Marsh: With Wild Land, We Must Nurture More Than We Take
In "The Earth Has Been Too Generous," Susan Marsh writes of Nature's healing power. In our interview, she also offers insights into former employer, the US Forest Servic
This summer, one of the most popular names in our stable of writers has a new volume of words—a book of poems assembled as a paean, of sorts, to her favorite muse, Mother Nature.
Susan Marsh, the Jackson Hole-based writer of fiction and non-fiction, is also prima facie evidence that a civil servant can have an impactful life, as an advocate for the things they love, long after they stop wearing the uniform of a land management agency.
Marsh spent decades working for the US Forest Service. Two of her postings as a wilderness-backcountry-nature interpreter who assisted in examining the impacts of public policy decisions on public lands, were at the Custer-Gallatin National Forest based in Bozeman, Montana at "the top" of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem; and the sprawling Bridger-Teton National Forest, headquartered in Jackson, Wyoming, that reaches from the southern end of Yellowstone Park to the Wind River and Wyoming mountain ranges.
Marsh’s new forthcoming book, available soon, is “The Earth Has Been Too Generous.” It can be ordered through Finishing Line Press or through your favorite local bookstore and Amazon. The book will be available as autumn begins but we wanted to tell you about it now. We discussed the book, which included Marsh's observations about the Forest Service and here’s how the conversation went.
Todd Wilkinson: "The Earth Has Been Too Generous"—what an evocative title. How did you arrive at it and how does it speak to the collection of poems within?
SUSAN MARSH: The title comes from a line in the poem “Islands,” which is in the book. The stanza reads:
I want to say
this earth has been too generous
oceans too blue, beaches too white
continents too green, welcoming
each species, including one
that plows all others under
leaving only the most inaccessible
of sea stacks and atolls.
I chose that line as the book title because the collection as a whole is about how generous the earth is with its prodigious and wondrous web of life of which we are a part. When you think about it, life itself is fairly provisional, as the biosphere (land, water, atmosphere) is a thin layer on the surface of a planet whose interior structure is frightening to contemplate (molten or otherwise, it’s an unfriendly place for life, like most of the universe).
So I stand in awe of the fact that this slice of the planet that we call home actually exists with all the elements and circumstances necessary to sustain us. I write out of deep appreciation as well as grief over how we humans have treated this gift.
TW: You are a naturalist who brought that lens to your work with the Forest Service and it seems in your heart of hearts you are a wanderer. What does poetry allow you to do that writing essays for books, MoJo or painting and photography does not?
Susan Marsh: Poet, writer, naturalist and MoJo columnist
MARSH: That’s a good question, and I’ve thought about it quite a lot. Art responds to human sentiments about what matters most to the heart and spirit, and there are different ways to express it—sometimes I am moved to pick up a paintbrush and other times a pen, and I hardly leave the house without a camera. I don’t mean to capture a scene but to help myself remember how it felt to be there.
Writing a poem feels much different to me than writing an essay, in part because of the need to boil things down to their essence. I can ramble and elaborate and give examples when I am writing an essay, and I find all of that very rich. As I think about this right now, it’s getting dark, a white-crowned sparrow and two robins are singing, the bats are coming out, and the trees are dark shadows in the fading light. All of these things and more pour into my awareness.
TW: How do you draw a focus when you're immersed in many different things?
MARSH: So, for this moment, I focus on the bird song, that good-night music of nesting and territorial announcement, and how it has an echoing ring in the quiet of twilight that sounds different to me than the same birdsong at mid-morning. Maybe that’s a metaphor for how a poem comes on different wings than an idea for an essay.
My essays deal with experiences I may want to relate, something someone said or that otherwise occurred to me that I find worth writing about and sharing. Often, the essay has twists and turns that I don’t foresee when I begin, and I have learned to follow them and see where they lead. I’m often am surprised, pleasantly so. This kind of writing helps me know what I am thinking or want to say, and often it expands what I thought I was going to say into something much more.
Poems start with senses and images. Writing them feels more as if the poem is telling me what it has to say than me trying to find it. Many poets have this experience, of feeling as though the poem writes itself, or it comes through them, not from them. There is a poetic state of mind that comes over me when I invite it in.
TW: Do you have a writing routine?
MARSH: I try to start each day with a poem, some of which I write, and some of which I read in one of the daily poem feeds that you can subscribe to online. It’s like a combination meditation and prayer—I listen, then I respond.
