We live in a beautiful leafy neighborhood in Spartanburg. I can see the watershed of the creek we decided to dam in the 1930’s to create a lake out of my office window. When it’s raining, I can hear the water passing by. There’s a major half-marathon and 10k (Merianna is running!) going through the neighborhood this morning under the canopy of oaks, maples, walnuts, and cypresses that line the main street and side streets. I’ve cataloged well over 100 species of various birds, owls, hawks, ospreys, and geese over the past few seasons just in our yard alone (thanks to the incredible Merlin app from Cornell).

Our neighborhood was devastated by Hurricane Helene in the Fall of 2024. We lost countless trees, from solid oaks to the ever-present pines, as we took the main brunt of the storm early that September morning. Duncan Park looks different today than it did in May 2024. Houses are still being rebuilt and remodeled, and you’ll occasionally see a Lorax-like tree stump in someone’s yard as a reminder of that event.

Yet, we’ve bounced back as both humans and vegetal life in this little corner of Spartanburg, known for its shaded streets and great neighborhood vibes.

Still, there was something almost liturgical about the sound of chainsaws echoing across our street yesterday. The sound, vibration, and smell of fresh pine and oak death wasn’t sacred in any comforting sense, but ritualistic all the same. The grinding repetition began sometime after breakfast when I got home from taking our youngest to school and continued for hours into the late afternoon across the street from our house. One tree came down, then another, then another. Limbs crashed against the earth with that strange combination of violence and finality that only accompanies the falling of something that has been alive longer than many of the people watching it.

And I found myself asking a question I suspect many people quietly carry but rarely voice aloud...

Why do we cut down trees in our yards?

Of course, there are practical answers. Some trees are “diseased.” Some threaten roofs or foundations. Some people fear storms after Helene. To my disdain, insurance companies often encourage removals. Developers prefer clean lines and open lots for efficiency’s sake. Our non-native but oddly prized green crabgrass and Bermuda grass grow more easily in uninterrupted sunlight. Leaves clog gutters while roots “disturb” sidewalks.

Trees are messy in the same way human life is.

But standing there yesterday listening to chainsaws tear through our neighborhood canopy, I realized the practical explanations only explain part of the story.

What struck me most was how normal it all seemed.

No one gathered in mourning. There wasn’t any paused traffic as we do for human funeral processions here in the Carolinas. No one seemed to lower their voice. The removals happened with the ordinary efficiency of suburban maintenance. By dinner, the trunks were already sectioned into neat cylinders. The canopy that had filtered afternoon light onto that street for decades was simply... gone.

And perhaps that is the deeper question beneath the ecological one. Not merely why we cut down trees, but why we have become so accustomed to their disappearance.

Obviously, I have been thinking a great deal lately about attention as an ecological practice with my PhD work. About perception itself as a moral and spiritual act. Thomas Berry often wrote that the ecological crisis is fundamentally a crisis of relationship. I increasingly think it is also a crisis of perception. We do not destroy what we genuinely perceive as alive within the horizon of our own existence. We destroy what has become background.

A mature oak becomes “shade,” while a maple becomes “yard debris.” A stand of pines becomes “property value” or timber assets to eventually “harvest” and sell. The tree ceases to appear as a living participant in the world and instead becomes an object, obstacle, or commodity within a human-centered landscape.

This is not usually cruelty. That would almost be easier to confront. It is something quieter, perhaps more unsettling... indifference produced by habit.

Growing up in South Carolina, trees have always been there as part of my history and perception. Longleaf pines along interstates and highways, and dirt roads of Marion County. Water oaks leaning over parking lots in Hilton Head. Pecans in old yards all over Florence. Sweetgums dropping those impossible spiked balls that turn into great pretend objects, from grenades to baseballs for children growing up in Latta every autumn. The ubiquitous Sabal Palm is on our state flag and lines our Atlantic coast (and a few yards here in Spartanburg). Trees formed the architecture of memory itself. You measured neighborhoods by them and summers by them. Their shade altered entire emotional geographies. Even now, when I think about childhood, I often remember trees before I remember buildings or even fellow humans.

I can see the Sweetgum in my grandparents’ backyard in Temperance Hill in my mind.

Yesterday’s chainsaw chorus and dirge also reminded me how physically visceral tree removal feels. The sound really bypasses abstraction. You feel it in your chest. The vibrations travel through walls and windows with an alarming thud when a solid and alive oak lands suddenly. It unsettles birds, and dogs bark differently. Even the light changes almost immediately once a canopy disappears. A yard that felt sheltered in the morning suddenly feels exposed by afternoon.

There is a phenomenology to tree loss that environmental discourse often misses. We talk about carbon sequestration, heat islands, runoff mitigation, biodiversity, and property values. All of those matter, obviously. But there is also the immediate lived experience of absence. A street feels different when older trees disappear. The scale of things changes. Time itself feels altered. Older trees bring a sense of temporal depth to neighborhoods. They silently witness generations.

Edith Stein’s work on empathy comes to mind, especially her insistence that perception is never neutral. To perceive another being as alive requires a kind of openness that exceeds utility. Perhaps ecological intentionality begins precisely there... in learning again how to perceive the more-than-human world not as scenery or resource but as neighbor.

That sounds overly romantic to some, I know. And yet anyone who has sat quietly beneath a mature tree shortly before a Carolina summer thunderstorm probably already understands this intuitively. Trees shape consciousness. They alter acoustics, humidity, imagination, memory, and even prayer. They are not passive decorations around human life. They participate in the worlds we inhabit.

Which returns me to yesterday.

I do not know why those particular trees were cut down. Maybe there were entirely legitimate reasons (the house was recently purchased, and I haven’t met our incoming neighbors yet). Maybe the owners had worried about storm damage, roots, or decay. I’m not interested in condemning neighbors from across the street by any means.

But I do think the question matters.

Because every removed tree reveals something about how we imagine our relationship to place. Whether a yard is merely owned space or a shared habitat. Whether shade is an inconvenience or a gift. Whether we understand ourselves as managers, stewards of landscapes, or participants in living ecologies.

Late yesterday evening (after the chainsaws finally stopped), the street became strangely quiet. Too quiet. The birds had relocated somewhere else for the night. The remaining trees stood at odd new angles against the sky because the canopy had been interrupted. I walked outside after dinner and instinctively looked toward the gap where branches had been that morning.

And for a moment, Duncan Park felt just a little less alive.

There’s a drought here in South Carolina. We had rain this morning, which is helpful, but it’s going to take exceptional spring rainfall in these remaining few weeks before summer to get us back to baseline. You can see it in Lawson’s Fork if you know where to look... the watermarks on the exposed limestone shelves rising above the current surface, the way the shoals are quieter than they should be in early May, the vegetation at the margins leaning inward toward the diminished channel. Spartanburg Water has already asked customers to conserve in parts of the county served by our watershed (over towards Greenville) rather than our reservoirs and lakes. The language of scarcity is in the air, which is itself drier than it ought to be.

Into this particular spring comes news that the NorthMark data center going up on South Pine Street, the former Kohler site, will use somewhere between 460,000 and 581,000 gallons of water per day, according to reporting from The Post and Courier’s Christian Boschult this morning. That wasn’t a typo. I had to double-check myself. That upper figure, the maximum daily draw, is what you get on the hottest days, when the servers are working hardest, and the cooling towers are cycling fastest... which is to say, the days when the rest of us are also watering gardens and running taps and watching our lawns go brown. Spartanburg Water’s CEO, Guy Boyle, framed it carefully that the average draw represents between 1.8 and 2.3 percent of current daily demand, and since the current system is operating at only about a third of its maximum capacity, the data center’s share works out to roughly 0.6 percent of what the infrastructure could “theoretically” handle. These are the numbers that are meant to be reassuring, after all.

What the reassuring numbers don’t carry is that 86 percent of that water will not return to the watershed. It will evaporate from the cooling towers as vapor and become part of the atmosphere, part of whatever the weather does next, no longer available to the Catawba-Wateree system, to Lawson’s Fork, Pacolet River, or to the small aquifers beneath the Piedmont clay. Only the remaining 14 percent returns as effluent, which is treated and discharged into the municipal wastewater system... 65,800 gallons per day (if the estimates hold). The rest is, in the literal sense, gone.

Yesterday, before Boschult’s article, NorthMark published a statement to their Spartanburg neighbors. It is a careful document, written in the reassuring register that large capital projects tend to adopt when local scrutiny is rising. It mentions that the facility operates under the same municipal water permit as the prior Kohler plant, a sentence designed to anchor the project to something familiar, to something the county already absorbed without crisis and provided jobs for our community. What the sentence cannot tell you is that the Kohler plant, making plumbing fixtures, had a different relationship to water than a server farm does. Kohler used water in manufacturing processes that involved discharge and recovery, while a cooling-tower operation that is 86 percent evaporative is a different kind of draw on the hydrological commons. The permit is the same, but the hydrology is not.

I want to be careful here because I have no interest in pretending the numbers are catastrophic when the utility’s own CEO says they aren’t. Spartanburg Water has substantial capacity. The treatment infrastructure appears adequate. The PFAS testing requirement and third-party discharge monitoring are the kinds of conditions a community should insist on, and they appear to be in place. None of this is the story of a company doing something illegal, or even particularly unusual by industry standards. Cooling towers that evaporate the majority of their draw are standard practice. This is how data centers work.

What I keep returning to is the concept of evaporation itself... the sheer scale of what leaves the watershed and does not return. On its worst day, this single facility will send something approaching the daily water use of 2,000 homes upward into the South Carolina sky. In May. During a severe drought. Under conditions where the state is asking voluntary conservation from every other customer, with the word “voluntary” doing a great deal of work, as it always does in these situations.

The Catawba-Wateree is already one of the most heavily managed river systems in the southeastern United States, a staircase of reservoirs from the North Carolina mountains down through the Piedmont, each one mediating between agricultural demand, municipal demand, industrial demand, recreational use, and the increasingly erratic precipitation patterns that attend a warming climate. Lawson’s Fork feeds into that system, carrying the memory of the Piedmont’s watersheds downstream. The Cherokee and Catawba people understood this creek as part of a living network that required ongoing attention and care... their land management practices along these banks were oriented around long-term reciprocity with the watershed rather than extraction from it. On the contrary, we have mostly organized ourselves differently.

I am not arguing that the data center should not exist, or that Spartanburg should have declined the tax revenue (projected at something like $15 million per year by 2029, which is genuinely significant for a county with real school and roadwork funding needs). These are genuinely complicated tradeoffs, and the people making them are not villains. What I am saying is that 86 percent evaporation during a drought is a kind of relationship with a watershed, whether or not we name it as such.

Water that rises into the atmosphere above South Pine Street was, the day before, rain that fell somewhere upstream... rain that ran off the red clay hills into creeks and tributaries that moved through the shoals and riffles I walk along in the mornings, that was drawn up through the roots of the trees along the bank. It was part of a cycle. After the cooling towers, it is part of a different cycle, or no particular cycle at all if you take the intended metaphor of “the cloud” as data centers are being marketed to heart.

The permit is the same. The water is not.

For weeks, the black walnut in the backyard had not leafed out. Everything else had started to erupt in leaves, with the oaks coming first, then the dogwoods, the red maples, the tulip poplars climbing the slope behind the fence. The cedars in our yard shed their winter coat (lots of sweeping of our porches attest to this). Even the vile Bradford pears planted in earnest around Spartanburg by do-gooders and lawn contractors supplied from Lowe’s bloomed and lost their bloom (thankfully). The redbuds made their brief argument. But the walnut stood in its own calendar (like our youngest daughter), unbothered by what the rest of the yard was doing, and if you didn’t know better, you might have thought it wasn’t going to bloom again.

This is one of the things the Upstate of South Carolina teaches me every year that I’ve lived here (if you live here long enough to pay the kind of attention it asks for, you’ll know). The season doesn’t move as a single event. It moves in layers, and the layers don’t agree with each other. April here is not the arrival of spring so much as the negotiation of it... a warm week followed by a cold one, the redbuds catching a late frost, the insects starting up and then going quiet. Leaves still piled up by those of us not barbaric enough to rake. And underneath all of that, the black walnut was doing its own calculation, holding its own new leaves in reserve while the rest of the canopy committed. It had reasons, I suppose. The last frost date in the Piedmont is a moving target, and the walnut has been tracking it for longer than any of us has been alive.

There is a particular quality to May light in the Upstate that I keep trying to describe and keep getting wrong. Growing up in the Pee Dee region, I learned a different light entirely... coastal plain light, which carries its heavy humidity visibly, which softens edges and holds the morning in a kind of suspension. In the Lowcountry, the air is a presence in itself and plays a key role in how you perceive the day and night. It thickens over the blackwater rivers, hangs in the long leaf pine stands, wraps the Spanish moss until the moss seems to be breathing. You don’t so much see the Pee Dee landscape as you receive it through a medium that is always slightly opaque, always slightly (or very) warm, the way you might perceive something through water that is almost but not quite clear. The fog that settles over the mysterious Carolina bays surrounding my hometown before dawn is not merely weather. It is a condition of perception, a way the landscape announces that looking here requires patience with obscurity.

The Upstate doesn’t offer such a cushion. This light has angles, as I realized as a freshman at Wofford College, with a dorm room window facing east. It comes over the Blue Ridge foothills with a directness that the piedmont clay seems to answer... that red-orange earth, dense and iron-laden in a way the sandy Pee Dee soils and heavy top soil never are, holds the morning light differently, gives it back warm and specific. The Pee Dee soils are pale and acid, leached by rain that moves quickly through sand toward a water table that is never far below your feet. You can dig two feet almost anywhere in the Lowcountry and find moisture. The land there is in constant negotiation with water, which is why the bald cypress and the tupelo grow with their feet submerged, why the pocosins hold their dark water for months, and why the whole ecology is organized around the premise that water is close and the ground is only provisionally dry. In the Upstate, the red clay holds its structure differently. It is stubborn, slow to drain, and prone to cracking in August when the rain stops. This spring has been much drier than usual, with a drought settling into Spartanburg County in a quiet march that the recent rains only partially addressed. The things that grow here have to push through something denser, which may be part of why they arrive later, why the walnut in particular takes its time.

In the early mornings, the May light falls through the gap in the trees along the back fence with a clarity that feels like attention rather than illumination. You notice things in it that you don’t notice in summer, when the canopy closes, and the air thickens and the whole landscape retreats into a kind of green privacy. The Pee Dee’s summer is a disappearance into humidity. You stop seeing the landscape clearly and start moving through it by texture, heat, and proximity to finding shade or shelter from afternoon thunderstorms. The Upstate’s summer is a different kind of concealment… almost more architectural... the hardwood canopy simply closes over everything and the filtered light underneath loses its angles and goes green and general. May in the Upstate is also the last month in which the landscape is still visibly organized, still showing you how it works, before the heat covers everything and you have to take it on faith.

What I notice in May here that I didn’t have to notice growing up is the sourwood beginning to distinguish itself from the other understory trees by its particular leaf shape, narrow and finely toothed, and the way the chestnut oaks on the rocky slopes are slower than the willow oaks in the low places. The fireflies of my youth in the Pee Dee came in enormous, synchronizing pulses, a coastal plain phenomenon tied to flat terrain and thick, humid air, a display so total it reorganized your sense of what a corn, tobacco, or peanut field was. The fireflies in the Upstate are more individual but still present, scattered across a hillier darkness, blinking in patterns that don’t resolve into the same collective rhythm. It is a different kind of attention the Upstate asks for at night... not the overwhelm of the Pee Dee’s simultaneous pulse, but something more patient, more like tracking or following a single light, then another, and then losing both in the treeline.

For weeks, I could see the shape of the walnut clearly... the architecture of the branching, the slight asymmetry, the branch that reaches further south than the others, as though it had learned something about sunlight that the other branches hadn’t yet. I knew the structure would eventually be hidden. The leaves would come in waves, the compound fronds opening outward from each bud in sequence, and by July, nothing would be visible but canopy. But while the “skeleton” as may be considered (perhaps unwisely) was still exposed, the light that fell through it onto the ground was detailed in a way it won’t be again until November.

