The weirdest bark in the woods
Racism on the Appalachian Trail, Keystone pipeline cancelled, and plant of the week (a tree!)
We were all hurtling through the unfamiliar, aching, choppy, destroyed by weather, trying not to tear apart. But some of us were looking around as well. By the time I made it through Maryland, it was hard not to think of the Appalachian Trail as a 2,190-mile trek through Trump lawn signs.
Rahawa Haile’s essay on through-hiking the Appalachian Trail as a Black, queer woman examines both the racism and threats she faced on the trail as well as what it meant to her to make it to the northern end in Maine. “There were days when the only thing that kept me going was knowing that each step was one toward progress, a boot to the granite face of white supremacy,” she writes.
When white conservationists like me think about racism in the outdoors, we might first imagine subtler forms of prejudice: pearl-clutching body language that suggests a Black hiker isn’t welcome. But as Haile’s story addresses, it’s crucial to think specifically and seriously about overt acts of racism and direct threats to Black hikers’ safety. When birder Chris Cooper was confronted by a white woman in Central Park, it wasn’t just a coded discussion about him not belonging there as a lone Black man—it was an incident that could have left him incarcerated or facing violence from police. Likewise, Major Jackson’s recent essay for Orion investigates the mortal stakes of being a Black naturalist.
Haile’s essay is a good place to start thinking about what kinds of structural changes have to happen to make places such as the Appalachian Trail truly safe for Black people. It’s also a beautifully assembled narrative about the twists and turns of a big through-hike and how the meaning of the experience can change over different segments of the trail. (Thanks to Jini Reddy for sharing the essay on Twitter.)
Blocking pipelines
The Biden administration has cancelled the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline. Its intended path lay just to the east of the area of central Nebraska where I did bird surveys for my master’s in biology. Native Americans, environmental groups and local farmers have been fighting the KXL for years now, so the decision feels significant. Now, Indigenous leaders are calling on Biden not to stop with KXL and also cancel the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and other pipelines that put water and safety at risk. Though cable news cameras moved on from #NoDAPL protests at Standing Rock after 2016-17, the Standing Rock Sioux and groups such as the Indigenous Environmental Network have kept up the fight.
“This is a vindication of 10 years defending our waters and treaty rights from this tar sands carbon bomb. I applaud President Biden for recognizing how dangerous KXL is for our communities and climate and I look forward to similar executive action to stop DAPL and Line 3 based on those very same dangers,” Dallas Goldtooth, a member of the Mdewakanton Dakota and Dine, told The Guardian.
Further reading
The Frontline, the climate newsletter for Atmos written by Yessenia Funes, has a terrific interview with Mary Annaïse Heglar, who co-hosts the climate podcast Hot Take. Heglar talks about how she sees the climate movement’s roots in the Civil Rights movement, being a Black woman in the largely white climate media environment, crushing oil companies on Twitter, and more. Do check out both The Frontline and Hot Take—both well worth your time.
Plant of the week: Shagbark hickory
Last week I noted that I wouldn’t be inflicting a long series of tree bark photos on you during the winter. And I’m not changing that promise—but it feels like a mistake not to point out at least one tree with unique bark. If you don’t know it, one photo of it could lead to a lifetime of recognizing it on sight.
Shagbark hickory (Carya ovata) is mostly present in east-central North America, west to the Great Plains, but it’s also here in Massachusetts, southern New Hampshire and a bit of Maine. The bark on mature trees breaks off in long strips, making it easy to spot in both winter and summer.
Hickories have a walnut-like fruit. The word hickory derives from the Algonquian word for the milk made by pounding the nuts and steeping them in water, pawcohiccora. Everything from bears to squirrels are on the lookout for hickory nuts during the winter. The bark is useful, too: some bats, including the endangered Indiana bat, are able to live in the crevices formed by the bark strips.
If you’ve been curious about learning more trees but found it tedious to memorize countless leaf shapes, bark can be an unlikely but powerful key to ID that’s useable year-round. Once able to distinguish just one or two trees by their bark texture and color, you might find yourself unable to stop. Silver maple’s long, twisting ridges; black cherry’s squares; ash’s diamonds. (I’m starting to sound like Joe Pera, so I’ll wrap up soon.)
I took part in one somewhat magical ecology lab session as a teaching assistant in which a group of students entered a forest seeing the trees as more or less the same and came out able to recognize about a dozen species. The trick was starting with the bark and not the leaves (which were high up in the canopy anyway.) One of the students left joking about a new future as a guide at a national park. It’s all about that bark.
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.