{"id":60601,"date":"2025-01-31T19:40:01","date_gmt":"2025-01-31T19:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/agriculture\/in-bad-naturalist-an-author-settles-on-a-mountain-top-and-tries-to-farm\/"},"modified":"2025-01-31T19:40:01","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T19:40:01","slug":"in-bad-naturalist-an-author-settles-on-a-mountain-top-and-tries-to-farm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=60601","title":{"rendered":"In Bad Naturalist, an Author Settles on a Mountain Top and Tries to Farm"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p dir=\"ltr\" style=\"line-height: 1.295;margin-top: 0pt;margin-bottom: 8pt\"><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;font-family: Arial;color: #000000;background-color: transparent;font-weight: bold;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;text-decoration: none;vertical-align: baseline\">Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\" style=\"line-height: 1.295;margin-top: 0pt;margin-bottom: 8pt\"><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;font-family: Arial;color: #000000;background-color: transparent;font-weight: 400;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;text-decoration: none;vertical-align: baseline\">We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. 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As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at <\/span><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;font-family: Arial;color: #000000;vertical-align: baseline\"><a href=\"https:\/\/modernfarmer.com\/cdn-cgi\/l\/email-protection\" class=\"__cf_email__\" data-cfemail=\"a6c3c2cfd2c9d4e6cbc9c2c0c7d4cbc3d488c5c9cb\">[email\u00a0protected]<\/a>.<\/span><\/div>\n<div>\n<p class=\"byline\">by Paula Whyman, Modern Farmer <br \/>January 30, 2025<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"republication-tracker-tool-shareable-content\">\n<p class=\"&quot;byline&quot;\">by Paula Whyman, Modern Farmer <br \/>January 30, 2025<\/p>\n<p><em>Years ago, author Paula Whyman left her DC-area home in search of a rural spot, hoping to get back to nature. What she found was 200 acres of old farmland atop a Virginia mountain. Despite having little experience in gardening or conservation, Whyman put down roots on the mountain top, and chronicled her efforts in her new book <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hachettebookgroup.com\/titles\/paula-whyman\/bad-naturalist\/9781643262178\/?lens=timber-press\">Bad Naturalist<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>The following passages are excerpted from Bad Naturalist, and have been lightly edited for length.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wherever people go, they reshape the land, and on this mountain it\u2019s no different. Two hundred years ago, many of these hillsides were timbered for orchards. Around forty years ago, most of the orchards were replaced with cattle pasture. In the past decade, farmers stopped grazing cattle on the mountain. Haying eventually stopped, and mowing stopped, too. For a while now the land has been subject to its own rules; once people stopped managing it, it began to reshape itself. An old pasture filled in with blackberry. The forest encroached on the meadow, pioneer poplar, locust, and sassafras saplings taking the lead. A hayfield filled with hardy natives\u2014and with weeds. Invasive shrubs climbed up and over a hillside, relentlessly expanding their range. Rather than a typical farm, the mountaintop looks unkempt, uninhabited, overgrown. The tendency might be to leave such a place alone\u2014if humans stop interfering, nature will do what nature does, and take over. The land didn\u2019t need me; it would rewild itself\u2014right? Not exactly. Once a place has been disturbed by humans, the only way to repair it is to keep disturbing it, but in the right way. The tricky part is figuring out what that means.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">****<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the Southeast, grasslands have declined by 90 percent. In Virginia, where this stunning, scraggly mountaintop is located, the Piedmont prairie, the native grassland community that once dominated the region east of the Blue Ridge mountains, is considered extinct; only small remnants hidden in tiny pockets around the state survive. With those numbers in mind, you can begin to understand why conservation of privately owned forests and grasslands is critical.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Back in 1962, even before MacArthur and Wilson had published The Theory of Island Biogeography, an independent researcher named Frank Preston declared that \u201cit is not possible to preserve in a state or national park a complete replica on a small scale of the fauna and flora of a much larger area.\u201d Parks alone can\u2019t begin to help us ward off the worst effects of climate change, human development, the influx of invasive species, and other pressures that endanger biodiversity. Even if we put all the public lands together\u2014all the national, state, and local parks and nature preserves\u2014without the participation of private landowners, our parks would end up becoming species museums showcasing a handful of plants and animals, those lucky enough to survive the isolation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Standing on the mountain, with all those acres of rolling hills unfolding in front of me, my goal to plant a small patch of meadow seemed timid. This land was big\u2014I should think bigger! What if I could return this mountaintop to its natural glory? It would serve as a living example of how to restore native meadows! Pollinators would come from all around! I pictured sheep grazing on one of the hillsides. Just a handful of sheep. I\u2019d make sheep-milk cheese. (I can\u2019t eat dairy. I was clearly losing my mind.) I\u2019d put up a fence to protect the sheep from the coyotes and bobcats and bears. Better make that an electric fence. Already I was taming the wilderness.