What the walnut was also doing, below the surface, is more difficult to see but no less organized. The roots extend well past the dripline, releasing juglone into the soil... a compound that inhibits the germination and growth of a long list of plants that would otherwise compete for light and moisture. This is sometimes described as allelopathy, as though it were a kind of aggression, but I’m not sure that framing serves the tree or any tree doing similar things. The walnut is reorganizing the terms of its neighborhood, slowly and continuously, without announcement, in a way that reflects a long series of calculations about what kind of community it can thrive in, much like I tend our gardens. Those calculations include droughts like this one, and storms worse than drought... Hurricane Helene came through in 2024, and the walnut stood through it, the way it has stood through every wet and dry season this particular slope has offered, adjusting its chemistry, canopy, and root spread to whatever the year required. The plants that grow near a walnut have either adapted to juglone or learned to give it space. The soil remembers the tree’s decisions. What the tree remembers is harder to say, but I don’t think the question is as strange as it sounds.

The French philosopher Raymond Ruyer called this kind of self-organizing purposiveness “neofinalism”... the idea that living forms are not merely subject to chemical processes but are in some genuine sense the authors of them, that an organism surveys its own form from the inside in a way that has no spatial equivalent, no outside perspective from which to observe itself. The walnut releasing juglone, timing its leafing to the last reliable frost, shedding bark in the drought... these are not mechanisms running on the tree but expressions of what the tree, in Ruyer’s sense, already knows about itself and its situation. A wonderful distinction, and I think Ruyer is right. A mechanism can be interrupted. What the walnut is doing is more like memory made active, a long argument with its own conditions that nothing from the outside fully determines.

The Upstate is not a landscape that announces itself. The mountains that shape the region’s weather, light, and micro-climate are just over the line into North Carolina... you can clearly see the Blue Ridge from certain areas here in Spartanburg on clear days, as I do when I take our children to school on Union Street, but they don’t necessarily dominate the view. The rivers here run brown with tannins from the piedmont clay, and they move through terrain that is neither flat nor dramatically elevated, just undulating in a way that conceals its own organization from anyone moving through it quickly. You have to slow down. You have to develop the kind of attention the walnut practices... patient, cumulative, tracking the long-term pattern of temperature, soil chemistry, and available light rather than any single dramatic event.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that perception is not something we do to the world but something we do with it... that the body and its environment are caught up in each other in ways that precede any deliberate act of looking. I think about this in May in the Upstate, when the light is doing something particular and the whole landscape is in a state of visible process rather than settled appearance. Perception here is a matter of learning the calendar the landscape is keeping, which is a different calendar than the one on the wall and which has as much to do with juglone concentration, frost probability, and the angle of morning light as it does with dates. I grew up learning one version of that calendar. I am still, after years in the Piedmont, learning another. Quarter 2 isn’t so scary anymore.

The leaves did come. I was sitting beside the walnut on this Tuesday morning in early May, upper sixties, blue sky, low humidity, the kind of weather we say we love because it fits our idea of what a morning should feel like, and the compound fronds had opened... bright green, almost translucent in the direct light, the leaflets still soft enough that they moved individually in the breeze coming through the yard. The honeybees had found the privet blooming along the fence and were working through it with their characteristic single-mindedness, indifferent to drought or season or the particular quality of the light. And there, at the base of the trunk where I usually sit and visit and attend (and be attended by) the walnut, was a piece of bark. A substantial piece, deeply furrowed, gray-brown, with a little lichen beginning its slow work on one edge. I don’t know when it fell or what loosened it... whether it was the wind, or the drought contracting the outer layers, or simply the tree’s ongoing process of shedding what it no longer needs. I picked it up and held it for a while, the way you hold something you weren’t expecting to receive. The texture was almost geological, more like a piece of eroded ridge than something that had been alive. Layers much like my beloved archaeological digs at Dura Europos or Nineveh. And I thought about what the tree had gone through to produce that texture, what decades of weather and drought and storm had compressed into that particular surface, and what it meant that the tree had left it there in my sitting spot on a morning when I happened to be paying attention. I don’t want to make too much of it. But I don’t want to make too little of it either. That is, I think, what the walnut keeps teaching... that perception requires us to stay in the register of what is actually happening, which is always more than our categories for it, and to receive what is offered without insisting on knowing in advance what it means.

That gift from the walnut now has a sacred place on my desk, and I just smiled as I stole a glance at it while typing this.

Further Reading

Raymond Ruyer, Neofinalism (1952; translated by Anika Skuli Reuter, University of Minnesota Press, 2016). The source of the “neofinalism” argument in my post here... can be very dense for a lay audience, but it’s worth your effort, especially the chapters on organic surveys and the inside of form.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945; translated by Donald Landes, Routledge, 2012). The philosophical ground beneath everything here is about bodies, environments, and the priority of perception.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013). The best existing model for writing about plant intelligence in an incredible way that neither oversimplifies nor overclaims.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Pantheon, 1996). On perception, landscape, and what it costs us to stop attending to the more-than-human world.

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907; translated by Arthur Mitchell, Dover, 1998). For the argument about duration and living form that runs underneath Ruyer (which it inspired, as it does my own work).

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896; translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, Zone Books, 1988). Bergson on memory as something the body carries rather than the mind stores... relevant to what the walnut “remembers.”

Robert Tulecke, “Juglone: Autotoxin of Black Walnut,” Phytochemistry (various editions). For the actual chemistry behind the allelopathy claims, if you want to go further down that particular root.

Douglas W. Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens (Timber Press, 2007). Practical and perceptual at once... good on the community logic of native trees, including walnut, in Piedmont landscapes.

This long-form paper, titled “Attention as Ecological Practice: AI Data Centers and the Limits of the Anthropocene,” starts close to home… literally. A $2.8 billion computing facility is going up on South Pine Street in Spartanburg, in the shell of an old Kohler plant. A few miles away, a different $3 billion proposal, Project Spero, named after South Carolina’s state motto, drew hundreds of residents to County Council chambers in opposition before the developer withdrew. A third site remains in the works.

The argument I’m making is that the crisis these proposals represent isn’t only an energy and water problem (though it is that). It’s a crisis of ecological perception, and the way the promotional apparatus around data center development is specifically designed to make planetary costs invisible while foregrounding jobs, tax revenue, and American competitiveness. The Tyger River watershed, the regional grid’s carbon intensity, the cumulative water withdrawals from the Broad River basin… none of that appears in a Governor’s press release.

Drawing on Yves Citton’s account of attention as a distributed, politically structured field, alongside Francis’s Laudate Deum, Donna Haraway’s contact zone concept, and Merleau-Ponty’s embodied perception, I try to make the case that what happened in those County Council chambers, a community briefly and collectively organizing its attention against a machinery designed to prevent exactly that noticing, points toward something worth taking seriously. Not as a substitute for structural and regulatory transformation, but as its necessary condition.

You can’t protect what you can’t see. The paper tries to think through what it would take to keep these systems visible before decisions are made rather than after.

Attention As Ecological Practice Ai Data Centers And The Limits Of The Anthropocene

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I noticed a spicebush at the edge of the trail that you would walk past without noticing if you were moving at the pace most of us move. It is not large. It does not announce itself. But in late April in the South Carolina Piedmont, Lindera benzoin is already fully leafed and carrying its small yellow-green flower clusters before most of the canopy has committed to anything, and if you stop long enough to look at it, something accumulates that is difficult to name without either flattening it or overstating it. The shrub is doing something. Not responding to stimuli or executing a program, but it’s doing something by pressing its particular form of life into the available light with a specificity that belongs to it and not to the general category of plants-in-spring.

This is the thing the Piedmont forest keeps trying to tell us if we slow down enough to hear it. Instead of a lesson, or a moral, it’s something more like a disclosure, the way a place reveals itself when you stay with it rather than pass through it.

The understory moves first. While the oaks and tulip poplars are still reading the light and the soil temperature, still holding their own counsel about whether spring has actually arrived, the spicebush and the serviceberry and the redbud have already made their commitment. Amelanchier arborea, the serviceberry, blooms so early and so briefly that most people miss it entirely, those white flowers appearing in the gray weeks before the canopy leafs out, pollinated and gone before the forest fills in above. Bloodroot pushes through the leaf litter with its flower already formed inside a curled leaf, carrying its own opening within it, the whole sequence of emergence already organized from within before any of it is visible from outside. There is something worth pausing on in that, in the way the bloodroot’s development is not assembled from the outside in but expressed from the inside out, oriented toward a form it is already, in some sense, becoming.

By the time the tulip poplars are fully committed, the forest has become something different from what it was in March. Liriodendron tulipifera is a signature tree of the Piedmont canopy, the one that tells you where you are, and in late April those big distinctive leaves are unfurling with a kind of urgency that the botanists will tell you is about light capture and competition and the math and physics of photosynthesis. All of that is certainly true. But something is also happening that the math of photosynthesis does not quite account for, which is that each tulip poplar is doing this in a way that is recognizably its own, asserting its form into the space available to it in the way that a century of growth on that particular slope with that particular soil and aspect and water table has made possible. The tree is definitely not a mechanism running a program. It is a history organizing itself forward into a present, carrying everything it has been into everything it is becoming by eating light and transferring that to energy.

Richard Powers understood something about this in The Overstory, which is the rare novel that manages to take trees seriously as something more than scenery without losing the reader in abstraction. What his characters keep discovering, each in their own way and often too late, is that the forest has been communicating all along, that what they took for silence or indifference was actually a form of expression they had not learned to receive. The mycorrhizal networks, the chemical signaling, the way a chestnut oak on a dry ridge holds its leaves longer into autumn than the same species in a wetter hollow... none of this is metaphor. It is the forest being specifically, irreducibly itself, and the question the novel keeps asking is whether we have the perceptual equipment to receive it.

That question isn’t rhetorical. There are permits being processed right now in the Carolina Piedmont for data center infrastructure that will draw from the same aquifer and the same electrical grid that the forest depends on, developments that are moving forward because the people making the decisions have access to impact assessments and growth projections and demand forecasts, and all of those are real, and none of them requires anyone to have spent twenty minutes watching a spicebush in April. The failure is not primarily a failure of regulation, though it may become that too. It is a failure of attention, a trained incapacity to receive what the living system actually discloses when you stand still long enough for it to disclose anything.

The sourwood will bloom in July, those long racemes of white flowers that make the tree look like it is trailing something behind it, and the bees in the Piedmont know exactly what to do with that, and the sourwood honey is a consequence of a relationship that has been developing between Oxydendrum arboreum and its pollinators for longer than the category of management has existed. By late October the sourwood leaves will be the deepest red in the forest, a red that seems almost aggressive in its specificity, as if the tree is insisting on being seen before the winter closes in.

This is what the forest keeps doing, in every season and at every scale from the bloodroot’s single spring flower to the tulip poplar’s century of canopy presence and insisting on its own form of life, pressing its own particular interiority into the world, being, as precisely and as persistently as the conditions allow, itself.

The philosophical name for this is what I call ecological intentionality in my work as an idea that what we call interiority is not a property belonging exclusively to human consciousness but a structural feature of living form as such, the way organisms participate in and disclose meaningful worlds through their own modes of growth and activity. But you do not need the philosophical name to feel the weight of what the spicebush is doing at the edge of the trail. You need to stop, and stay stopped, and let attention do what attention does when it is patient enough... which is to receive, rather than project, what is genuinely there.

The forest has been disclosing itself for a long time. The question is whether we are learning to listen.

Thanks to The Walking Spartan for the inspiration to write this.

On the morning of February 22nd, Dolores Dalton was trying to get to church.

She was 75 years old, a faithful Catholic, a hairdresser by trade, a woman whose obituary describes as someone who “never met a stranger.” She had attended St. Paul the Apostle on East Main Street here in Spartanburg for fifteen years. She parked, she stepped out, she crossed East Main Street, with its four lanes and a 25 miles per hour speed limit sign (something closer to 40 in practice), when an SUV traveling westbound hit her. She died at the hospital at 8:28 that morning.

The driver was also on their way to church.

Two people, headed toward the same general hope on a Sunday morning, separated by a road that was designed, not accidentally, not through indifference exactly, but through a specific philosophy of space, to move cars as fast as possible through the kind of urban fabric that makes a city worth living in. The road didn’t just fail Dolores Dalton. It failed the driver, too. It failed everyone who has to calculate, every time they step off a curb, whether the gap is wide enough, the cars slow enough, the morning light bright enough to make a crossing across a third of a mile of uninterrupted asphalt. There are no crosswalks on that stretch. The South Carolina Department of Transportation is now proposing to change all of that.

The proposal is called a “road diet,” which I think is an oddly metabolic term for what is really a philosophical reorientation. Between Converse Street and East St. John Street, SCDOT wants to reduce East Main from four to two lanes, with a center turn lane, bike lanes on both sides, and crosswalks. The project would take place in coordination with already-scheduled repaving work, so there would be no additional footprint or cost, just a different answer to the question of what a road is for.

The opposition, which showed up at the April public meeting and will likely show up again before this is done, is easy to predict from congestion, inconvenience, the fear that a slower East Main will push traffic into Converse Heights, and the vague sense that something is being taken away. These concerns are understandable, and they deserve honest engagement. But the data on road diets is, at this point, not particularly contested. SCDOT’s own spokesperson pointed to a comparable project on Augusta Road in Greenville that saw a 42% reduction in crashes. The Federal Highway Administration has found reductions between 19 and 52 percent, depending on the corridor. What feels counterintuitive turns out to be basic physics, since when a road has excess capacity, drivers fill it. Widen a lane, and people accelerate or likewise narrow it, and they slow down… not because they’ve been moralized at but because the perceptual field has changed.

Back to my ongoing point about humans' perceptual field!

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (bear with me here, because this is actually practical) argued that perception is not a camera recording a fixed external world. It is a bodily orientation toward possibility. We don’t just see a chair, we see a place to sit. We don’t just see a door, we see an opening. And crucially, we don’t just see a road, we see an invitation to move at a certain speed, with a certain kind of attention, past a certain kind of environment. A four-lane arterial invites one mode of being. It says that you are a vehicle. Move. What is beside you is not necessarily your concern.

This isn’t a metaphor, it’s phenomenology applied to transportation and civic engineering. The width of a lane, the number of lanes, the presence or absence of a median, the proximity of sidewalks to moving cars… these aren’t neutral choices about infrastructure. They are decisions about what kind of creatures we assume people to be, what relationships we assume they are capable of, and what they will notice as they move through space. A road built for maximum throughput at 40 mph does not ask you to see the person on the sidewalk as someone who might need to cross. It asks you to see the red light ahead, the gap in traffic, and the time you’re going to be late.

The city of Spartanburg and SCDOT have been trying to think this through, in fits and starts, for years. The Hub City Hopper, Denny’s Tower, the walking trails along Lawson’s Fork and out to Glendale Shoals, and the ones here in Duncan Park are fragments of a different vision and a different set of assumptions about what the body moving through a city might want to encounter. The road diet on East Main is, in this sense, not just a safety measure. It is a tentative argument about perception. It is the city saying, “Here is a stretch of road where we want to invite a different kind of attention.”

There is something worth noticing about the specific geography of this proposal. The stretch between Converse Street and East St. John runs along the edge of what you might call the contested urban margin, or the zone where downtown’s institutional density begins to give way to older residential neighborhoods, where churches sit across from parking lots, and where foot traffic is not hypothetical but actual. St. Paul, First Baptist, and First Presbyterian are right there (and our beloved Venus Pie). So is the Denny’s Tower, and Converse University is just up the road as well as the shops on East Main. People walk here. People cross here. They do so because the geography of their lives requires it, not because a planner has designated it “pedestrian-friendly.”

What the current road says to those people, functionally, is that you are tolerated, not designed for. The four-lane configuration is a legacy of when East Main served as a U.S. highway, before St. John Street took over that function. The road is overbuilt for what it currently does as it carries traffic volume that could be handled by two lanes, but it carries that volume at a speed and with a perceptual field that treats the whole corridor as a through-road rather than as a place. That’s a huge difference.

I also want to say something about opposition to projects like this, because I think there’s something real underneath the noise about congestion. People who push back on road diets are not, in most cases, simply in love with cars or indifferent to safety. They are often expressing something more like a territorial anxiety or a fear that change is being imposed on a place they understand and that the understanding they’ve built up, the mental map they carry of how to move through this city, is being invalidated without their consent.

