Rural Heritage June/July 2025

trees, dragged them into paths eroding into gullies; he spread composted manure on bare soil to help plants anchor the soil in place. As a younger man, he viewed trees as timber, assessing forests in terms of board-feet, but as he got older, he grew to abhor cutting large trees. He viewed past logging activities as sins against the land. The environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s further shaped Dad’s conservation sense. It’s amazing now how startling the stories from then were. Rachel Carson sounded the alarm about birds dying from DDT in her best-selling Silent Spring. Vivid news reels showed rivers so polluted that they caught fire. Environmental concerns ignited a nationwide education movement that became the first Earth Day in 1970. My parents helped organize a teach-in on the University of Arkansas campus for that first Earth Day. Dad drove a team of Belgians pulling a wooden-wheeled wagon into town to highlight this non-polluting transportation mode, and the wagon was the speakers’ platform. That year and for years afterward, Dad organized a neighborhood cleanup along rural roads—littered, in those pre-recycling

days, with not just trash but also old appliances and vehicles, nearly every gulley featuring an informal dumpsite. Dad drove either the team and wagon or the ton-and-a-half 1947 Chevy truck while friends and neighbors picked up whatever litter they could lift. Dad’s environmental ethic peaked in 2024 with putting a conservation easement on the family property to protect the land in perpetuity, which was also my mother’s fondest wish before she died. The easement, with the Northwest Arkansas Land Trust, covers the family property plus an adjacent parcel that my husband and I own, nearly 400 acres altogether. The easement allows for continued residence, recreation, and limited agriculture on less sensitive areas, but ensures that the land will always be preserved from development and rapacious resource use. Protecting the land is something that can be put into practice. The lessons shared here are part of our rural heritage. As populations have shifted to the cities, these “old ways” are fading. But we keep them alive by continuing to live them. In the next issue, another baker’s dozen.

Rural Heritage

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