TW: Let's return to a theme that appears in many of your books and other writings—that of Nature as retreat and sanctuary. In addition, there is also the world undominated by human imposition that has managed to endure despite our unconscious and deliberate attempts to subdue it. There seems to be a dynamic of landscapes as healing places and places having to contend with wounds. Yes?
MARSH: Yes, places have always been part of me. I found out about human dominion/destruction early on, when the ten-acre woodland where I spent my early childhood fell to the bulldozer. Later, during my first backpack trip into the Glacier Peak Wilderness, we were mostly off trail and rambling among peaks from which you could see nothing but other peaks and deep river valleys. I thought, wow—this is someplace the dozers won’t get to. I was fifteen. Those two experiences—of loss and hope—are probably what sold me on the idea of wilderness.
Even when confronting unspeakable loss, Marsh's forays into the wild country of Greater Yellowstone always open her eyes to promise, hope, discovery and a spirit of Nature he finds comforting. Photo of mule deer courtesy Susan Marsh
TW: You not long ago lost your husband, Don, and occasionally in your column you've written about moving through dark and heavy grieving, finding comfort in Nature.
MARSH: Wild places are healing for me, and they don’t have to be in the deep backcountry. A few months after my husband died, I felt an urge to settle under the shelter of a Douglas fir where I lay on my side as if sleeping, my head inches from a dried up cow pie—I was not the only one to seek shade and respite there. It gave me solace that I needed, after arranging a memorial for Don and having his old friends and family around for a few days. I kept my own feelings to myself as I tried to help them have a good visit and I didn’t realize how much I needed that little time of peace under the tree.
TW: Indeed, you offered thanks to the tree.
MARSH: This tree (I wrote about it in an autumn 2021 MoJo column) is on a section of state land sandwiched between the national park and forest. The state of Wyoming is anxious to see if it can generate a bit more income from these lands than it receives from a few cattle on lease. So there is that old tension again: will the park be able to acquire it? Will it sell to the highest bidder? Will it go the way of my childhood woods or be saved?
This is a question for every far reach of the biosphere. Will we save it or destroy it?
TW: Do you believe we who receive so much from Nature have an obligation to be advocates? Moreover, you are retired from the US Forest Service but you have good friends who still work for the agency in Greater Yellowstone. A major criticism aimed at land management agencies is their reluctance to abide by the precautionary principle and/or a proclivity for favoring human use of landscape over protection of creatures who live there. Your thoughts?
MARSH: The Forest Service is a multiple-use agency. But that doesn’t mean all uses on all acres, and all human uses don’t need to be extractive. The1960 Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act states that the national forests “shall be administered for outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, and wildlife and fish purposes.”
It goes on to define multiple use in more detail, noting that “some land will be used for less than all of the resources” and that the Forest Service must coordinate management “with consideration being given to the relative values of the various resources, and not necessarily the combination of uses that will give the greatest dollar return or the greatest unit output.”
The riot of a zillion petals of arrowhead balsamroot in bloom in Greater Yellowstone. As a sight it commands awe and fills the heart with joy but seldom is such worth considered in the commodity balance sheets of a multiple use land management agency. Susan Marsh knows. For decades, as a career civil servant with the Forest Service, Susan Marsh tried to give voice to "intrinsic values" in Nature and she continues to do so with her prose and poetry. Photo courtesy Susan Marsh.
TW: Many would argue that "multiple use" is a utilitarian concept that is at odds with protecting and preserving the delicate fabric of Nature, that it does not recognize intrinsic values and focuses most on meeting human desires and ambitions to generate income.
MARSH: This law preceded subsequent legislation including the Wilderness Act (1964) and others designed to protect endangered species, clean air and water, and the array of non-commodity resources, but I think they all can fit under its mandate.
TW: While we live in far more enlightened ecological times, thinkers of the past were able to sense the spirit of places and that they needed to be safeguarded.
MARSH: Long before there were national forests, influential conservationists of the early 19th century included artists and hunters who raised concerns about destructive timber cutting, fraudulent homestead claims, damage to soil and watersheds, wildfire, and overhunting.
Artist George Catlin spent the 1830s in the Great Plains that he sought to preserve, along with the people who lived there. In 1847, naturalist George Perkins Marsh lectured on forestry practices that conserved, rather than destroyed, the land. George Bird Grinnell, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederick Law Olmstead added their voices to the groundswell. Creating federal reserves was a huge part of the conservation effort as citizens began to see value in retaining what were left of the open lands.
