a Port Townsend, Washington based native grass and flower seed company. We covered all the new soil with two different seed mixes that together combine dozens of native flowers and grasses.
In the few intervening years we’ve watched a meadow grow up around our house. We’ve welcomed butterflies and pollinators neither of us have seen in decades, watched them dance over blooms that are new to me despite having been common here at one time—meadowfoam, popcorn flower, gentian, tarweed. We’ve watched a succession of blooms that are familiar and at home in a riot of other life—coreopsis, buttercup, yarrow, primrose, half a dozen varieties of clover.
It’s a delight to see how much life this small slope and side garden—the total area approaches 3,000 square feet—supports each year. Last spring, I watched a bird build a nest tucked at the base of a substantial tuft of grass over a number of days. Weeks later, I watched this same bird going and coming again with bits of food. I heard the hungry cries from tiny, unseen beaks each time she returned.
We’ve found garter snakes dozing on the stone steps at the meadow’s edge. We’ve surprised fawns, curled into impossibly tiny piles of soft, spotted fur, hidden in the sun-warmed grass for the day by a hungry mother who needed to roam farther to sustain herself than her baby’s legs could handle.
We’re feeling for our role as part of the nature of this place. The work is necessarily on-going—removing the invasive weeds and inviting in and cultivating a healthy plant and soil community. We’re realizing first hand how wrong we are to assume that what the earth needs is for us to leave it alone. This place absolutely needs active care and we are learning and evolving our approaches and doing our best.
+
I’ve simultaneously been reading through (and testing on) a list of Bainbridge Island Metropolitan Parks and Recreation District’s (BI Parks) various management plans—vegetative, natural area, trail development—as part of the qualifying process of becoming a park steward. I’ve found the language disheartening, “A fully integrated management approach is needed to successfully heal the degraded systems… It is important to emphasize that the rehabilitation of these lands will be a long-term process (20 plus years), without quick fixes or simple prescriptions.”
I learned about this opportunity a little over a year ago when I began looking for any indication that my meager trailside efforts at pulling ivy off trunks and uprooting holly seedlings in Gazzam Lake might be plugging into some thoughtful, coordinated effort at care that increased the health of my home forest.
The park stewards opportunity felt exactly right, and in the new year, I began the work of qualifying. I invited Alex to join me, and over the course of a month we attended a handful of BI Parks organized volunteer events to familiarize ourselves with their approach to the maintenance and restoration of the nearly 1,600 acres in their care.
We chose work parties that focused on parks we visit regularly. We spent two Saturday mornings pulling Rocky Mountain maple saplings (not invasive, per se, but showing invasive tendencies in this environment according to the work party coordinator who led our efforts) out of the soft mulch beds at Blakely Harbor park, former site of Port Blakely Mill Company, established in 1864 and among the world’s largest lumber mills in its heyday over a century ago. We spent another wading into yet-to-bloom salmonberry thickets to pull out the occasional star-shaped stalk of Himalayan blackberry at Fort Ward Park, a coastal artillery built to protect the Bremerton Navy base, operational from 1890-1958.
I’m a solitary creature by habit, and the stewardship program appealed to me as a bridge to connect my contributions to others’ while maintaining some distance. I was surprised when I liked the requisite work parties. I liked spending a couple hours with a group of strangers who shared a sense of obligation to our public spaces and also clearly found community—if halting and awkward and based only on that shared obligation—in doing so. I liked finding marginal work zones where I could quietly observe the unfolding efforts of so many hands, making my contribution to the changing scene’s edge.
Once we’d met this requirement, I broached the subject of the park steward position with the volunteer coordinator. The invitation to meaningful action anchored in community and restoration science was on the other side of this encounter, I was sure. “Park Stewards!” she replied with genuine alacrity. “That program sorta went dormant in COVID-times. We haven’t really fired it back up. You two could be the ones who get it started again!”
I’ve since reviewed management plans, trail building processes, invasive species removal priorities. It’s clear that it will take a coordinated effort of many hands—volunteer hands—to restore local public lands to relatively basic levels of health. The urgency of the language contained in these documents contrasts glaringly with the program’s dormancy, like alarmed shouts into an empty and echoing room.
We walk to Gazzam Lake from home. It’s easy to think of my obligation to the land ending at the legal boundaries of “my property.” It’s also impractical, from an ecological perspective. There is no separation between the half of the ravine we “own” and the half whose owners we’ve never met. Following this logic, a mere fifteen minute walk spans the distance between the ravine and the park’s boundary—there’s no significant separation there, either.
On this walk it’s very clear what land is cared for and what land has been degraded and left to continue its degradation—where a sense of obligation begins and where it ends. But what about those in-between spaces? The ones that link the little bit of habitat that we help to recreate (or fail to create) on our “properties” with our publicly held lands?
What chance does the 400 acre Gazzam Lake have of the kind of health I can imagine for it, that the parks district can plan for it, that is possible, with just a few sets of hands working toward it for a handful of hours each month?
Concluded next week.