That is a real thing and I understand that view. I think it deserves acknowledgment. And it also needs to be pointed out that territorial anxiety is largely a product of the fact that we built and then rebuilt this city (like so many in the mid 20th century as car culture dominated) around a set of perceptual assumptions that centered the driver of vehicles, and any adjustment to those assumptions will feel, to people whose habits formed within them, like a loss. It is not a loss in any objective sense. The evidence is clear that road diets reduce crashes, do not meaningfully reduce traffic capacity on over-built corridors, and tend to increase the economic vitality of the adjacent urban fabric. But, it feels like a loss because it shifts who the street is oriented toward, and that shift is perceptible even when it can’t quite be articulated.

Dolores Dalton’s death is, in this light, not an exception or an anomaly. It is the kind of outcome that the current perceptual field makes probable. The coroner’s report noted that the driver simply didn’t see her in time. The road was designed for a speed at which seeing and responding are not the same thing.

I live on the East Side and drive East Main regularly as I also attend church there with my family. I have noticed what Officer Parris pointed out at the public meeting about the proposal regarding the width of that road, which invites a speed that the posted limit doesn’t authorize. It seems like a through-corridor even when you’re trying to move through it at residential pace. The buildings and parking lots slip by in a kind of peripheral blur and the sidewalks feel like afterthoughts as they often do on Union or Pine Streets.

After a road diet, that would change. Not because the city has passed a law requiring you to pay attention, but because the geometry of attention would be different. The field of movement would be narrower, and narrower fields of movement produce slower speeds, which produce more time for the eye to settle on what is beside and ahead, which produces the perceptual conditions in which a person crossing a street is visible as a person crossing a street and not as an obstacle in a threshold zone.

This is what Strong Towns calls human-scale infrastructure or what Merleau-Ponty would call the perceptual conditions for an encounter with the other. What I’d just call a street you can actually be on.

I am aware that “the road diet is philosophically sound” is not, by itself, a complete argument for anyone who commutes across Converse Street every morning and is worried about an extra four minutes in traffic. So I’ll just say this plainly… the evidence from comparable projects shows that the traffic concerns are mostly unfounded. The Augusta Road diet in Greenville reduced crashes by 42% without triggering the congestion spiral opponents predicted. Research on similar corridors across the country consistently shows that road diets on overbuilt urban arterials maintain traffic throughput within a few percentage points of previous levels while dramatically improving safety metrics. The people who say “no one bikes in Spartanburg” have not, I think, been paying attention or at least on the Rail Trail or here on the East Side of Spartanburg lately. More importantly, the reason bike infrastructure often looks empty is that its absence has selected out the population of people who would use it. Infrastructure precedes demand in this domain, not the other way around.

I don’t know what Dolores Dalton saw in the moment she stepped off the curb on a Sunday morning in February, the air still cold, the church a few hundred feet across the width of a road that was built to be something different from what it is now surrounded by. I don’t know whether she looked both ways, whether she tried to use a crosswalk that wasn’t there, or whether a gap in traffic closed faster than she anticipated.

What I do know is that the city manager called a third of a mile without a crosswalk “a concern,” and that the road diet would add crosswalks and a center refuge, reducing by seventeen feet the distance a pedestrian has to cross while navigating moving traffic. I know that another pedestrian death on that corridor in that circumstance is, after this summer, less probable than it was last February. I know that probability is not guarantee, and that guarantee is not the point.

The point is that a road is an argument about who the city is for. East Main’s argument, until now, has been for fast-moving cars, just as Pine Street’s feels like fast-moving tanker trucks. The proposed revision says that the argument would also be for people moving slowly, crossing, cycling, and attending church on a Sunday morning.

That is not a radical argument. It’s a modest one. It is exactly the kind of small reorientation, the kind that gets approved at a public meeting with a handful of residents and a DOT spokesman and a police officer who has driven that road long enough to see what it does, that gradually changes the perceptual field of a city, the assumptions that accumulate in the body as it learns to move through a place, the possibilities the street seems to hold.

I hope it goes through for Dolores and all of Spartanburg.

Sources & Further Reading

Local reporting

• “A Section of East Main Street in Spartanburg Will See a Road Diet.” Walking Spartan (Substack), April 2026. — Highly recommended, especially the parking-protected bike lane argument.

• “Road Diet Proposed for Portion of E. Main Street in Spartanburg.” WSPA 7News, April 2026.

• “Spartanburg Residents Weigh In on Proposed East Main Street ‘Road Diet’.” WSPA 7News / AOL News, April 17, 2026.

• “Spartanburg Road Diet Plan Aims to Improve Safety on East Main Street.” FOX Carolina, April 17, 2026.

• “SCDOT Public Invited to Learn More About Proposed Road Diet in Spartanburg.” FOX Carolina, April 13, 2026.

• “A Section of Spartanburg’s East Main Could Soon Get Thinner.” Post and Courier, April 2026.

• “Officials: Woman Hit, Killed by SUV in Spartanburg While Walking to Church.” FOX Carolina, February 22, 2026.

• “Woman Hit by Car, Killed in Downtown Spartanburg Crash.” WSPA 7News, February 24, 2026.

• Obituary: Dolores Briseno Dalton. Jackson Funeral Service, February 2026.

Data & policy

• East Main Street Road Diet — SCDOT Project Portal. South Carolina Department of Transportation.

• “What Are ‘Road Diets,’ and Why Are They Controversial?” Kinder Institute for Urban Research, Rice University, 2015.

• “Road Diet Seven Years in the Making — Was It Worth Every Minute?” Strong Towns, June 2022.

• “A Los Angeles Road Diet That Worked.” Strong Towns, October 2016.

• Speck, Jeff. Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time. North Point Press, 2012.

• Marohn, Charles. Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town. Wiley, 2021.

Philosophy & phenomenology

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald Landes. Routledge, 2012 [1945].

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Northwestern University Press, 1968.

• Citton, Yves. The Ecology of Attention. Trans. Barnaby Norman. Polity Press, 2017.

Warning… this one is a little more philosophical than I normally post here, but in the spirit of disclosure, it lays out why I do what I do. Feel free to skip over if you’re not into that!

There’s a moment (you’ve had it, I’ve definitely had it) when you stop in the middle of something like a walk and feel, with a certainty that precedes any argument, that something is happening in the organism a few feet away from you. Not that it is moving, or making noise, or occupying space in a way that catches your eye. It’s something more interior than that. A stillness that isn’t empty and a kind of attention in the world that is not yours.

It could be a crow on a fence post, watching you with that particular corvid watchfulness that doesn’t feel like surveillance so much as being assessed. It could be a stand of white oaks at the edge of a parking lot, their roots negotiating some underground arrangement you’ll never see. It could be a box turtle holding perfectly still in the leaf litter while you stand two feet away, the two of you caught together in something that doesn’t quite have a name.

You feel it, and then you feel slightly embarrassed about feeling it, because the dominant story we’ve inherited says that whatever is happening over there is happening in the dark and that the lights of inner experience are a human franchise, or at best a mammalian one, and that the crow and the oaks and the turtle are performing the outward signs of life without anyone home to experience them. The embarrassment is cultural, but the feeling is older.

I’ve been thinking about Edith Stein lately, and about what she might say to this moment.

Stein’s contribution to philosophy, at its most concentrated, is a theory of how we ever know another mind at all. She called it Einfühlung, or empathy, though the German carries something richer than the English… literally, a feeling-into. Her 1917 dissertation (written under Edmund Husserl, in the phenomenological tradition, before WW1 had finished) asked a question that seems obvious until you try to answer it… how do I know that you have an inner life?

It’s not how I infer it, or simulate it, or project it from my own case. How do I know it in the primary, pre-reflective, perceptual sense that I know there is a table in front of me or that the light has gone warm and late? Her answer was that empathy is itself a mode of perception. I don’t reason my way to your interiority, but I perceive it, the way I perceive depth in a visual field. The perception can be mistaken, refined, or enriched. But it is perceptual first.

What interests me so much is that Stein was careful about something most readers slide past because she distinguished between empathy as an act (I reach toward you) and empathy as a structure (there is something there to reach toward). The act depends on the structure. I can only empathize with something that has an interior to meet. And she was explicit that this interiority is not identical to the consciousness humans experience. Rather, empathy is a more basic feature of what it means to be a subject at all, to have an inner life that is genuinely yours, from which you encounter the world.

The question she didn’t fully pursue, and I think this is because the intellectual world she was working in hadn’t yet given her the tools or even vocabulary in terms of ecological intentionality, is what it would mean to extend that structure beyond the human. What if the crow is a subject? Not a metaphor for subjectivity, not a cute approximation of it. Actually, a locus of interior life, capable of being met?

Raymond Ruyer was a French philosopher working in the mid-twentieth century who was, for a long time (until very recently), almost unread outside of France, until Deleuze cited him, and then, later a group of philosophers, including Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux started to take him seriously, and then he was rediscovered again by thinkers working on biology and consciousness. His central claim is strange and precise in a way… every living form exercises what he called absolute survey or a kind of self-enjoying, self-forming awareness that cannot be reduced to spatial extension.

This sounds mystical, but it isn’t. It’s more of a biological claim. The embryo developing into an organism isn’t executing a genetic program the way a computer executes code. It is surveying itself, holding its own form in view, orienting its development toward what it is becoming. The cell is not merely processing information, but it has a kind of first-person orientation toward its own activity. This isn’t a capacity that emerges at some threshold of neurological complexity, but it’s a feature of living form as such. The amoeba surveys. The developing limb surveys. I’d argue the mitochondria do the same. There is no organism (or division or formative part of it) without some minimal version of this self-enjoying interiority.

What this means for Stein’s question is significant. If Ruyer is right, then there is genuinely something there, some interior to be met, in every living organism (and we can extend that to its parts and even down to the atomic or quantum level if thought out). Empathy isn’t being extended beyond its proper domain when we feel it toward a turtle or an oak. It is operating precisely as Stein described and perceiving an interiority that is actually present. The embarrassment was a category error.

Henri Bergson adds the temporal dimension. His notion of durée, or duration as lived time, describes how every living (maybe more-than-living) thing carries its past forward in a genuinely creative, not mechanically determined, way. The organism is not a static configuration that happens to move; it is a memory in motion, accumulating its history in a way that shapes its encounter with each new moment. The bird knows its territory the way your body knows how to ride a bicycle as a kind of lived past that has become part of what it is, rather than an explicit piece of information stored and retrieved.

This matters for empathy because it gives the encounter thickness. When you stop and feel that something is happening in the organism (or rock?) a few feet away, what you are meeting is not just a present configuration. You are meeting a duration, and an unfolding, an other with its own temporal interiority, its own accumulated past pressing forward into the present. The feeling of interiority you perceive is not a projection. It’s the trace of that duration registering on your own perceptual field.

Stein, Ruyer, and Bergson are not saying the same thing, of course. Stein is doing phenomenology and describing the structure of the perceptual act. Ruyer is doing philosophy of biology by describing the structure of living forms. Bergson is doing philosophy of time by describing the structure of living memory. But they triangulate on something that, taken together, amounts to a fairly serious challenge to the dominant story… that empathy across species is possible not because we are projecting human experience onto non-human life, but because interiority is a feature of life itself, graded and various, and the perceptual capacity to meet it is something we actually have.

There is a spiritual dimension to this that I can’t ignore or try to pass over without mentioning.

Stein herself became a Carmelite nun and was eventually martyred at Auschwitz along with her sister. She was killed as a Jew, having been born into a Jewish family and having converted to Catholicism after reading Teresa of Ávila in one long night of encounter with a text. She never treated phenomenology and spirituality as separate projects. For her, the capacity to perceive another’s interiority was not merely a cognitive achievement. It was a form of participation in the ground of being and a way that consciousness opens toward what is genuinely other, which she eventually understood in terms of the soul’s movement toward God.

I am not trying to import that theological framework wholesale. But something in it strikes me as exactly right when I stand in the Carolina Piedmont landscape and feel that quality of attention coming back at me from the world. The embarrassment I described at the beginning… the cultural reflex that says you are projecting, anthropomorphizing, romantically confused… that anxious embarrassment assumes that the proper direction of consciousness is inward, toward the self, and that any apparent opening toward the world is a kind of sentimental error.

Stein’s phenomenology and the biological philosophies of Ruyer and Bergson suggest otherwise. The opening toward the other is not an error. It is the structure of consciousness itself and the capacity to be oriented toward an interiority that is genuinely not yours, to receive it without collapsing the difference between you. And if that capacity extends, as I believe it does, to the more-than-human world… then what we wrongly call “nature” is not a backdrop to the drama of human consciousness but a field of genuine subjects, each carrying its own duration, each available in some degree to the kind of participatory perception Stein was describing.

This is where the spiritual layer or dimension becomes unavoidable, at least for me. Because if the world is structured this way, and if there is really something happening over there, and if we have a perceptual capacity to meet it, then the question of how we inhabit the Piedmont, how we attend to the shoals and the hemlocks and the red-tailed hawk quartering the field at dusk, is not merely an aesthetic or ethical question. It is something closer to a contemplative one. The attention itself is a form of participation. The capacity to stop and feel that something is happening over there, and to let that feeling be more than embarrassment, is a practice… not a conclusion.

Stein did not survive to work out the full implications of what she had begun. Ruyer died in 1987, still relatively obscure here in the United States universities and colleges, and in mainstream thinking. Bergson, at least, was famous in his time, though his reputation later suffered the usual eclipse that attends thinkers who insist on the reality of time and memory against the reductionist program (especially after the Einstein debate). But the three of them together sketch something I keep returning to in my own lived experience… the world is not dark. The lights are on in there. And we have always known how to read them; we just stopped trusting ourselves to do so.

The crow on the fence post is still watching you. The box turtle has not moved. The oaks have not stopped their underground negotiations.

What you feel, standing there, is not nothing. It is, if Stein is right, a genuine perceptual act, the meeting of your interiority with another. If Ruyer is right, there is something in the turtle that is doing something not entirely unlike what you are doing: orienting toward its own form, surveying its situation, being present to its own being. If Bergson is right, the turtle is carrying a duration, a history, a lived past that shapes this present moment of its encounter with you.

None of this requires you to believe that the turtle is having human thoughts, or that the oak is happy or sad when you walk by, or that the crow is pondering your moral character (though I am genuinely uncertain about that last one). It requires only that you take the feeling seriously, not as projection, not as sentimentality, but as perception. As the beginning of a different kind of attention to the world we actually inhabit.

The Piedmont here in South Carolina is full of subjects, their histories, and lived time. We have always lived among them. Learning to meet them, without collapsing the difference or dismissing the encounter, is perhaps the oldest spiritual practice there is.

Further Reading

Primary texts worth actually reading

• Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy (1917) — the dissertation itself; more readable than you’d expect

• Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907) — the durée argument in its fullest biological form

• Raymond Ruyer, Neofinalism (1952, English translation 2016) — the absolute survey argument… start with the introduction

Contextual and bridging works

• David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous — Merleau-Ponty brought into genuine ecological encounter; the closest thing to what this essay is doing in book form

• Andreas Weber, Matter and Desire — Ruyer’s biological interiority without the technical apparatus; beautifully written

For going deeper

• Evan Thompson, Mind in Life — the best bridge between phenomenology and biology currently available (in my opinion)

• Matthew Segall, Physics of the World-Soul — Whitehead and Bergson together; relevant to the process cosmology undercurrent in the essay (also one of my Profs at CIIS)

• Mark Vernon, A Secret History of Christianity — the participatory cosmology thread; Barfield’s “original participation” as the deep background to what Stein is reaching toward

I have been intently watching the black walnut in our backyard for just over a year now, and I am still not sure I know what it is doing.

That sentence probably sounds strange. We have words for what trees do, from photosynthesis and transpiration to allelopathy and mast production, and the black walnut is particularly well-documented in this regard. Its roots secrete juglone, a toxic chemical compound that harms many neighboring plants, meaning it does not merely occupy space but actively shapes the community around it. It is doing something, in the measurable sense. We have instruments for this.

But I mean something else by the question. I mean, what is the walnut doing from the inside?

I started “watching” (being with) this tree as part of a graduate seminar in my PhD studies in January 2025, a practice of almost daily observation, written reflection, or just sitting “with.” The assignment was simple enough at the time... return to the same organism at the same location over an extended period of time and attend carefully. No agenda. No hypothesis to confirm. Just attention, sustained and patient, as a discipline in itself.

What I did not expect was how much of that practice would consist of watching the tree appear to do nothing.