TW: Besides Yellowstone as the first national park, Greater Yellowstone was home to the first timberland preserve and it was viewed early on as a kind of buffer against outside industrialization of landscape..
MARSH: With Theodore Roosevelt came the first forest reserves, right here in the Greater Yellowstone country. These were meant to protect the public domain, not to exploit it. A century-plus, later, we are still defining what the Forest Service is supposed to be doing.
Prescribed fire is currently in the crosshairs, taking the place of unsightly clearcuts and destruction of salmon spawning habitat in the Northwest (not that those problems have disappeared). In our area, where most of the reasonably usable timber has been cut long ago, it’s rampant recreation and development around the forests that is of greatest concern.
TW: What do you hear from the inside of the agency among people who feel pressured to put human desires, including recreation, first over protecting things like wildlife?
MARSH: The Forest Service is tasked with using most current science to determine where and how resources are to be managed. It hires specialists from soil scientists to landscape architects to help it do this, but what these professionals recommend often flies in the face of what is politically expedient.
With pressure from above and outside, and with their career ambitions on the line, many agency decision makers walk a tightrope between doing what’s right for the resource and responding to the pressure. Some have even confided to me that they didn’t want to make the decision they did, but 'there is only so much I can do.'
"With pressure from above and outside, and with their career ambitions on the line, many agency decision makers walk a tightrope between doing what’s right for the resource and responding to the pressure. Some have even confided to me that they didn’t want to make the decision they did, but “there is only so much I can do.”
TW: That doesn't sound very encouraging if the stewards on the ground are being overruled, the same way wildlife biologists and ecologists were overruled during the toppling of old-growth forests. But today, recreation is a major emerging industry.
MARSH: So, back to your original question. The agency culture is utilitarian. A forest supervisor’s good intentions to do the right thing for "the resource" too often comes up against congressional oversight and funding. Funding is based on meeting “targets” (assigned from above, not what the land can accommodate) and so is the supervisor’s performance evaluation. Targets favor what you can count, not what counts in terms of the health of the land.
In summary, the incentive for agency employees is to be a good team player, go along to get along, tell the boss what he/she wants to hear, and don’t contradict the line officer once a decision has been made, however faulty. It is not to advocate for the precautionary principle.
"Targets favor what you can count, not what counts in terms of the health of the land. In summary, the incentive for agency employees is to be a good team player, go along to get along, tell the boss what he/she wants to hear, and don’t contradict the line officer once a decision has been made, however faulty. It is not to advocate for the precautionary principle."
TW: I think it’s fair to say that both of us think of wilderness not as it is articulated in the bureaucratic language of a law or as an artificial construct of humans, but as a realm where self-willed wild things apart from us can still survive—places today that are exceedingly rare. If you were given a soapbox in the Jackson Town Square and asked to read a poem or give a talk on why wilderness matters, what would you say?
MARSH: I think a poem would be tolerated better than one of my usual rants, so here goes. It's called Asset Protection and is one that appeared in Parks and Points, April 2019.
Asset Protection
by Susan Marsh
Let us secure our assets:
Bright, laundry-day air
Water we can drink
A place to walk and daydream
The rush of water, the quiet pulse
Of the earth and those who share it:
Ants and otters, earwigs and eagles,
Birch and aspen, lichen and seaweed,
Ourselves and one another.
Let us manage our wealth:
Land that can keep giving
To all who come to receive,
Creeks that meander and deepen
Sedge at their margins knitting
Them into place, trout
Dreaming in their shadows,
Forests that mature and decay
And spill their dividends to the future.
They will only grow in value.
TW: Thanks for that. Great poetry, like the message about Nature in your words, does not age but grows more meaningful and enduring across time. Contemporary essay writing calls attention to matters in the here and now, helping to distill what we need to be paying attention to in the moment. What does the poet Susan Marsh say about the universal values of our relationship with non-human Nature? What does the conservationist Susan Marsh say that we need to be paying attention to, or embrace apathy and indifference at our own peril?
MARSH: I think my essays and poetry are about the same thing—this precious life, this precious assemblage of others with whom we share it. The urgent matters of the here and now tend to endure, as it always seems as if we are on the brink and the world is going to hell in a hand basket. But I worry that the poetry we write today may not be able to endure unless we start taking climate change seriously, for if not, who is going to be around to read it?
TW: You start your day by writing poems. I think we all could benefit by reading a few lines of your work every morning. Thanks for all you do.