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Even as I dreamed up a Percy-Shelleyesque vision of myself communing with nature, skipping through meadows, bluebirds winging around my head, I was hit with second thoughts. I had the nagging sense that I might be glossing over a few important factors (besides poison ivy and rattlesnakes). Like, at this stage in my life, and considering my various physical limitations, did I really want to take on such a big, ambitious project with an open-ended timeline and a learning curve as steep as one of those hills?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I understood, in theory, that caring for land was a major commitment\u2014 I would soon understand it even better in practice. To complicate matters, not only was there no house to live in up here, not even a shed for storing tools, there was no power, and no working well. This land would <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">require time, sweat, single-mindedness: your basic obsession. In other words, exactly my jam.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I chose to try to restore these two hundred acres, to attempt to transform ailing fields into native meadows, and a barren forest floor into a teeming native understory. Even though, outside of the knowledge I\u2019d gleaned from books like Wilding and \u201cweed warrior\u201d expeditions with my kids along the Potomac River, I had no real idea what would be involved in doing this work on a vast mountaintop, or what the end point of such a project would look like\u2014much less whether a true end point was possible.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">If this course of action seems hopeful, foolish, and delusional, that\u2019s the wheel around which my feelings about it cycle, sometimes in a single day. My frustrating limitations aside, what I do have going for me is a tendency to become preoccupied with a topic, studying it and talking about it nonstop (much to the irritation of my family). At various points in my life, I\u2019d done this with mangrove trees, gray whales, carpenter bees, rats, sea urchins, carpet beetles, lizards, and flying squirrels. The mountain was not only a subject, but a place I could dive into and lose myself, a source of fascinating and unlimited information to fill my brain and give me a sense of purpose. And unlike most of the places that inspired those other fixations, the mountain wasn\u2019t a place I would only visit\u2014it would actually be my home. I\u2019d literally live with the outcome, the success or failure of my endeavors. I didn\u2019t know yet how that would feel or how it would influence my decisions.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">My belief that I can revitalize this place has an almost magical quality to it, as if, as the land grows healthier, I\u2019ll grow stronger, too. This may be magical thinking, but it\u2019s also an exercise in hope. Standing on top of the mountain, contemplating the idea of somehow bringing change to this formidable landscape, is a dizzying experience. Whatever happens, like the wildflower seeds that stick to my trousers, the land grabs hold of me, and it won\u2019t let go.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-166894\" src=\"https:\/\/modernfarmer.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/Bad-Naturalilst-Paula-Whyman-Cover-1.webp\" alt=\"\" width=\"853\" height=\"1280\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Taken from <b><i>Bad Naturalist<\/i><\/b>\u00a9 Copyright 2025 by Paula Whyman. Published by Timber Press, Portland, OR. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n<p>This &lt;a target=&#8221;_blank&#8221; href=&#8221;https:\/\/modernfarmer.com\/2025\/01\/in-bad-naturalist-an-author-settles-on-a-mountain-top-and-tries-to-farm\/&#8221;&gt;article&lt;\/a&gt; first appeared on &lt;a target=&#8221;_blank&#8221; href=&#8221;https:\/\/modernfarmer.com&#8221;&gt;Modern Farmer&lt;\/a&gt; and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.&lt;img src=&#8221;https:\/\/modernfarmer.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/cropped-favicon-1-150&#215;150.png&#8221; style=&#8221;width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;&#8221;&gt;&lt;img id=&#8221;republication-tracker-tool-source&#8221; src=&#8221;https:\/\/modernfarmer.com\/?republication-pixel=true&amp;post=166893&#8243; style=&#8221;width:1px;height:1px;&#8221;&gt;<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Want to republish a Modern Farmer story? We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines: Please credit us and our writers For the author byline, please use \u201cAuthor Name, Modern Farmer.\u201d At the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60602,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12026],"tags":[3685,4643,14528,17144,6021,4132,3505,8445,33695,213],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-60601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-agriculture","tag-author","tag-bad","tag-biodiversity","tag-ecosystem","tag-farm","tag-land","tag-mountain","tag-naturalist","tag-settles","tag-top"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>In Bad Naturalist, an Author Settles on a Mountain Top and Tries to Farm - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=60601\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"In Bad Naturalist, an Author Settles on a Mountain Top and Tries to Farm - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Want to republish a Modern Farmer story? 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