Through November and into December, the walnut shed its compound leaves in long, slow stages, the leaflets dropping before the central stalk, the stalks yellowing and releasing one by one until the branches stood bare against the gray Piedmont sky. January brought ice once and a good deal of snow yet again, a glaze that made the bark look lacquered, every ridge and furrow filled with light. February was mostly stillness. I would stand at the edge of the yard in the cold and take notes and feel, some mornings, faintly absurd... a man in his late 40’s with a notebook watching a dormant tree, waiting for something that might not come.

The bark was the only thing that changed, and then only when it rained. The walnut’s bark is deeply furrowed, almost architectural in its ridging, dark gray-brown in dry weather. When rain comes, the furrows darken first, then the ridges, the whole surface shifting toward black, toward something that looks almost wet and alive in a way the dry bark does not. I began to look forward to rainy mornings specifically. The tree seemed more present to itself somehow, more legible, though I could not have said what it was saying.

Then, this past week, in early April, the first buds appeared.

Not leaves just yet... just the swelling at the branch tips, a greening at the nodes, the faint suggestion of what is coming. After five months of apparent stillness, the tree is doing something visible again. And what surprised me was not the buds themselves but my response to them as something close to relief, or recognition, as if the tree had confirmed something I had been quietly doubting all winter.

Which raises the question again, in a different way. What was the walnut doing in February? Was it dormant (which is to say, was it doing nothing), or as close to nothing as a living thing can come? Or was it doing something for which we simply do not have good instruments?

The philosopher Henri Bergson spent much of his career arguing that the deepest problem in how we think about living things is that we borrow our categories from physics. We understand matter in terms of isolable parts, reversible states, and spatial positions. We understand organisms the same way as machines with components, as systems with inputs and outputs, as mechanisms whose behavior can in principle be mapped and predicted. What we lose in this borrowing, Bergson thought, is time. Not clock time, not the time we measure, but duration... the continuous, irreversible, accumulating character of a life actually being lived.

A stone has no past in the relevant sense. You could, in principle, reverse all its molecular states, and it would be the same stone. An organism cannot be reversed. It carries its history in its tissues, its timing, its chemistry. The black walnut in my yard is not the same tree it was in January, not because something dramatic has happened, but because it has continued, because duration has moved through it and left its mark in ways that no instrument fully captures.

The French philosopher Raymond Ruyer, writing in the mid-twentieth century, pushed this further. An organism, he argued, is not a surface that can be observed from outside, but it is what he called an “absolute surface,” a domain equipresent to itself, holding its own form together through something like immanent self-attention. Not a machine surveyed by an engineer. A form that surveys itself. The walnut in February, bark darkening in the rain, held its form from within and was not dormant so much as equipresent to itself in ways I was only beginning to notice.

This is what the buds in early April are telling me, I think. Not that the tree has woken up, as if it were sleeping before. But that what looked like stillness was in fact a kind of accumulated tending and the slow work of a living form carrying its past forward into a new season, doing something for which dormancy is not quite the right word.

There is a philosophical tradition, running back at least to Plotinus in the third century C.E., that holds contemplation to be not an exclusively human act but the fundamental activity of all living things. Plants, animals, even the generative forces of nature itself... all are understood, in this tradition, to produce form through a kind of silent, attentive self-coincidence. Not thinking in the way we think. But not nothing, either. A mode of presence to one’s own form, and through that form, to the whole of which it is an expression.

I find I cannot dismiss this idea when I am standing in front of the walnut in April, watching the buds swell. It is too easy, and I think finally too dishonest, to say that what the tree is doing is merely chemical, merely mechanical, merely the sum of its processes. Something in the act of sustained attention resists that reduction. Not because attention is mystical, but because it is precise — and precision, held long enough over a living thing, keeps turning up more than mechanism accounts for.

The juglone in the walnut’s roots is not random cruelty. It is a claim on the surrounding soil, a shaping of the community according to the tree’s own requirements, or, as ecologists call it, allelopathy, and what I am tempted to call, less technically, intention. Not conscious intention in the way I intend things. But a directedness. A form that knows, in some sense, what it needs and moves toward it.

I do not know what the walnut knows. I am not sure that formulation is even quite right. But after a year of watching the bare winter branches, the bark darkening in rain, the five months of apparent stillness, and now these first buds opening in early April like a sentence the tree has been composing all winter, I am less certain than I was that the question is a category error.

The tree is doing something. I am trying to learn how to see it.

Further Reading

(feel free to message if you’d like a copy of any of these but not able to purchase)

On trees and plant intelligence

• Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (Harper, 2024) — Bookshop.org

• Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (Greystone, 2016) — Bookshop.org

• David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (Viking, 2017) — Bookshop.org

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed, 2013) — Bookshop.org

On duration, living form, and the philosophy behind this essay

• Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907; Dover edition) — Bookshop.org

• Raymond Ruyer, Neofinalism (1952; Univ. of Minnesota Press, trans. 2016) — Powell’s (a must read!)

• Tano Posteraro, Bergson’s Philosophy of Biology: Virtuality, Tendency and Time (Edinburgh UP, 2022) — Powell’s

On attention as ecological practice

• Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention (Polity, 2017) — Bookshop.org

• Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia UP, 2013) — Bookshop.org

On Black Walnut specifically

• Mary Oliver, “The Black Walnut Tree” (poem, from Twelve Moons, 1979) — Oliver’s own black walnut poem, which wrestles with the tree as familial memory and creaturely presence… worth reading alongside this essay

• Linda Chalker-Scott, “Do Black Walnut Trees Have Allelopathic Effects on Other Plants?” — WSU Extension… the most honest scientific summary available that I’ve found… rigorous on what we actually know about juglone, and notably candid about how much we don’t

• Robert Gardening Myths, “Walnuts, Juglone and Allelopathy” — Garden Myths… a plainspoken lay review of the same uncertainty, good for general readers

• Juglans nigra species profile — USDA PLANTS Database… range maps, habitat, and basic natural history for the species in its native context

There is a word the Kesh people speak before taking any life. Before hunting, before felling a tree, before squashing a mosquito in the heat of a Carolina summer. The word is arrariv... “my word[s]”... and it is spoken not as prayer exactly, but as acknowledgment. As a way of saying: I see you, I need you, I am implicated in this. Ursula Le Guin invented the Kesh for her novel Always Coming Home, set in a far-future California valley, and I encountered the word last summer in a course on transformation and ecology. I have been reaching for it ever since in places where it is conspicuously absent.

The Piedmont does not lack for such absences. The announcement language of development and extraction here tends toward gift vocabulary... opportunity, investment, growth, the future arriving like a favor. Nobody speaks arrariv before zoning meetings or the groundbreakings. Nobody names what will be taken from the particular watershed, the particular stretch of second-growth forest, the particular quality of a place that has been slowly composting its own history for longer than any press release acknowledges. The formula is omitted as a matter of course. And Le Guin, writing forty years ago about a fictional future people in a California valley not entirely unlike this one, understood exactly what that omission means and where it leads.

I have been reading Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything alongside Le Guin recently, which is not a pairing Klein would have anticipated but which feels increasingly necessary. Klein’s argument is structural and urgent: the period in which climate science became undeniable was precisely the period in which neoliberal ideology consolidated its grip on global governance, and this was no coincidence. The liberalization of trade regimes, the dismantling of public capacity, the shift toward financialized extraction... all of it happened in roughly the same two decades that would have been our best window for a managed transition. Her concept of extractivism as a logic rather than a practice is clarified in a way that I agree with. Sacrifice zones are not anomalies or accidents. They are the predictable outcome of a framework that requires some places and some people to absorb costs on behalf of the rest of the world. The Piedmont has been absorbing those costs for a long time, in ways that predate the current climate conversation by several centuries.

What Klein diagnoses with precision, though, she struggles to prescribe. Her “People’s Shock”... a bottom-up rupture that reorganizes political possibility the way elite shocks have reorganized it from above... is more wager than blueprint. The critical political economy tradition is, by design, better at naming the problem than at articulating what comes after. I have come to think this is not a failure of imagination so much as a structural limit of the genre... that the tools adequate to diagnosing extractive capitalism are not quite the same tools adequate to imagining its alternatives. The spear is good at identifying other spears. It is less useful for imagining the carrier bag.

Which is Le Guin’s term, drawn partly from Elizabeth Fisher’s work on human origins. The carrier bag theory of civilization holds that the first human technology was not the weapon but the container... the bag, the basket, the gourd, the vessel for carrying gathered food back to a shared place. Civilization, on this account, begins not with conquest but with a different kind of accumulation: tending, gathering, storing, bringing home. We have told ourselves for centuries the other story, that history moves like a spear, that change arrives through rupture and force, that the arc of development bends toward more power, more speed, more extraction. Klein’s extractivism is the logical endpoint of that story told long enough and believed hard enough. Le Guin’s Kesh are what happens when a people decides, across generations, to tell a different one.

Le Guin develops this idea most directly in a short 1986 essay, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," where she argues that the dominant narrative of civilization... the spear, the hero, the conquest... is not just a story about the past but a story about story, a way of insisting that only certain kinds of action count as significant. The carrier bag, by contrast, holds many things at once, in no particular hierarchy. It does not have a climax. It does not resolve. It accumulates. The essay is worth reading alongside Always Coming Home because it makes explicit what the novel enacts obliquely... that the alternative to extractive logic is not a counter-heroism but a different relationship to time, to significance, to what counts as mattering at all.

The Kesh don’t practice the carrier bag as an ideology. They practice it as a habit, embedded in language and daily gestures. The arrariv formula spoken before every act of taking. The pottery work that slows thought “to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time.” The deliberate pace of a culture that has decided accumulation means something different than extraction... that what you carry home matters more than how fast you move or how much you take. These are not policies. They are perceptual orientations, ways of inhabiting a place that make the sacrifice zone logic not merely unethical but grammatically impossible within the language the community has built around itself.

I think about this in relation to the Piedmont specifically because this landscape is itself a kind of carrier bag... a middle ground, literally, between the mountains and the coast, neither dramatic enough to be iconic nor degraded enough to be cautionary, just persistently, quietly here. The red clay holds what falls into it. The creek systems remember their own courses even when we redirect them. The second-growth forest is carrying something forward from the longleaf and chestnut ecosystem it replaced, incompletely but stubbornly. There is a kind of ecological memory at work in this landscape that operates exactly the way Le Guin’s carrier bag operates... not as conquest or rupture but as patient accumulation, tending what can be tended, carrying forward what can be carried.

The question Klein’s book leaves open, and that Le Guin’s valley quietly answers, is what it would mean to organize a human community around that logic rather than against it. Not a utopia, exactly... Le Guin is careful about that word, and her Kesh are not perfect. But a reorientation of what counts as practical. The carrier bag, it turns out, is an extremely practical technology. It is how most of what matters has actually been transmitted across time... not through rupture but through the daily practice of picking something up, putting it somewhere safe, and bringing it home.

Le Guin opens Always Coming Home with an image I have not been able to shake. She describes the only practical archaeology of the future people she is imagining: “You take your child or grandchild in your arms, a young baby, not a year old yet, and go down into the wild oats in the field below the barn. Stand under the oak on the last slope of the hill, facing the creek. Stand quietly. Perhaps the baby will see something, or hear a voice, or speak to somebody there, somebody from home.”

There is no policy platform in that image. There is no rupture event, no binding agreement, no People’s Shock. There is a person standing under an oak, facing a creek, holding a baby, being quiet. The baby might perceive something the adult has already been trained not to. That is the whole of it... and I find, the longer I live in this Piedmont landscape, the more it sounds less like fiction and more like the most practical instruction I have encountered for how to begin.

Further Reading

Le Guin, Ursula K. Always Coming Home: Author’s Expanded Edition. Library of America, 2019. loa.org

Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. Grove Press, 1989. Full text via Monoskop — also on her official site

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Simon & Schuster, 2014. Bookshop.org

Fisher, Elizabeth. Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society. Anchor Press, 1979. WorldCat

We pulled into the High Falls Access parking lot on Tuesday morning, the kids already unbuckled before the engine quit. Emmylou had her small pink backpack. Ben had a water bottle clipped to his green-gray one. Merianna carried Lily in the carrier on her back, Lily’s shoes dangling at hip level, her eyes already scanning the treeline. I had my Hub City Spartanburger’s hat and, embarrassingly, no plan beyond the trailhead map bolted to the wooden post near the restrooms.

The map showed us where we were, a red arrow, YOU ARE HERE, pressed into the shaded topography just below the High Falls Loop. Triple Falls to the north. Hooker Falls beyond that. The Little River threads through all of it, dropping in stages down through the granite shelves of the Blue Ridge escarpment. We were, in the language of the watershed, standing at the bottom of a sentence that had been composing itself for a very long time.

DuPont State Recreational Forest sits in Transylvania County, just south of Brevard, NC, in a part of the Southern Appalachians where the mountains begin their long unraveling toward the Piedmont (and one of my favorite places on our spaceship planet). The forest covers roughly 10,000 acres and holds within it one of the densest concentrations of significant waterfalls in the eastern United States, including High Falls, Triple Falls, Hooker Falls, Grassy Creek Falls, and more. The Little River, which drains a significant portion of this highland basin, is responsible for all of them, cutting and polishing the exposed granite faces over many thousands of years of patient work.

The land has passed through many hands. It was farmed and timbered, and for a period in the mid-twentieth century, it hosted a DuPont Corporation facility that produced a compound used in the Manhattan Project (which is obviously tied to the development of nuclear weapons, which we still bargain and gamble with this week). That history sits beneath the forest trails now, largely unmarked. What you notice instead is the way the hardwoods open onto exposed rock, the way rhododendron crowds the creek margins, the way water sound precedes the water itself by a hundred yards or more. The forest has had time to grow over its own past.

We were on spring break, which in Spartanburg means the Blue Ridge is within reach if you’re willing to drive an hour and a half or so.

I have been thinking a good deal lately, in the context of my dissertation work, about what Merleau-Ponty calls the lived body, or the body not as object but as the very medium through which a world becomes available to perception, as all being is relational. His argument, worked out across the Phenomenology of Perception and the late notes gathered in The Visible and the Invisible, is that we do not first have sensations and then assemble them into a world. We are always already in the middle of a field (be it gravity or consciousness), oriented, attuned, reaching. Perception is participation before it is analysis.

What strikes me, walking a trail with three children under eleven, is how thoroughly this describes what they are doing and how poorly it describes what I am trying to do. Ben moved ahead at his own rhythm even as he didn’t feel well, stopping to examine a fungal shelf on a fallen log, then rejoining the trail without ceremony. Emmylou crouched at every stream crossing as though the water needed her attention in order to continue flowing. Lily, still on Merianna’s back, stretched out both arms at intervals toward things I couldn’t always identify, be they a patch of moss, a shaft of light, a bird moving through brush.

They were not observing nature. They were in it, as it. Their bodies had not yet learned the slight withdrawal that adult attention often requires… the stepping-back that converts experience into data, the modest self-consciousness that comes with knowing one is supposed to appreciate something. They were, in Merleau-Ponty’s sense, living at full contact with the perceptual field. And the perceptual field was, in this case, composed almost entirely of moving water.

Bergson, who thought about time with the same patience Merleau-Ponty brought to space, argued that duration, durée, is what we actually live in, even when our concepts insist otherwise. Clock time slices experience into measurable units and presents those units as equivalent, interchangeable, and mappable. But the time of a waterfall is no more clock time than the far side of the Moon. It is continuous, indivisible, always in the act of becoming something it has not yet been. You cannot step outside it to measure it without falsifying what it is.

High Falls comes into view from the overlook trail as a wide sheet of white water spreading across a face of exposed granite that must be sixty or seventy feet high (the exact measure is less important than the sheer breadth of it), the way it fills the visual field before you have any framework for understanding what you’re seeing. The water does not fall in a single coherent stream. It fans out across the rock face, braiding and separating, finding the subtle channels and imperfections in the granite, always arriving at the base in a form it could not have predicted from above.

This is duration made visible. The falls are not the same from one moment to the next. The pattern is stable enough that we recognize it, name it, and return to it. But the water enacting that pattern has passed through and is already gone. What we call High Falls is not a thing but an event… a continuous present that, from a sufficient distance, looks like a permanent feature of the landscape.

