The News from the Land.

• Position: Essay

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It has by now become my obligation to speak of things as an elder. I have been collecting memories and observations of my home neighborhood in Henry County for seventy-five years, or about a third of the 235 years since the founding of Harrodsburg and Boonesborough. If I add to my own memory the voices of my grandparents, who also lived their lives in this place, telling me their memories of it, then I have a "living memory" of more than half the span of the modern history of Kentucky. It is the story, with a few uptilts, of an unfortunate state of decline.

Beginning early in our history, the steep valley sides of the Kentucky River and its tributaries were cleared and row-cropped. The trees were cut, the litter burned, the slopes broken with "jumper" plows, the rocks piled, a crop planted and harvested. This was repeated until erosion and depletion put an end to the cycle, and then the trees were allowed to grow back.

This was the worst sort of farming, but the blame for it is hard to distribute justly. It was of course done varyingly in ignorance by the farmers, for almost nobody so far has tried to devise a conserving use for these "marginal" lands. Almost nobody so far has tried to understand how a bad agricultural economy affects the land. Desperate people would try the hopeless expedient of "plowing their way out of debt." Or they would overproduce row crops to compensate for low prices that were the result of overproduction. By about the time of World War II, probably because so many of the young men had gone to war or to factory jobs, this plowing of the steeper slopes was given up. The forest has been growing back now for two generations or more. But if you walk those slopes today you will find under the trees the old cropland gullies, some healed, some still eroding.

With the return of the woods, there have been some significant returns of wildlife. Deer and wild turkeys, long gone before my time, have been reintroduced and are again present in large numbers. Beavers and otters, also absent in my early years, are here again. In the last few years, bald eagles have been nesting a few miles upriver from my house, and sometimes I see one from my window.

Besides the reforestation of the slopes, the other great change in the landscape here has occurred in the pastures. From a time not long after our people came, the pasture grass predominant everywhere was bluegrass, which supplanted the canebrakes and the native grasses of the savannas. This seems to have been a fairly benign succession, for bluegrass and the naturalized European white clover that lived symbiotically with it, along with the many other wild plants that would come naturally to the pastures, were hospitable to the native animals and birds. The buffalo and elk and their predators were gone, but smaller creatures throve.

And then in the 1950s, bluegrass began rapidly to be supplanted by fescue, introduced by the University of Kentucky. This was a taller, coarser grass, excellent for erosion control, but far less palatable to livestock, and not hospitable to wildlife. It...