The Places I Used to Love

Every morning I bounce three minutes along a dirt road to the office, weave up two antique staircases and around overflowing sacks of wool, place my adult lunchbox down beside copies of Strega Nona and Blueberries for Sal, and then head outside to grapple with a goat. Some workplaces make the rookies brew coffee or organize briefs; this one assigns us milking duty. Today, though I hate to admit it, the goat got the best of me. After squirming, kicking, rocking, chewing on, and trying to climb off the milking stand for thirty minutes (did you know it takes a long time to milk a goat if you haven’t got Olympic forearms?), my dear lady friend finally leapt for freedom, knocking the pail to the ground and getting herself hopelessly tangled in the process. I gave up. Fine! It wasn’t yet 9am, and I had already been bested by a pink-collared ruminant named Wren. Still, I know that when 4 o’clock rolls around, there again we will meet in the arena, scowling as we fulfill our destinies.

One goat is but a drop in the bucket in a sprawling organic produce and dairy operation like this. I run our coastal farm’s visitor education programs, but since I am paid to know everything, I also help the fruit and vegetable team and the dairy apprentices. Last week, I tagged along for bovine milking duty, thinking I’d be okay because I had, after all, gotten to know the underside of a goat. I was wrong. The scale of industrial dairy - even on a relatively tiny family farm like this one - is mind-blowing. Dangling automatic vacuum milkers, huge curving ceiling pipes, oceans of towels and iodine, drain plugs, forty half-ton Holsteins and Jerseys lined up calmly in a queue, chewing their cud as the Waitress soundtrack blares from the Alexa in the corner; I had been transported to another dimension. The senior apprentice, a badass nineteen-year-old Nebraskan named Grace, looked phenomenal in cowboy boots, a big hat, and bleach-stained denim with two leather-sheathed knives and a pair of pliers on her belt. Next to her, I felt exceedingly young and dumb, an enthusiastic yet ignorant cheese and ice cream consumer.

Despite my insecurities, I was doing well until one of the Holstein heifers that had given birth earlier that afternoon sidled up to my milking station. It’s important to clarify that we milk from behind, not from the side. It’s also important to note that this new mom still had the bloody, slimy, human-length placenta dangling from her back end, among other substances. If you have never been face-to-face with such a thing, I do not recommend it. I had to call Grace over to painstakingly saw it in half so that we could attach the milkers to our dear Céline (as many mammals do, she was producing a nutrient-rich substance called the colostrum, which we bottle-feed to her calf). My housemates found me two hours later, standing in the kitchen, staring blankly at my container of Cabot Vanilla Greek Yogurt. I still eat dairy, and I think it’s incredibly important to support your local farmers if you can. I just know now how the sausage gets made, so to speak, and it is something I can never unsee. Nevertheless, I feel much more connected to an intimate process that has been around since humans first domesticated goats 10,000 years ago. But how much longer will it last?

It’s a heartbreaking trend in my life that I tend to live, work, and teach in and about places, ecosystems, and lifestyles that are disappearing. It was romantic to study history in school; it is less so to watch it happen in real time. After college graduation, I moved to the Florida Keys to teach marine biology. My island, Pigeon Key, was five acres of historic buildings strewn on old limestone sticking a few inches up out of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, due to a combination of factors including sinking tectonic plates, the Keys are now ground zero for the impacts of sea level rise. The ocean around Key West rose four inches from 2000 to 2017 and is projected to rise another twelve by 2040. I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation until we had an organization come out to replant mangroves along Pigeon Key’s edges. They had used land measurements from a few years prior to determine how many seedlings to bring along, and our island had shrunk so much in that timeframe that they had hundreds of extra trees, even at the lowest tide. That same month, Keys scientists decided to come together to try to save specific strips of the coral reef - the world’s third largest - from bleaching, pollution, and habitat loss instead of individual reef species, so there can be at least something cohesive left to attract the snorkeling and diving money when everything else is gone.

My next stop was Southern California, a crowded, exhausted place of air pollution, drought, wildfires, and ceaseless human expansion. I trained as a naturalist and instructor on both land and water; I learned that while in better shape than the East Coast for sea level rise, the region faces other problems. We studied bygone otters, urchin barrens, disappearing kelp ecosystems, leaking ocean-floor DDT barrels, bycatch, oil spills, barges, light pollution, migratory pattern shifts, and islands of trash caught in swirling deep-sea gyres. The most heartbreaking was the news that ocean acidification - the decreasing pH of seawater due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - means that creatures that make their own shells or exoskeletons to survive (mollusks and crustaceans, for example) are building thinner, weaker homes and protective coverings. Since they provide the foundation of many marine food webs, widespread collapse is possible.