Ben and Emmylou stood at the wooden fence rail of the upper overlook, just watching. I watched them watching. Lily, from the carrier, made a sound I can only describe as recognition with a low, sustained vowel, directed at nothing in particular and everything at once.

We ate our snack on the flat granite slabs below the falls, where the Little River runs fast and shallow over a broad stone shelf before channeling back into the forest. The rock was warm from the morning sun. Lily took off her shoes.

What I kept coming back to, sitting there, is a phrase I’ve been circling in my dissertation work… ecological intentionality. The term is my own coinage, but the ground it stands on is shared between Husserl’s intentionality, the always-already directedness of consciousness toward a world with Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that this directedness is bodily before it is cognitive, and the further suggestion (which I owe in part to process thought and in part to the plain evidence of watching children at a waterfall) that the directedness runs in both directions. The world reaches back. The falls pull the attention of anyone who comes within earshot. The current shapes the intention of anyone who steps into it.

Emmylou understood this without a framework. She sat at the edge of the current and traced its surface with one finger, moving with it, then against it, then letting her hand go still and feeling the water work around her. She was not studying the river. She was in conversation with it.

Transylvania County, whose name gives Brevard its literary resonance, sits on the receiving end of one of the most precipitous elevation drops in the eastern United States. The Blue Ridge escarpment here falls several thousand feet over just a few miles, which is why the rivers are fast, why the waterfalls are numerous, and why the mist from the falls can be felt from the trail long before the falls themselves are visible. The water is in a hurry, and the hurry is geological.

There is something worth sitting with in that scale. The Little River does not know it is being hurried by an escarpment. It does not experience the gradient. It simply follows the gradient, and the gradient is the result of a continental collision that ended roughly 300 million years ago, when the ancestral Appalachians were thrust up in the same slow catastrophe that would eventually produce the Blue Ridge, the Piedmont, the Pee Dee plain (where I grew up), and the coastal strand where the land finally runs out. The water flowing over High Falls this week carries, in the most literal sense, the memory of mountains.

We carry something of that, too, I think. The body’s attunement to moving water is old… older than the names we have for it, older than the trails. When Lily reaches toward the current from Merianna’s back, she is not performing an aesthetic response. She is answering something. Whether we call that ecological intentionality or simply being alive, the act is the same.

On the drive back to our rented home in the mountains outside of Brevard, the kids were quiet in the particular way that follows genuine tiredness… not sleep exactly, but a settling. Lily still had one shoe off. Ben had the water bottle braced against his knee.

I thought about what we’d actually done. We had walked maybe three miles on well-maintained trails through a state forest on a clear day in early April. We had looked at water falling. We had eaten snacks on a warm rock. Nothing had been illuminated, exactly, and yet something had been practiced as a way of attending, a willingness to let the world arrive on its own terms before we said anything about it.

The Little River was still running when we left. It will run much the same way when Lily is old enough to come back without the carrier. The falls are patient with our inattention. They keep doing what they do regardless of whether anyone is watching, and they do not particularly change when someone is. What changes is us… something in the posture, something in the quality of silence. A loosening of the slight withdrawal that adult life requires, just long enough to feel the spray.

That seems worth the drive.

DuPont State Recreational Forest is located in Transylvania County, NC, near Brevard. The High Falls Access trailhead off Sky Valley Road provides the most direct route to High Falls and connects to Triple Falls via the 1.7-mile High Falls Loop. The forest is free and open year-round!

For further reading

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (Routledge, 2012). The foundational account of the lived body and perceptual participation that runs beneath the essay’s treatment of children at the falls. Publisher page · Find via IndieBound

Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (Dover, 2001). The most accessible entry into Bergson’s thinking on duration is the argument that lived time is a continuous flow rather than a measurable sequence. Publisher page · Find via IndieBound

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013). The most widely read contemporary account of participatory attention to plant and water life is a model for this kind of writing. Publisher page · Find via IndieBound

Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky’s Red River Gorge (Counterpoint, 2006). Berry’s earliest sustained attempt at the form this essay works in, lyrical ecology, braids place history with the threat of loss. Publisher page · Find via IndieBound

Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (Counterpoint, 1990). Essays on watershed consciousness and embodied inhabitation of specific landscapes. Publisher page · Find via IndieBound

There’s a dam down the hill from my house in Spartanburg that forms a beautiful lake. We walk there often, and my children love seeing the ducks and minnows on the edge of the shore. On certain mornings, especially when the light comes in low through the pines and the red clay holds onto the night’s dampness, it’s hard not to feel that the landscape itself is holding something just beneath the surface that’s not hidden, exactly. More like waiting.

We don’t have to reach far, geographically or imaginatively, to encounter the underworld.

It’s in the sediment and water pooled behind that dam. It’s in the anaerobic soils where roots and fungi carry on their exchanges out of sight. It’s in the slow decomposition of leaves that fell months ago and are now becoming something else entirely. Death, here, is not an abstraction. It is a process that sustains the visible world.

And yet, we carry stories... old ones... about what it means to go down into death and come back.

The Christian tradition gives us the Harrowing of Hell, that strange and powerful image of Christ descending into the realm of the dead, not to visit but to break something open. In the old icons, he stands over shattered gates, reaching down and pulling Adam and Eve up by the wrists. It’s not a negotiation or a cycle, but more like a rupture. Death, in that moment, is not simply part of the order of things. It is overcome.

But that is not the only story we’ve told ourselves.

Long before those icons were painted, Inanna passed through seven gates into the underworld, stripped of everything that made her who she was, until nothing remained to rescue her sister. However, she didn’t conquer death. She was undone by it, and only through a fragile exchange was she allowed to return. In Egypt, Osiris did not escape the underworld at all. He became its center, holding together the continuity between death and life as part of a larger order as its overseer. In Greece, Orpheus almost succeeded in bringing Eurydice back, but failed at the threshold, turning too soon (much like Lot’s wife), losing her again in the act of looking.

These stories do not agree with one another, but they return to the same intuition that to live fully is to be entangled with what lies beneath, and descent is not optional.

What shifts, and what matters, is what we believe happens there.

In the Carolinas, we are surrounded by forms of descent that we rarely name as such. Our rivers are dammed, slowed, and forced into holding patterns where silt gathers and oxygen thins. Our forests, particularly here in the Piedmont, grow out of soils that are already the remains of earlier worlds... agricultural exhaustion, erosion, regrowth. Even our weather, with its long humid summers and sudden storms, carries the sense that the boundary between life and decay is thin and constantly negotiated.

If we read the Harrowing of Hell as a story of total victory over death, it can be a heavy read in a place like this, where death is so clearly part of what sustains life. The black walnut in my backyard does not defeat death. It depends on it. Its roots extend into soil structured by generations of decay and exchange. The fungal networks beneath it move nutrients not in spite of death, but through it.

So the question becomes harder and more interesting.

What does it mean to speak of breaking the gates of hell in a world where those “gates” might also be the conditions for life?

One way forward is to take the Harrowing less as a biological claim and more as a perceptual one. Before it is a statement about what happens after death, it is a claim about what death is allowed to mean. In the icon, Christ does not erase the underworld or conquer it… he enters it and stands within it to preach. But something about its structure no longer holds.

The gates are broken not so that death disappears, but so that it is no longer closed.

Because what we face in places like Spartanburg is not death in the abstract, but forms of enclosure. A dam that turns a river into a holding basin. A data center proposal that treats water and energy as resources to be locked into extraction cycles. Systems that assume the underworld... the unseen layers of soil, water, atmosphere... are there to be used without consequence.

Those are, in a very real sense, gated worlds.

And the question is whether we imagine our task as overcoming them entirely or as learning to move within them differently.

The older myths suggest that descent is something to be endured, navigated, or accepted as part of a larger pattern. The Harrowing suggests that something in the structure of death itself can be opened.

I’m not convinced those are exactly opposites.

Standing by the creek here in our neighborhood, watching the water move more slowly than it should, it seems more likely that what we need is not a rejection of descent, but a refusal of its closure. Not an escape from the underworld, but a reconfiguration of how we inhabit it.

That might mean removing dams where we can (and should). It might mean rethinking how we draw water and power from the systems we depend on. It might mean something as simple as paying attention to what is already happening beneath our feet, or as difficult as paying attention to what is already happening beneath our feet.

Because the underworld is not somewhere else.

It is here, in the soil, in the water, in the slow work of decomposition and renewal.

And whatever it means to speak of resurrection in a place like this, it will have to begin there... not above it, not against it, but within it.

A few months ago, I started writing about data center projects here in Spartanburg after giving them some thought (my background is a strange mix of religion, ecology, business, and marketing). It’s something like the way you notice a word you’ve just learned... suddenly, they were everywhere. NorthMark Strategies is transforming the old Kohler plant on South Pine Street into a $2.8 billion high-performance computing facility. Project Spero nearly put a 250-megawatt AI data center at the Tyger River Industrial Park before the community organized and pushed back. A third site at 300 Jones Road is still quietly in play. Spartanburg County has become, in the space of a year, a data center frontier.

The following is the conclusion of a seminar paper I wrote for my religion and ecology doctoral program at CIIS this spring, analyzing what the data center buildout in Spartanburg and the broader Southeast reveals about how we see, or fail to see, the planetary costs of digital life. The full paper is attached as a PDF below if you want the copious footnotes, bibliography, data, and argument from the beginning about ecological perception related to data centers and how they are “sold” to communities. But the conclusion stands on its own if you just want to read about breath, and wrens, and what it means to notice, I think.

—

Conclusion: While We Breathe

Project Spero was named after South Carolina’s state motto, Dum Spiro Spero: while I breathe, I hope. Breath is not abstract. It is the most intimate and continuous form of our participation in the atmosphere that we share with every living being on the planet, the rhythmic exchange of gases that connects human bodies to the bodies of trees, of soil organisms, of the Tyger River’s aquatic communities, of the Carolina wren outside the window. To breathe is to be in relation. It is the most basic form of what Pope Francis calls communion with creation and what Donna Haraway calls being in a contact zone as the ongoing, involuntary, life-sustaining encounter with a world that is not ours but in which we are included.

The data center, as this paper has argued, is an infrastructure organized around the systematic forgetting of that breath, around the engineering of distance between human projects and the living systems that sustain them, around the rendering of planetary costs as abstract, distant, and therefore negotiable. Project Spero’s invocation of the state motto was either a profound irony or a genuine aspiration that the facility’s design would have betrayed. The community that showed up to oppose it was, in the most literal sense, defending the conditions of breath.

That defense was temporary and incomplete. The NorthMark facility is proceeding. The 300 Jones Road situation remains unresolved. The broader Southeast buildout continues at a pace that no single community’s organized attention can match. The planetary boundaries documented by the IPCC with such careful, restrained precision continue to be transgressed, and the AI infrastructure expansion now accelerating will press against at least three of those boundaries simultaneously in the coming years. The window for meaningful response, as the IPCC’s 2023 Synthesis Report concludes with high confidence, is narrowing.

And yet something happened in Spartanburg County in February 2026 that is worth noting and examining in this framework of attention. A community organized, through in-person presence and online communication, against a promotional apparatus designed to prevent exactly that kind of noticing. The grid and watershed became present. The contact zone became, however briefly, visible in the County Council chambers, in chats over coffee at local establishments, and in online conversations with community members.

That visibility is what attention as an ecological practice is for. Not as a substitute for structural and political transformation, and Wainwright and Mann are right that the machinery of Climate Leviathan will absorb and reorganize even genuine community resistance if it does not produce durable institutional change. But as the necessary condition for wanting that transformation, and for sustaining the collective will to pursue it past the moment of immediate crisis. You cannot protect what you cannot see. You cannot grieve what you have never noticed. You cannot make kin, in Haraway’s phrase, with a creature whose existence you have been organized to overlook.

The building going up on South Pine Street will generate its own power, employ a few people, and process computational tasks for a portfolio of investment clients whose names and purposes are not publicly disclosed. The Tyger River will continue its way toward the Broad and the Congaree. The watershed will absorb what it absorbs. The wren will sing from whatever tree remains near the fence line of the industrial park. Both of these things, the facility and the wren, the server rack and the river, are happening simultaneously, in the same county, under the same atmosphere. What we choose to notice, and what institutional structures we build to make noticing possible and consequential, is the question that attention as an ecological practice puts before us.

Dum spiro spero. While I breathe, I hope. The breath is shared. The hope depends on what we are willing to see.

—
The full paper (22 pages including citations and bibliography) is available to download here:

Attention As Ecological Practice

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My kids usually hear it before I do (being a 47-year-old who spent too much time in my youth listening to Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains at decibel levels that weren’t healthy). We will be maybe a quarter mile into the Cottonwood Trail at the Griffin Nature Preserve here in Spartanburg, still in the tunnel of hardwoods where the path bends east along the creek bank, and one of them will stop… Ben, usually, or Lily, and tilt their head in that particular way that means something has arrived in their perception that hasn’t registered in mine just yet. Do you hear that? And then I do. The shoal, working itself over the granite somewhere ahead, white noise resolving as we walk closer into something more particular and more textured. The deeper churn where the water drops and the lighter chatter along the margins, maybe a kingfisher somewhere in the sycamores doing its rattling complaint. The creek announces itself. We have come to listen, even when we think we have only come to walk.

I have been thinking about Lawson’s Fork Creek for a long time now, but it took hiking it with my children to understand what it was actually asking of me as well. It is not a dramatic waterway. It does not carry the mythological weight of the French Broad or the sheer volume of the Broad River into which it eventually drains. It is twenty-nine miles of Piedmont creek winding through Spartanburg County, beginning in the foothills near Campobello and emptying into the Pacolet south of Glendale, modest by almost any measure. But it is, in the particular sense I am working to develop in my ecological writing, a deeply intentional place. A place where the land and the human have been reaching toward each other across an extraordinary span of time, each shaping the other’s form of awareness. My children, stopping on the trail to point at a turtle working its way along the bottom, are participants in something far older than they know. So am I.

The Piedmont substrate under this watershed began forming something like three hundred million years ago, the residue of a mountain-building event that has long since spent itself, leaving behind a rolling red clay upland cut by rivers still tracing the fault lines and fractures of that ancient geology. The shoals along Lawson’s Fork and the falls at Glendale, with exposed granite shelves that break the current at intervals along the Griffin Preserve, are where resistant rock refused to erode at the same rate as the softer stone around it. They are geologically stubborn places. And because they are stubborn, because they force the water into visibility, audibility, and turbulence, they have drawn human attention for a very long time.

The Cherokee used this landscape primarily as hunting territory, a buffer between their towns to the west and the Catawba to the east. The conventional historical account tends to emphasize the political dimension of that arrangement, and it was, in some sense, political. But there is an ecological dimension that deserves more weight. The Cherokee managed these Piedmont forests through deliberate burning, maintaining open patches of young growth, which historians call old fields, that functioned as wildlife corridors and habitat edges. The landscape that European settlers encountered along the Tyger, Enoree, and Pacolet Rivers was not wilderness in the romantic sense, not untouched nature awaiting human meaning. It was a tended commons, shaped by centuries of purposeful ecological attention. The shoals were practical features of that attentiveness. They were places to ford, to fish, to read the river’s offer. The Cherokee hunted deer and turkey in the fire-managed edges between forest and old field, and the rivers were the readable lines of the whole system, the grammar of a landscape that had been patiently cultivated.

The first Europeans near Lawson’s Fork were Spanish. In 1567, a party under Captain Juan Pardo passed through this part of the Piedmont, and a stone bearing that date was plowed up by a farmer near Inman in 1934, amazingly enough… one of the stranger objects in the Spartanburg Museum’s collection being a sixteenth-century trail marker turned up by a twentieth-century moldboard. Then, after Charleston’s founding in 1670, the region remained outside the boundary of permissible British settlement for nearly another century. The 1755 treaty with the Cherokee opened land grants, while a military defeat of 1761 made colonizers feel more secure. The Scots-Irish who came down from Pennsylvania in increasing numbers after that settled, almost instinctively, along the river bottomlands. They followed the same watercourses the Cherokee had read for generations. They built their first corn mills at the shoals and falls, reading the same energy the creek had always offered.

