“Take courage, the earth is all that remains.” [Lakota Noon: The Indian Narratives of Custer’s Defeat, Gregory Michno, 266]
Iron Hawk spoke these words to Little Bear who was saddling up to join the last minutes of fighting at Little Big Horn around 6 in the evening of 25 June, 1876. Almost immediately his horse was shot from under him and he took a bullet in the leg. As for what happened that day, you know. And you know too what lay in store for the Lakota Sioux and their lands. So Iron Hawk’s encouraging phrase—‘the earth is all that remains’ seems curious if not outright ironic. Did he mean that we should take heart that this very earth that nourishes us and all life will endure despite our deaths, despite our brutality [the context of those words flashes up—men shooting, running, dying under a clear blue sky; and miners pouring into the basin to claim its minerals] or even what brutality we have yet to commit? The earth perdures, inviolable, beyond our reach. He did not know that this fecund, sovereign earth has hosted roughly 50 billion species since life began, more than 99% of which have disappeared– “Life today is little more than a rounding error.” Nor was he aware that after 5 major mass-extinctions, we are currently in the 6th, and by the end of the 21st century, half the known species of our age will be gone. But he did sense that the earth has endured much. Lean forward over the balcony of time and look ahead. We’re left with the root vegetables, the genetically modified soy beans, the termites and the roses? Mighty quiet out there.
It’s easy to see Iron Hawk’s problem; he needed to get out more. He lived at the inception of the Age of Machines, although the western United States was on its margin. As he spoke, trains were crossing Russian plains (Anna Karenina is but their best-known victim), English oak forests crafted into ships of the line had been blown to bits in the waters off Cape Trafalgar, coal mines were collapsing in Cornwall and French ladies were drinking tea from monoculture plantations high up Assam hillsides sweetened with cane sugar from Haiti whose landscape was likewise shaped for that crop alone. Iron Hawk seems a little out of the loop. The earth as he knew it was already fading, and fading at an accelerating rate. Today, his particular battlefield (and others like it from Montana to Flanders) is more or less preserved, but a few hundred miles east of where he spoke, another struggle rages; fracking in the Williston Basin extends our touch miles below the surface, deeper into the earth’s past and just as surely further into her future. The historic promise of the earth as well as its potential to nourish and even shelter its denizens are bound up with human activity to a degree Iron Hawk could not have fathomed. And that binding does not bode well for either party, it seems.
Nothing new here. The 19th century English poets saw this clearly—they lived at ground-zero of the Industrial Age. Take Gerard Manley Hopkins. Writing the year after Little Big Horn (which, of course, went unnoticed at his religious house in Wales) in 1877:
“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”
Now our smudge is plastic, our smell is carbon monoxide—then it was iron and coal. Unlike Thoreau, Hopkins didn’t feel we could escape the conditions we were laying down for ourselves. He doubted we could evade the legacy of our tenure on this land, unlike that quintessential American Huck Finn who, perhaps a little prematurely, felt we could always start anew, a little further west:
“But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”
I’m sure Huck had Montana in mind. . . or maybe Idaho.
But let’s go back to poor doomed Iron Hawk and his notion of the resilient earth. A concrete walkway snakes around the battlefield, fenced in a sea of grass, looking but for the monuments much as it looked that day. Whatever disaster occurred there fell not to the earth but to the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapahoe whose way of life is but a memory. The earth carried out its regeneration. As it does elsewhere, apparently. Iron Hawk spoke from religious conviction, but probably not mere speculation. The prairies were managed by fire, and the grass came back time after time following conflagrations that must have been epic. Dylan Thomas puts it this way: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ drives my green age” – there is a vitality we share but neither control nor fully fathom; the earth wants to remain. And to remain doing what it does and has done forever—sponsor life. Weeds sprout through cracks in the sidewalk. Bull-doze a strip in a grassfield around here—bull-doze it right down to the hard clay—and popcorn flowers will leap up on cue. Blade a bit deeper so that water collects and you’ll have choruses of frogs in February.
Hopkins’ poem about our smudge and smell explains, perhaps, why this is: Picking up from where he left off, with the bare soil and the unfeeling foot, he continues:
“And, for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards, springs—“
That ‘and’ at the beginning of the line is no mere conjunction, nor is it a softer way of saying “despite’, as if nature continues to do what it does despite our depredations. That’s true up to a point. But Hopkins was closer to Iron Hawk, I think. His ‘and’ means ‘and it is for this reason that nature is never spent’: nature lights her green fuse because she knows much depends on her. It’s what she does—we can count on it. And that should give us courage.
Consider this—one April day in 1986 a power surge precipitated an accident of apocalyptic proportions at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the city of Pripyat, resulting in the evacuation of 350,000 people and ultimately costing over 3000 lives. Fallout compromised lakes, forests, and grasslands across the Northern Hemisphere; dairy cows were slaughtered in Scotland, fish died in Swedish fjiords. Today, the permanent exclusion zone around the site is roughly 19 miles in diameter, and is expected to remain too highly contaminated for human occupation for tens of thousands of years. Seems like a fairly permanent insult to the earth—yet already the trees creep back, bears roam through empty houses chasing generations of feral cats, wild boar fossick in the tangled and untended gardens—even elk see the zone as a wilderness preserve. Which, in effect, it has become. Remove human activity, and the earth, according to a particularly regional calculus, does her work. “And, for all this, nature is never spent. . .” For al this, indeed. It’s hard to imagine a more grievous test of Iron Elk’s words—blow up a reactor, scatter inconceivable amounts of radiation throughout the region, and run away leaving footprints that glow in the dark. But almost instantly, the grass goes to work.
Whatever challenges we face enhancing riparian zones or restoring upland savanna are slight in comparison. Because we have a singularly potent ally.