On land, too, things are changing quickly. Catalina Island, where I worked, is a towering spit of oceanic crust that sat pristine for millions of years. Now, it is overrun with invasive fennel, black mustard, horehound, and mule deer, among other organisms that have tagged along with European colonization. On a solo hike around the tip of the island, I came across an old sign demarcating a meadow of native wildflowers in the memory of some long-passed conservationist. The entire field was now a no-man’s-land of relentless, tangled, choking invasive plants. Nothing else could live there. Both Southern California’s famous Torrey Pines and Catalina’s rare Malva Rosa trees are almost all gone as the rivers dry up and the desert turns to tract housing and the cliffs continue to fall into the sea, and most days it feels like there is nothing I can do about it.

And then, after spending a year falling in love with the disappearing beauty of the West, I moved to coastal New England and found a new cornucopia of issues, this time agricultural. Like everywhere, Maine deals with erosion, invasives, habitat loss, and anthropogenic climate change. However, its large rural population is still unusually dependent on the land and sea. As the ocean warms, the Atlantic lobsters march north towards Canada, whisking thousands of livelihoods away with them. Given the collapse of the fisheries, there have been recent shifts towards aquaculture instead - our farm even researches whether growing and feeding seaweed to cows reduces their methane emissions - but that is, of course, dependent on consistent cold-water growing conditions. Farmers, by and large, are old and getting older, without a willing replacement generation. They drown in debt as the land drowns in monoculture. Kids don’t know where their food comes from, topsoil thins out and washes away, and farmer suicide rates remain double to triple the national average. Small dairy farming especially is going the way of the passenger pigeon: there were 4,578 dairy farms in Maine in 1954, 286 in 2017, and 176 in 2022. It’s not that America’s appetite for milk and cheese is decreasing; it’s that family-owned farms are forced to close or consolidate into large-scale operations to stay afloat. The cutthroat processes of mechanization and monopolization are ultimately worse for the farmers, the soil, the community, and the consumers alike, and yet they accelerate on.

As an environmental and agricultural educator, I am starting to become haunted by what I do. What’s the point of learning, loving, and teaching about these places if they’re dying? Any ecologist and farmer worth their salt knows that change is the driving factor behind adaptation and, therefore, species survival. Change and loss and grief are essential to life itself. I know this. I know that nothing that can’t keep up can possibly last, but I love Pigeon Key’s hundred-year-old bunkhouses and Catalina Island’s foxes and quails and flowers. I love the daily rituals of my small dairy farm in Maine. For thousands of years, fields like this and the people on them have been entirely subject to the rhythms of seasons, tides, udders, roosters, and rain. There’s a sense of constancy and responsibility here that overrides human whims and emotions. Even if I am frizzy, itchy, irritated, uncaffeinated - guess what? I still have to milk, just as the farmers still have to water the vegetables, collect the eggs, and herd the cattle from one pasture to another. Things bloom, shrivel, freeze, and melt in their own time, and we must have the patience and fortitude to work alongside them. Incidentally, I think it’s why I love the ocean so much. Its steadfastness settles me in a time that’s too fast-paced for my soul. There’s something here that feels like forever, and that must be why it’s so jarring to accept its rapid dissolution.

I read somewhere that despite all our human accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. We owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. At the Henry A. Wallace rest stop off Interstate 80 in Iowa on my cross-country drive, I learned that the Hawkeye state, known for its ‘black gold,’ has lost an average of almost seven inches of topsoil in the last hundred-and-fifty-odd years. Rainfall distributions are erratic and storm patterns are shifting. It’s a shame to me that the environmental and agricultural worlds are often at odds with one another, since they face many of the same stressors. I know that there is an argument that now is more important than ever to do the work that I do, especially in the crossover space, but it’s hard. I do believe that the planet will spin on. But it’s going to spin on without the places I used to love.

Things you can do:

-Replace some of your grass with native plants

-Sign up for a CSA from a local farm

-Start a compost pile

-Support a climate advocacy group like the Chesapeake Climate Action Network

-Watch this: Daily Crisis Farm

My coworkers watch a double rainbow over our Jersey herd.