What the watershed permitted… that phrase keeps returning to me. The Wofford Iron Works at Glendale, one of the earliest industrial operations in the Carolina interior, depended on Lawson’s Fork for its power. The iron went into weapons for the Revolutionary War. The cotton mills that followed a generation later, the Bivingsville Factory established by Dr. James Bivings in the 1830s, later acquired by D.E. Converse and renamed Glendale, were sited at the shoals because the shoals made the wheel turn. Every stage of Spartanburg’s economic development during the transition into the colonizing period, from subsistence farming through iron-working through the textile industry that defined the county’s character well into the twentieth century, was organized around what the watershed would give. The Scots-Irish did not impose their settlement pattern on a passive landscape. They read what the creek was offering and responded, sometimes sustainably, often extractively, always consequentially.

It matters that the mills are gone now, and that the creek is still here.

This is the historical pattern that a framework of ecological intentionality asks us to approach differently. The conventional environmental history of a place like Spartanburg focuses on what human settlement did to the watershed… the mill dams, the textile effluent, the gradual urbanization pressing in from the I-26 and I-85 corridor, the impoundment of the South Pacolet at Lake Bowen for the city’s drinking supply. These are real and significant. But they can leave us with a narrative of pure loss, the land as patient victim and the human as inexorable agent of harm. What I find more generative, and more honest, is to ask not only what we did to the watershed but what the watershed has been doing to us and how it has insisted on its own form of attention across every generation of human presence here.

Merleau-Ponty argues that the embodied subject does not encounter the world as a neutral backdrop against which experience occurs. The flesh of the world co-constitutes the flesh of experience. Perception is not a unilateral act; it is a conversation between a body and an environment that, in some meaningful sense, is already reaching back. Applied to a watershed, to Lawson’s Fork specifically, winding east through the Piedmont toward the Broad and eventually to the Santee and the Atlantic, this suggests that the patterns of human settlement here are not simply human decisions projected onto a passive landscape. They are moments in a longer conversation. The shoal elicited the mill. The mill organized the village. The village carried the shoal’s energy into forms of human community, some of them beautiful, many of them unjust, all of them downstream from the granite outcrop that refused to erode.

The endangered species along this corridor offer one way to understand what that conversation has cost and what remains. The Bunched Arrowhead (Sagittaria fasciculata), a small federally listed aquatic herb found in the South Carolina Piedmont and Western North Carolina seepage forests of the upper watershed, is among the rarest plants in North America, surviving in only a handful of isolated pockets in Greenville and Henderson Counties. These are places where slow groundwater still seeps undisturbed through clay-underlain slopes beneath a deciduous canopy. Its presence marks the places where the watershed has not been interrupted. The bog turtle and the Carolina heelsplitter mussel, both imperiled species in the Lawson’s Fork–Pacolet system, have similarly narrow tolerances. They are not merely ecological indicators in the technical sense. They are witnesses to a form of continuity and a long patience in the land that has outlasted iron works and cotton gins and mill villages and is now, precariously, outlasting the sprawl that is pressing against the edges of the watersheds from every direction.

The Spartanburg Area Conservancy’s work along Lawson’s Fork is important because it is trying to hold those conditions of continuity open, not just the trail miles and the biodiversity inventories (though those matter for a number of reasons) but the particular quality of attention the creek itself sustains. The 110-acre Griffin Preserve exists because enough people understood, at some level, that this stretch of Lawson’s Fork was doing something irreplaceable. The cottonwoods along the bank, the sycamores in the floodplain, the exposed granite shelves where the water breaks white and loud… these are not amenities added to the creek. They are the creek’s way of making itself available to perception.

We stopped last fall at the shoal where the Cottonwood Trail comes closest to the water, and Emmylou crouched down at the bank the way children do, with her whole body, as though attention required getting as low as possible. There was a turtle on a half-submerged log, far enough out that you had to hold still to see it clearly. She held still. I watched her watching it, and I thought about the Cherokee hunters standing in this same valley reading the burned-over edges for deer, and the mill workers who heard this same water every morning of their working lives from the village up on the bank, and the botanist who first documented the Bunched Arrowhead in a seepage forest a few miles upstream, kneeling in the saturated soil to record something the land had been quietly maintaining for centuries without any record at all.

The shoal does not remember these things in any way that is directly available to us. But it continues to do what it has always done and break the water’s surface into sound and light, elicit a particular quality of attention from whatever body comes within earshot, and offer, to anyone who stops long enough, the experience of being called into awareness by something that was here before you and will be here after. My children hear it before I do. The invitation the watershed extends is not complicated. It only requires that you be present enough to notice when the creek begins to announce itself through the trees, and that you stop, and that you listen to what the water is doing over the stone.

That is where I want to start… not with the crisis, not with the loss, though both are real, but with the shoal, and with the attention it asks of us, and with the long, patient history of what happens when people actually give it.

Further Reading & Resources

Local & Regional History

• Landrum, J.B.O. History of Spartanburg County. Franklin Printing, 1900. Digitized at the Library of Congress: loc.gov/item/01031332 The foundational county history, available free online.

• Kovacik, Charles F., and John J. Winberry. South Carolina: The Making of a Landscape. University of South Carolina Press, 1989. The standard geographic and ecological history of the state; essential background on Piedmont settlement and river systems.

• South Carolina Encyclopedia: “Spartanburg County,” “Piedmont,” “Pacolet River” are good keywords here: scencyclopedia.org. Rigorously sourced, freely accessible reference on the history and ecology of the region.

• Spartanburg County Historical Association spartanburghistory.org Maintains Walnut Grove Plantation, the Price House, and the Regional History Museum… good starting point for deeper county history research.

• Kennedy Room of Local and South Carolina History, Spartanburg County Public Libraries spartanburglibraries.org Our primary archive for Spartanburg County history, including maps, manuscripts, and newspaper records.

Watershed & Ecology

• Palmetto Conservation Foundation: Lawson’s Fork Creek & Pacolet River Blueway: gopaddlesc.com Over 50 miles of mapped river travel through the watershed, with notes on ecology and historic mill sites.

• South Carolina Native Plant Society “Bunched Arrowhead, Our Rarest Plant”: scnps.org On the endangered Sagittaria fasciculata and the Piedmont seepage forests it depends on.

• SC Department of Environmental Services: South Carolina Watershed Atlas: gis.des.sc.gov/watersheds Great interactive mapping of all SC watersheds, including the Broad River basin that drains Spartanburg County.

• USGS Water Data for the Nation: Lawson’s Fork Creek at Spartanburg: waterdata.usgs.gov Real-time streamflow data for the creek.

Conservation & Trails

• Spartanburg Area Conservancy (SPACE): spartanburgconservation.org Manages the Edwin M. Griffin Nature Preserve (Cottonwood Trail) and Glendale Shoals Preserve

• Glendale Outdoor Leadership School: guided trips on Lawson’s Fork Creek and the Pacolet River: glendalesc.com

This question has been at the top of my mind for the last few weeks (waves hand in the air with everything going on), and I’ve gone in many different directions with possible responses. There is a chart I’ve come across from ourworldindata that, at first glance, looks like a fairly standard data visualization. A handful of lines moving across a timeline from 1965 to 2024, each one representing a country’s primary energy consumption per person, measured in kilowatt-hours. Canada is at the top, hovering near 100,000 kWh. India is near the bottom, just under 8,000. The United States has been slowly declining from its peak in the early 2000s (which prompted my interest in this question in the first place). China is bending upward in a long, steep arc that began sometime in the 1980s.

Sit with it long enough (like a black walnut tree in a Spartanburg backyard), though, and the chart starts to feel less like a data visualization and more like a kind of metabolic portrait... a way of asking how much of the Earth each way of life requires in order to sustain itself. Not in the abstract sense of carbon footprints or emissions inventories, but in something more fundamental way of how much energy has to move through the systems surrounding a single human life for that life to function as it currently does.

That question has a way of opening everything else.

The most striking feature of the chart, in my opinion (once you start pressing on it), is not the highest line or the lowest. It is what happens to the lines of the wealthiest countries around the turn of the millennium. The United States peaked near 95,000 kWh per person in the early 2000s and has since gradually declined, settling now around 76,000 kWh per person. The United Kingdom drops even more steeply, from roughly 45,000 kWh in the mid-1970s to around 28,000 today. France plateaus and begins a modest decline. These are usually read as signs of progress... decoupling, efficiency gains, the promise that modern economies can grow while drawing less from the Earth.

But there is a complication sitting quietly inside a reading of the data and its representation in that manner.

When manufacturing moves offshore, the energy embedded in that manufacturing does not disappear. It relocates. The deindustrialization of the British economy and the offshoring of American manufacturing are not separable from China's steep upward arc during the same decades. These curves are entangled. What looks like efficiency from one vantage point may be, in significant part, displacement... the movement of extraction to somewhere less visible on the ledger (Barrett et al., 2013; Davis & Caldeira, 2010). The lines are not independent of one another (another problem with 2-dimensional graph representations of data). They are telling parts of a single story.

This matters for how we think about the apparently good news embedded in the chart. If the “decline” in wealthy-nation energy use reflects a genuine transformation of the underlying relationship to the Earth, then it is worth celebrating. If it reflects the relocation of that relationship to other bodies, other places, and primarily other watersheds, then the moral calculus looks considerably different.

There is a growing body of research that runs counter to a different assumption, one perhaps even harder to dislodge, as it is part of the current American mythology around progress.

The standard logic of development treats energy use as a reliable proxy for human flourishing. More energy, more well-being. “Drill, Baby, Drill!” The assumption runs so deep that it rarely needs to be stated. It is encoded in the very architecture of how we measure progress, from GDP growth to the Human Development Index in its earlier iterations.

But a number of researchers have been probing the actual relationship between energy consumption and measures of well-being, and what they are finding is more complicated. Steinberger and Roberts (2010), analyzing the relationship between energy use, life expectancy, and human development across countries and over time, found that the relationship follows a curve rather than a line. Up to a certain threshold, additional energy strongly correlates with improvements in health, literacy, and basic welfare. Beyond that threshold, the gains flatten considerably. You get diminishing returns. And the threshold at which this flattening begins is considerably lower than the consumption levels of wealthy industrialized nations.

Millward-Hopkins et al. (2020), modeling what a “decent living” standard might require for the global population, estimated that providing good material conditions for all 10 billion people projected by mid-century could be accomplished at roughly 40-50% of current global energy use... if that energy were distributed differently and organized around genuine need rather than throughput maximization. Rao and Min (2018) reached similar conclusions in their framework of “decent living energy,” identifying a floor beneath which material deprivation begins and noting that most wealthy-nation populations are living far, far above it.

What this suggests is disorienting if you sit with it (like a budding red maple tree here in our backyard as I type this)… high-energy societies might be able to reduce consumption significantly without significant losses in human flourishing. And societies like India, visible on the chart as that nearly flat green line running just above the x-axis, have legitimate claims to increased energy access as a matter of basic justice, claims that cannot be waved away by pointing to global emissions targets without addressing who has been drawing from the common store for how long (Shue, 1993).

This is, as Pope Francis frames it in Laudato Si’, a question of ecological debt... not just a technical challenge but a moral one, rooted in the asymmetry between who has driven the crisis and who is most exposed to its consequences (Francis, 2015).

None of this is visible on the chart, of course. The y-axis measures kilowatt-hours. It cannot measure soil depletion, river health, or what it feels like to live in a place where the water still runs clear. It has no way of registering what Robin Wall Kimmerer describes as the work of “becoming native to place”... the long, slow practice of learning to inhabit a particular piece of the Earth with something like genuine reciprocity (Kimmerer, 2013).

This is where the data starts to gesture toward something that data alone cannot carry.

The concept I have been working with in my own research, ecological intentionality, tries to name a mode of attentiveness that is prior to the ethical and political questions, though it does not leave them behind. Drawing on Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy and Henri Bergson’s account of duration, the idea is that human consciousness is capable of a genuine participatory opening toward the living world... not just instrumental calculation, not just stewardship, but something closer to what Whitehead called “feeling the feelings” of the others with whom we share a world (Whitehead, 1929). Whether that kind of attentiveness can be cultivated at a civilizational scale is an open question. But the chart suggests that the alternative... continuing to treat energy throughput as the measure of a good life is running into the limits of its own logic.

It is easy to read a chart like this at a distance. From somewhere general. From “the global economy,” “industrialized nations,” or “the energy transition.”

But the abstraction collapses if you bring it closer.

In Spartanburg, the energy curve is not abstract. It is visible in the recent public controversy over (the failed) Project Spero, a proposed AI data center that would have drawn significant additional water and electricity from local infrastructure, provoking genuine community pushback. It is present in the conversation about what the revitalization of Duncan Park means for our local watershed, with its many creeks and tributaries, and carries with it the memory of a very different relationship between this city and its waterways. It is there in the question of what it means to have the Catawba-Wateree and Pee Dee river systems dammed and managed primarily for industrial and agricultural throughput, when those same rivers ran for millennia as something closer to what Kimmerer might call relatives.

At that scale, the question the chart is asking me stops being statistical. Instead, a better question might be what does this place require of us? And what are we requiring of it?

The researchers working on decent living energy thresholds are not, by and large, making theological arguments. They are running models to estimate caloric needs, build materials, and develop healthcare infrastructure. But the questions their work opens onto are ones that theology and philosophy have been circling for a long time, usually framed not as energy budgets but as something older… what constitutes a good life, and what does pursuing it obligate us toward?

Aristotle’s eudaimonia, Wendell Berry’s “membership,” Kimmerer’s “grammar of animacy,” the Laudato Si’ vision of integral ecology... these are not the same thing, and the differences between them matter. But they (along with me) share a suspicion of the assumption that more is better, that flourishing scales with throughput, that the good life can be measured in kilowatt-hours per person per year.

The chart does not settle any of this. But it does make the question harder to avoid.

References and Further Reading

Barrett, J., Peters, G., Wiedmann, T., Scott, K., Lenzen, M., Roelich, K., & Le Quéré, C. (2013). Consumption-based GHG emission accounting: A UK case study. Climate Policy, 13(4), 451–470. https://doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2013.788858

Davis, S. J., & Caldeira, K. (2010). Consumption-based accounting of CO₂ emissions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(12), 5687–5692. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0906974107

Francis. (2015). Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. Vatican Press. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions. https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass

Millward-Hopkins, J., Steinberger, J. K., Rao, N. D., & Oswald, Y. (2020). Providing decent living with minimum energy: A global scenario. Global Environmental Change, 65, 102168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102168

Rao, N. D., & Min, J. (2018). Decent living standards: Material prerequisites for human wellbeing. Social Indicators Research, 138(1), 225–244. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1650-0

Shue, H. (1993). Subsistence emissions and luxury emissions. Law & Policy, 15(1), 39–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9930.1993.tb00093.x

Steinberger, J. K., & Roberts, J. T. (2010). From constraint to sufficiency: The decoupling of energy and carbon from human needs, 1975–2005. Ecological Economics, 70(2), 425–433. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2010.09.014

Wainwright, J., & Mann, G. (2018). Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future. Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/products/436-climate-leviathan

Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Macmillan. https://archive.org/details/processrealitygi00whit

Berry, W. (1987). Home Economics: Fourteen Essays. North Point Press. https://www.counterpointpress.com/dd-product/home-economics/

There is a small dam in Duncan Park that runs through our neighborhood just east of downtown Spartanburg and beside our home. It was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1935. The water of Fairforest Creek (tributaries, not the main stem) pools quietly behind it, a still mirror of sky and tree canopy, and to most people walking the path alongside it, it probably reads as a natural feature of the landscape... something the land has always done, something stable and given. My children enjoy feeding the ducks and seeing the fish that swim by on our morning walks. It’s recently been “restocked” with bass and bluegill and has added a kayak dock. My favorite baseball player, Ryne Sandberg of the Chicago Cubs, once played for the Spartanburg Phillies at the historic stadium built in 1926, which still stands.

But the lake itself is not a natural feature. It is a decision someone made at some specific moment in the past to hold that water of Fairforest Creek, which is still part of an incredible watershed system here. And decisions, unlike geological facts, can be reconsidered.

I have been thinking about that dam more than usual since news began arriving about the Klamath River. By early 2024, the largest dam removal project in American history had begun to unfold along the Klamath in northern California and Oregon... four dams coming out, more than 400 miles of river corridor opening back up, salmon returning to waters they had not reached in over a century. The scale of the project is hard to grasp. But what strikes me most is not the engineering involved, or even the decades of legal and political struggle that preceded it. It is the shift in orientation the project represents… a collective decision to ask not just what these dams provide but what they interrupt, and whether the interruption is still worth the cost.

Robert Macfarlane has been asking a version of this question in his recent work. In Is a River Alive?, he challenges the assumption, so common in how we talk about environmental management, that rivers are resources or systems to be allocated, monitored, and optimized. What he finds, moving through landscapes shaped by rivers and through the scientific and legal movements now recognizing rivers as rights-bearing entities, is something more like what process thinkers would recognize as relational agency: a river is not merely a quantity of water moving through a channel, but a layered, ongoing process with its own forms of responsiveness, its own temporal depth, its own way of engaging the world. Holding that process still is not a neutral act. It is an act with consequences that extend well beyond the visible.

Here in the Carolinas, those consequences are distributed across a landscape so thoroughly reshaped by dam-building that it is difficult to see it clearly anymore.

The Catawba-Wateree system of the Carolinas is the most striking example. What the map labels as lakes... Lake Norman, Lake Wylie, Lake Wateree, and several others... are not lakes in any ecologically meaningful sense. They are sections of a river that has been stepped and slowed by a chain of dams operated largely by Duke Energy, stretching from the North Carolina mountains down through the Piedmont of South Carolina. The system generates electricity, supplies drinking water to millions of people, and provides recreation across an enormous region. By conventional measures, it is a recreational, capitalistic, and big beautiful success.

But the river underneath it, the Catawba (the Indigenous Catawba people were “the people of the river” after all), as a river, has been substantially transformed in the process. Sediment that once moved through the system now settles behind dams. Migratory fish species that depended on an uninterrupted river corridor no longer have access to their full range. Seasonal flood pulses that shaped the floodplain forests and wetland communities downstream have been regularized into something closer to industrial schedules. The reservoirs themselves support vibrant ecosystems, but they are not the same ecosystems the river once sustained, and the communities of organisms that depended on the river’s movement, sedimentation, variation, and connectivity have mostly disappeared, without anyone officially deciding they should.

This is one of the ways in which dams function as both perceptual and physical interventions. They do not merely change the water. They change what we expect water to do. People who grow up around Lake Norman or Lake Wylie think of these as stable, permanent features of the region, not as rivers that were altered during their (now great?) grandparents’ generation. The shoreline becomes relatively fixed. The water level becomes something that should behave. And what has been displaced... the river’s older self, its own way of occupying the landscape... becomes invisible simply through familiarity.

The Pee Dee River and its watershed, where I grew up, tells a somewhat different story, but it is no less shaped one. The Pee Dee runs more freely through its lower reaches in South Carolina than the Catawba does, and its floodplain forests, remnant bottomland hardwoods, oxbow wetlands, and Carolina bays embedded in the surrounding landscape remain among the most ecologically significant landscapes in the state. But even here, the river’s behavior in South Carolina is substantially determined by decisions made upstream in North Carolina, by the Yadkin-Pee Dee chain of dams that structure flow, temperature, and sediment delivery before the water ever crosses the state line. What arrives in Marlboro County, looking like a freely moving river, is already a human-manipulated river, one whose pulses have been calibrated by release schedules rather than by rainfall alone.

Recent basin planning work across South Carolina (and the development of the new Interstate 73 in the Pee Dee region) has begun to surface the pressure these systems are now under. Population growth across the Carolinas, expanding industrial water demand, and the increasing variability of precipitation under changing climate conditions are creating stresses that the infrastructure was not designed to accommodate. What was engineered for a particular set of hydrological assumptions (relatively stable precipitation patterns, slower population growth, lower summer temperatures) is now being asked to perform under conditions that are shifting faster than the engineering can adapt.

There is a phenomenological dimension to all of this that I keep returning to in my own work, and it has to do with what attention reveals when we let it settle on something long enough.

A river, attended to over time, does not behave like a managed resource. It behaves like what it is… a process with its own rhythms, its own memory of the landscape it has moved through, its own responsiveness to rainfall, season, and the communities of organisms that depend on it. Henri Bergson wrote about duration (durée) as the experience of time as lived continuity rather than as a series of measurable instants. Something like this is available in rivers, if you pay attention long enough to notice it.

Fairforest Creek in Duncan Park is not just the water that is there today. It carries sediment from upstream, it holds the traces of last week’s rain, it responds to the shade of the trees along its bank in ways that will matter to the insects and the birds and the soil chemistry downstream. Holding it still behind even a small dam interrupts that continuity, not catastrophically, perhaps, but genuinely.

This is what Edith Stein’s work on empathy helps me see in these contexts. Stein describes empathy not as projection but as a movement of attention toward the experiential structure of another, a genuine, if always partial, encounter with something’s way of being in the world. To attend to a creek, or a river, with something like empathetic seriousness is not to sentimentalize it. It is to ask, carefully and honestly, what it is doing when left to do its own thing, and what is lost when that doing is interrupted. The Klamath salmon did not simply disappear from the upper river when the dams went in. They lost access to the habitat that had shaped their biology over thousands of years. The river itself lost the sediment movement that salmon carcasses had redistributed across the watershed. These are not abstract losses. They are losses in the relational fabric of a place.

None of this leads straightforwardly to a conclusion about what should be done with the dams we have.

The Klamath removal was a long time coming and required extraordinary coordination among tribal nations, state and federal agencies, environmental organizations, and private utilities. The dams were old, their relicensing costs were high, and the ecological case for removal had been building for decades. The Catawba-Wateree system is a different situation entirely, with newer infrastructure, active management by a major utility, and millions of people dependent on its outputs for daily life. Nobody is proposing, or should be proposing, tearing out Lake Norman (though some may argue about the questionable human developments that have sprung up around it this century).

But the Klamath is still useful as an orientation... a way of asking questions that the presence of large, stable infrastructure tends to suppress. What are these dams still doing that justifies what they have changed? Are there smaller dams in the watershed, on tributaries or in parks or on agricultural land, where the calculus looks different... where removal or modification might restore significant ecological function at manageable cost? What would it mean to manage the existing reservoirs in ways that are more attentive to the downstream river communities they affect... more sensitive to seasonal variation, more deliberate about sediment release, more conscious of the organisms that depend on floodplain dynamics?

And here in Spartanburg, there is that small dam in Duncan Park, which is not going to reshape the regional ecology of the Piedmont one way or the other. But it is the kind of thing worth looking at carefully, precisely because it is local, legible, and close enough to walk to (one of the most beautiful walks in Spartanburg, I’d argue). What is that dam doing to the creek’s sediment load? What does it change about flood dynamics further downstream? Which organisms can move through that stretch of water, and which cannot?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the kind of questions that environmental engineers, ecologists, and municipal managers answer when given the opportunity and the resources. And they are worth asking, not because the answer will certainly be to remove the dam, but because the habit of asking, of noticing that the still water is the result of a decision rather than a fact of nature, begins to change the way a person moves through a landscape.

There is a passage I have been sitting with from A Secret History of Christianity, Mark Vernon’s reading of William Blake and the participatory tradition, in which he describes a certain kind of attention as moving us to the threshold of imagination... a place where we are not merely looking at the world from outside it but beginning to participate in its self-disclosure. I find this language useful for what I am trying to describe in how we relate to rivers, creeks, and the water systems we have inherited and will pass on to our children and future generations.

The Klamath project is, among other things, an act of imaginative recovery. It is a willingness to remember that the river had a life before the dams, and to ask whether some of that life can be returned. That act of remembering is ecological, legal, and political, but it is also, at its root, a change in how people are relating to the river, or a move from utility to participation, from management to something more like responsibility.

That does not require removing every dam. It requires something prior to that decision, which is a kind of attention (patient, honest, local) to what the water is doing and what it is being prevented from doing.

In Spartanburg, that attention might begin with a walk through Duncan Park, pausing at that small dam, and staying long enough to notice the creek on both sides of it.

Further reading and sources:

Klamath River Renewal Corporation

South Carolina Department of Environmental Services, River Basin Planning

American Rivers, Dam Removal Program

Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive? (W. W. Norton, 2025)

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013)

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Pantheon/Vintage, 1996)

Mark Vernon, A Secret History of Christianity (Christian Alternative Books, 2019)

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907); Matter and Memory (1896)

Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy (1917)

There are moments when a place begins to notice itself. Not in the abstract sense of policy or planning documents, but in the more immediate and embodied way that happens when people show up, sit together for hours, and refuse to leave until they are heard. That happened this week in Spartanburg (Fox Carolina).

The County Council meeting lasted over 3 hours, and the room remained full. People waited through agenda items that had nothing to do with why they came, holding their place for public comment, staying attentive long past the point where most meetings empty out. Many of them were there because of data centers and the growing sense that something significant is unfolding in this region without the kind of shared visibility that meaningful decisions require.

What’s important here is that data centers were not even formally on the agenda. And yet they surfaced anyway, through side conversations, through tension in the room, through the accumulation of questions that had not found a place to land in official channels. By the time public comment finally opened late into the evening (I imagine the County Council officials had hoped for a thinner crowd as they moved through the more tedious business at hand), the tone shifted toward something more focused and deliberate. People were paying attention in a sustained way that felt different.

What People Are Actually Asking

If you listen carefully to the video linked here and the news report, the questions being asked are not especially complicated and are not driven by simple resistance to technology. They are rooted in time and in the lived experience of inhabiting a place.

Some of the proposed agreements tied to these projects span decades, with tax structures and infrastructure commitments extending 40 years into the future. That is not an abstract horizon. That is something that shapes the lives of multiple generations in a community.

There is also a noticeable shift in who is showing up. Meetings that once drew only a handful of regular attendees are now filled with residents seeking to understand what is happening, asking questions about water, energy, land use, and governance. That change in attention matters as much as any vote that might eventually take place.

What is emerging is not simply opposition to a single project. It is a recalibration of perception. People are beginning to notice the systems that quietly shape their daily lives, systems that have long remained out of view.

The Ecology Beneath the Conversation

One of the things I keep returning to in my own work in the Religion and Ecology PhD Program is that ecology is not limited to forests, rivers, or species. It is about relationships that persist over time, often below the threshold of everyday awareness.

Infrastructure is ecological in this sense. Water systems, electrical grids, land-use patterns, and industrial developments all participate in a single web of relationships. Data centers, especially at the scale being proposed across the Southeast, are not neutral additions to a landscape. They are metabolically intensive systems that draw on water, energy, and land in ways that extend far beyond their physical footprint.

Much of that metabolism remains hidden, and that hiddenness is part of what people are responding to. The concern is not only about the presence of these facilities, but about the opacity surrounding them. When residents ask for transparency, they are not simply asking for more documents or technical briefings. They are asking to be included within the time horizon of decisions that will shape their environment for decades.

Patterns, Not Projects

Another detail that continues to surface in these conversations is that people are already thinking beyond a single proposal. There is an awareness that one project rarely remains one project, as we’re seeing two more proposed data centers now in Spartanburg.

Industrial patterns tend to replicate. One site becomes two, two becomes a cluster, and, over time, a new kind of landscape emerges, layered atop existing ecological and social systems. By the time that pattern is fully visible, much of it has already been set in motion.

This is part of why the intensity of public engagement matters right now. These are early moments, even if they do not feel early. There is still, however narrow, space for communities to shape how these patterns unfold.

Staying in the Room

There is something almost liturgical about a meeting that lasts for hours and yet remains full. People sit through proceedings that test their patience, not because they expect immediate results, but because being present becomes part of the work itself.

Speaking during public comment is one piece of that. But so is listening. So is watching how decisions are framed, how information is shared or withheld, how time is structured within the meeting itself. This is how a community begins to understand its own processes, not in theory, but through lived participation and shifting perceptions.

A Different Kind of Development Question

The question before Spartanburg is not simply whether data centers are good or bad. That framing is too narrow for what is actually at stake.

The deeper question is whether communities can cultivate forms of attention that match the scale of the systems now arriving in their midst. Whether decision-making can slow down enough to include those who will live with the consequences. Whether ecological costs, not just economic projections, can be held within the same field of consideration.

Recent decisions to delay or reject incentives tied to large data center proposals suggest that something is shifting, even if the long-term trajectory remains uncertain.

What happened this week was not a resolution. It was something quieter, but in some ways more important.

People stayed.

And in staying, they began to see more clearly what has been here all along.

There is a black walnut tree in the backyard of our house here in Spartanburg. Every September, it drops its fruit, and the thick green husks split open, staining the ground (and the fingers of our children) dark. The squirrels know the timing better than we do. The tree has been doing this longer than anyone on the street has been alive.

But according to a growing body of research, it has been doing something else during that time too... something largely invisible and harder to name. Beneath the soil, networks of fungal threads connect the roots of the walnut to other plants and organisms in ways scientists are still working to describe. And the question those networks keep raising is not simply biological. It is perceptual. It is asking us whether we know how to pay attention to what is right beneath us.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers at Princeton University working across institutions in the United States and Europe published new findings on mycorrhizal fungi (the microscopic threads that link plant roots underground). Using imaging techniques refined over several years, they mapped not only how the architecture of these underground networks forms, but also the fluid motions occurring inside fungal tubes roughly one-tenth the diameter of a human hair, through which nutrients flow back and forth throughout the organism. These networks move carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus across remarkable distances through the soil, allowing plants and fungi to exchange resources through a shared infrastructure that predates our street, our city, and the entire textile economy that built it.

As one researcher put it simply, there are all these things happening underground that no one ever thinks about because they cannot see them.

That invisibility is part of what makes this hard to talk about in practical terms. We tend to extend moral consideration to what we can perceive... and the soil beneath the tulip poplars and white oaks lining the creek corridors through Spartanburg is not legible to us in ordinary ways. But legibility is not the same as presence.

The forests surrounding Greenville and Spartanburg sit at a remarkable ecological threshold. The southern Appalachians are considered one of the most biologically diverse regions of the temperate world, according to the South Carolina Native Plant Society, and the Piedmont foothills carry that diversity into the clay-heavy, iron-stained soils that anyone who has gardened here knows immediately. Those soils formed over millions of years as the ancient Appalachians weathered and eroded, leaving behind a mineral complexity that still shapes which species grow where, which fungi partner with which roots, which relationships persist, and which collapse under pressure.

The forests here also carry a complicated history. The mid-twentieth-century abandonment of row crops allowed forests to return to the Piedmont, though not the oak and hickory that typified earlier centuries. Loblolly pine colonized the abandoned cotton fields first. Sweetgum, tulip poplar, and red maple followed. The visible forest changed, but the deeper processes in the soil continued shaping recovery in ways the canopy did not reveal. Seedbanks persisted underground while fungal communities survived in fragments. Mycorrhizal networks that had supported older forests were interrupted but not entirely erased. When we walk through Croft State Park today, or along the Pacolet River corridor, we are moving through forests still rebuilding themselves after those earlier disturbances. The soil carries those histories in its structure and microbial communities. In that sense, the forest remembers... not through anything like human memory, but through ecological processes unfolding across decades.

Plants and fungi developed a partnership lasting over 400 million years, one that may have enabled plants to colonize dry landmasses and transform them into prolific habitats for terrestrial life (Springer). The relationship is not incidental to the forest, but is constitutional. Mycorrhizal fungal networks linking the roots of trees facilitate inter-tree communication via resource sharing, defense signaling, and kin recognition, influencing what researchers describe as sophisticated behavior among neighboring plants (ResearchGate). Some researchers have gone further, exploring what a recent paper in Symbiosis called “extended plant cognition” and the possibility that plants benefit from the cognition and behavior of mycorrhizal fungi to enhance their own survival, including foraging complementarity, expanded perception of the below-ground environment, and shaping the mycorrhizal community to meet survival needs.

The language here is careful and contested, and it should be. This is not the same as saying trees think in the way we do. But the underlying ecological picture is not nothing. Responsiveness within a forest does not appear to reside solely within individual organisms. It emerges through relationships linking plants, fungi, and soil communities in ways that begin to look less like isolated biological transactions and more like what phenomenologists might call a field of distributed perception... awareness that is not located anywhere in particular but present throughout the whole.

I have been exploring this idea in my own writing as ecological intentionality (the practice of attentive presence that recognizes humans as participants in, not observers of, the living world). What the mycorrhizal research keeps returning me to is how thoroughly that participatory logic runs through the forest itself. The sweetgums and beeches, the stands of loblolly along the old field margins, the black walnut in the backyard... each of these participates in a network of exchange that extends through the soil and across time in ways that our usual categories of “individual” and “organism” struggle to hold.

This matters for more than philosophical reasons here in the Upstate. As I wrote earlier this year about Project Spero (the proposed AI data center at the Tyger River Industrial Park), the questions it raised were ultimately about more than megawatts and gallons of water. They were about what kinds of relationships between land, water, and intelligence we are willing to normalize in this place. The project was eventually withdrawn after months of community opposition (a moment of civic attention worth studying carefully). But the broader pressure it represented has not disappeared. Proposals like it will keep arriving in communities like ours, asking us to decide how much of the landscape’s capacity (including its soil capacity, its fungal capacity, its slow-built ecological memory) should be redirected toward sustaining planetary-scale computation whose primary benefits flow elsewhere.

The question for a forest, if we can ask it that way, is not whether development will come. It is whether the networks beneath the soil can persist through what arrives. Those networks are not infinitely resilient. Mycorrhizal interactions play a foundational role in global patterns and structures of forest diversity, with mycorrhizal tree type systematically mediating the strength of competitive and cooperative dynamics within communities (Nature). What that means at the scale of a particular watershed is that the diversity and responsiveness of a forest depend not only on which species are present aboveground, but on the web of relationships in the soil (many of which are species-specific, many of which take decades to establish, and all of which can be severed quickly).

Donna Haraway has a word I keep returning to in this context, one I thought about recently when writing about the first signs of spring… composting. The idea that life continues through processes of breakdown, recombination, and transformation. Nothing simply disappears. Things are continually folded back into the living systems that surround them. The brown leaves underfoot right now on the trails at Croft carry last year’s sunlight and last year’s rain into the soil that is already shaping what grows next spring. The forest floor is composting memory into future life.

The black walnut in our backyard does not need me to make this argument. It has been making its own version of it for longer than the street has had a name, through a language of carbon, phosphorus, and fungal exchange that we are only beginning to have instruments sensitive enough to partially read.

The question is not whether that language is happening. The question is whether we are willing to develop the kind of attention it requires... and whether we can build that attention into the civic and ecological decisions we are already making about this place.

More Reading…

Simard, Suzanne W., Ryan, Teresa L., and Perry, David A. “Response to Questions About Common Mycorrhizal Networks.” Frontiers in Forests and Global Change (January 2025). https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/forests-and-global-change/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2024.1512518/full

Ma, Xiaofan and Limpens, Erik. “Networking via Mycorrhizae.” Frontiers in Agricultural Science and Engineering 12, no. 1 (2025): 37–46. https://journal.hep.com.cn/fase/EN/10.15302/J-FASE-2024578

“Research Reveals the Underground Traffic Between Fungi and Plants.” Princeton University, March 25, 2025. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2025/03/25/research-reveals-underground-traffic-between-fungi-and-plants

Leyval, C. et al. “How Mycorrhizal Fungi Could Extend Plant Cognitive Processes.” Symbiosis (2025). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13199-025-01065-y

Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) — Global Mycorrhizal Mapping Initiative: https://spun.earth

South Carolina Native Plant Society — Upstate Chapter https://scnps.org/upstate

Over the last few months, something unusual happened here in Spartanburg. For a brief moment, a large number of people began paying close attention to something that usually remains invisible... the infrastructure that quietly shapes daily life. Water systems, electrical capacity, land use, and industrial development. The complicated negotiations between local governments and corporations are rarely seen up close by most residents.

The proposed Project Spero data center forced those questions into the open.

At first, it sounded like many economic development announcements do. Promises of investment. Jobs (just 50). Future growth. The kind of language communities across the South have become familiar with when large industrial or technological projects are proposed. A $3 billion AI-focused computing facility at a site at the Tyger River Industrial Park. Projections of tax revenue stretching across decades.

But as more information surfaced, people started asking different questions.

How much water would a facility like this require each day? Where would that water come from? What would the electrical demand mean for the grid... for neighboring households and businesses already navigating seasonal strain? Who ultimately carries the long-term ecological cost when projects like this arrive in smaller communities?

None of these are simple questions, but they are the right ones to ask before the concrete is poured.

Public meetings filled up. Residents started reading infrastructure proposals and tax incentive agreements. Engineers, environmental advocates, and ordinary citizens began talking with one another about aquifers, electrical load capacity, cooling systems, and the long-term implications of siting AI-scale computation in the Carolina Piedmont. The developer’s assurances that the facility would be “self-sufficient” and that its water impact would be “negligible” were met not with deference but with follow-up questions. People wanted to know what those words actually meant in gallons, in megawatts, in the memory of the land.

That is a different kind of civic engagement than we usually see around large development proposals.

Recently, another piece of local news arrived that belongs, at least loosely, to the same season. Manning Lynch, who has chaired Spartanburg County Council since 2019, announced that he will not seek a third term. He cited family, construction projects, and new chapters.

It would be too simple to read this as a direct consequence of Project Spero. Political careers are shaped by pressures most of us never see clearly. Lynch was already facing a challenger. And the council’s eventual “no” vote on the tax incentive only came after state legislators began weighing in... not simply because residents packed the meeting rooms, though they did.

Still, it is worth pausing over the fuller picture. Lynch has spent decades in public service here, including nearly three decades on the Sanitary Sewer District Commission. Spartanburg Water named a wastewater treatment facility in his honor. He is, in other words, someone whose public life has been intertwined with the infrastructure of this place. The Project Spero debate was also, at its core, an infrastructure debate... about water, about capacity, about what the land here is being asked to carry. That those two things collided during his final term is not a simple story. But it is a layered one.

What the Project Spero discussions revealed, more than anything else, is that this community is capable of engaging seriously with complicated questions when given enough information and enough time. That capacity doesn’t disappear when a particular project is withdrawn.

And the story isn’t finished. Across the Southeast right now, rural and mid-sized communities are increasingly becoming the physical hosts for the infrastructure of the digital age. Massive data centers, energy-intensive computing clusters, and AI facilities require enormous amounts of electricity and water. Much of this infrastructure is being built far from the cities where the technology companies are headquartered, in places like Spartanburg, where land is available, where incentives are offered, where the questions can sometimes be managed before they become public.

What we witnessed here suggests that dynamic is shifting.

The questions raised in Spartanburg are not unique to this county. They are part of a much larger conversation unfolding across the country... and already spreading to places like Marion County, where similar proposals are beginning to surface near the Pee Dee. Who gets to decide how local water and energy are used? How do communities balance economic opportunity with long-term ecological responsibility? What does it actually mean for a landscape to participate in sustaining planetary-scale computation?

There are no clean answers. But something valuable has already happened here, regardless of what comes next.

For a little while, a community remembered how to pay attention to the place it inhabits... to the water lines, transmission corridors, and treatment facilities that make daily life possible. That kind of attention is slow to build and easy to lose. It is also, in the end, the only real foundation for the decisions still ahead.

Project Spero may return in another form. Other proposals certainly will.

But the capacity to ask careful questions about them... now belongs to the community.

A few days ago, I noticed the red maple beginning to flower in our yard here in Spartanburg. Their blossoms appear before the leaves… small bursts of red scattered through otherwise gray woods. If you walk, bike, or drive past them quickly, you might miss them entirely. But once you see them, you realize they are everywhere.

Early spring in the Carolina Piedmont does not arrive dramatically. It was a Long December (and there's reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last) or The Long Winters, depending on your preference.

There is no single day when winter ends and spring begins. Instead, it creeps in quietly through small changes that only become visible if you have been paying attention through the colder months.

The woods are still mostly brown.

Last year’s leaves cover the forest floor in thick layers. The grasses are flattened and dull from winter cold. Fallen branches lie where storms dropped them months ago. At first glance, everything appears dormant, even “lifeless” to borrow a phrase that I don’t give much meaning to these days.

But the browning is not the absence of life. It is the preparation for it. To get to Hildegard of Bingen’s “greening” or viriditas, you must first have the browning. Or as Carl Sagan reminds us in Cosmos, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

We are constantly inventing the universe with our perception. This is something that living in the Piedmont teaches if you spend enough time outside. The green explosion of April and May does not emerge from “nowhere” (another term I’ve found myself discarding the last few years). It grows out of the long, quiet work of decomposition… leaves breaking down, soil organisms stirring, nutrients cycling back through the ground.

In other words, spring depends on the brown as much as apple pie depends on the basic atomic structures that we’ve just begun to glimpse and tried to record on our cuneiform tablets of the periodic table.

Donna Haraway has a phrase I often come back to when thinking about ecological life… composting. She uses it as a way of describing how life continues through processes of breakdown, recombination, and transformation. Nothing simply disappears. Things are continually folded back into the living systems that surround them.

The forest floor in late winter is one of the best teachers of this idea.

Every brown leaf underfoot is a kind of memory. It carries the story of last year’s sunlight, last year’s rain, last year’s growing season. The carrier of memory from light-eating organisms with their own stories and tales to tell. As those leaves decompose, that memory does not vanish. It becomes part of the soil that will nourish the next generation of plants, fungi, insects, and trees.

The greening of spring is therefore not a fresh beginning.

It is the visible result of countless acts of composting that have been happening quietly all winter.

Haraway reminds us that living well on Earth requires learning how to “stay with the trouble.” That phrase is often interpreted as a call to face the ecological or political or social crises of our time honestly. But I think it also invites us to notice the more subtle forms of resilience (and resistance) and renewal that happen constantly in the more-than-human world.

The Piedmont in late February and early March is full of these quiet lessons.

The soil softens slightly after winter rains. Birds begin testing out new songs in the early morning. Small green shoots appear in places that looked completely dormant only days and weeks before. Even the light itself begins to shift, lingering a little longer in the evenings despite our human inclination to set our clocks back an hour to compensate for the cyclical shifts in our planet’s axial tilts and wobbles.

None of these changes are dramatic on their own.

But together they signal that the landscape is already moving toward another season of growth.

And that growth is possible only because of the long season of browning that came before it.

The composting of memory is happening everywhere around us. Leaves returning to soil. Fallen logs becoming habitat for insects and fungi. Nutrients cycling through systems far older and wiser than any human economy. Paying attention to these processes changes how we understand both time and hope.

Spring in the Carolina Piedmont is not a sudden miracle. It is the patient unfolding of relationships that have been working beneath the surface all along.

If we learn to see that work… the browning, the breaking down, the composting… then the greening of spring becomes something more than a seasonal change.

It becomes a reminder that renewal is rarely separate from decay. Often, it grows directly out of it.

If you spend any amount of time paying attention to the world, news, or social media feeds, it is obviously difficult to justify optimism. But I want to use the context of the ecological crisis we face (not just environmental, but ecology in the broader sense of the term, meaning our study of home and how we relate to it) to think about optimism not as a “hope” but as something deeper and transformative. This topic comes up so much in my studies, conversations at church, Reddit posts I read, etc.

The ecological crises we face are real and accelerating. Species loss continues at a staggering rate. Climate disruptions are becoming more visible and more costly. Our oceans are changing with acidification, polar instabilities, and the Gulf Stream showing signs of weakening. Political systems across the world feel brittle and polarized while we drop bombs and kill children to address “problems.” Technological change and AI are unfolding faster than our cultural or ethical frameworks can adapt. Even the hopeful language of “solutions” sometimes feels thin against the scale of the problems we face.

It is understandable that many people feel drawn to some form of resignation. The mood of our time often oscillates between anxious urgency and quiet despair.

But lately I’ve been thinking that optimism isn’t the opposite of realism. Instead, optimism may depend on something deeper… imagination.

Not imagination in the sense of fantasy or wishful thinking. What I mean is the ability to perceive possibilities that are not yet fully visible within the present order of things.

This kind of imagination has always been a driver of cultural change. Long before societies shift in practice, they shift in perception. People begin to see the world differently. They begin to tell different stories about what reality is and what human life is for.

Much of the ecological crisis we face today is rooted in a particular story we tell and spread about the world. For several centuries, Western industrial society has tended to imagine the Earth as a collection of resources existing primarily for human use. Forests are timber inventories. Rivers are units of water allocation. Land becomes real estate to be bought and sold. Even the atmosphere becomes something that can be modeled primarily as a carbon sink while we apply more sunscreen.

Within that story, the natural world is fundamentally passive. It is a background stage on which human economic and technological activity unfolds.

But there have always been alternative ways of seeing.

Writers like Wendell Berry have spent decades reminding us that the land is not an inert backdrop to human life but a living community in which we participate. Berry often points out that good farming, good culture, and good imagination are inseparable. We cannot care for the places we inhabit unless we can imagine ourselves as belonging to them.

Similarly, thinkers like Joanna Macy have argued that what she calls the Great Turning begins with a shift in perception. The modern industrial growth society is built on the illusion that humans exist as isolated individuals competing for control of a passive world. But when we begin to perceive the depth of our interdependence with other beings and systems, new forms of action become possible.

This shift in perception is not merely intellectual. It is experiential.

It happens when we recognize that a forest is not simply a collection of trees but a living network of relationships. It happens when we realize that a river flowing through a town is not just a resource to be managed but part of the community’s own body. It happens when we understand that our food, our breath, our culture, and even our thoughts emerge from a vast web of relations extending far beyond the boundaries of the human.

In my own work, I have been exploring this through the idea of ecological intentionality. Phenomenology reminds us that consciousness is not something sealed inside the skull. Our awareness is always directed outward, into a world already structured by relationships, meanings, and histories.

When our perception shifts, our possibilities shift with it.

Optimism, then, is not simply the belief that everything will turn out fine. It is the conviction that reality is richer and more open than the narrow frameworks through which we often perceive it.

If the ecological crisis is partly a crisis of perception, then imagination becomes a practical and even ethical skill. We need the ability to imagine forms of life that are not organized around endless extraction and consumption. We need to imagine communities that measure success not only in economic growth but in ecological health and relational well-being.

And we need to imagine ourselves differently.

Not as isolated individuals navigating a neutral landscape, but as participants in a living world that has been unfolding for billions of years and will continue long after we are gone, as trees, soil, and our oceans will be here in some condition long after we’re all gone from this mortal life.

This kind of imagination does not ignore the seriousness of the moment we are in. In fact, it requires facing that seriousness honestly. The challenges before us are immense.

But imagination reminds us that history is not static.

Human societies have reinvented themselves many times before. Cultural assumptions that once seemed permanent have often dissolved within a generation or two. Entire ways of living have emerged that earlier generations would have struggled even to conceive.

Optimism grows in that space.

It grows in the recognition that the future is not simply an extrapolation of present trends. It is something that emerges from the interplay of perception, imagination, and action.

And those capacities are still very much alive.

Sometimes optimism begins not with a grand technological breakthrough or a sweeping political reform, but with something quieter. A new way of seeing a landscape. A deeper sense of kinship with other beings. A small community choosing to organize its life around care rather than extraction.

Those shifts may appear small from a distance. But historically, they are often where the most important transformations begin. If the crises of our time require courage, they also require imagination.

And perhaps optimism, at its most honest, is simply the decision to keep that imagination alive.

I’d be curious how others are thinking about this right now. Where are you finding signs of imagination in your own communities or landscapes? Are there writers, thinkers, or traditions that help you keep a sense of possibility alive in a time when the future can feel uncertain?

If you’d like, share your thoughts below or send me a note. These kinds of conversations are part of how we learn to see differently together.

Here’s a reading list if you’re interested in exploring this thought more as well:

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/the-unsettling-of-america/
Berry’s classic reflection on land, culture, and imagination. Few writers have done more to challenge the industrial view of the Earth as merely a set of resources.

Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy
https://www.activehope.info/
A powerful exploration of the emotional and imaginative work required to face ecological crisis without falling into despair.

Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future
https://www.bellarmine.edu/bearberry/the-great-work/
Berry argues that the central task of our time is the transition from an industrial growth society to a mutually enhancing relationship between humans and the Earth.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/321482/the-spell-of-the-sensuous-by-david-abram/
A beautiful phenomenological exploration of perception, embodiment, and the living world.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass
Kimmerer’s work brings Indigenous ecological knowledge, botany, and storytelling into conversation in ways that open new imaginative possibilities for relating to land.

Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy
https://archive.org/details/stein-problem-of-empathy
A foundational phenomenological text exploring how we come to know and participate in the experience of others.

Joanna Macy, “The Great Turning” (essay)
https://greatturning.org/vision/
A concise introduction to Macy’s idea that our era is defined by a civilizational shift in how humans perceive and relate to the Earth.