LOCALadk Magazine

LOCALadk 6 A M E S S A G E F R O M R H I A N N O N LOCALadk In August 2016, I was given the opportunity to at- tend a conference titled "Reading Landscapes: Writ- ing Nature In the 21st Century." Offered through the Connecticut Writing Project at Fairfield University, the conference was hosted at Weir Farm National Park in Wilton, Connecticut during an unusually intense heat wave. When I think of that conference, two memories instantly come to mind – the sweltering heat and hu- midity in the enclosed barn that was home to many of our sessions (humidity is the nemesis of my asthmatic life) and the following sentence written by J. Sterling Morton that has been seared in my mind ever since: "It faces the future." Throughout the 1850s to the 1890s, Morton held several political positions at both the state and national levels, notably serving as the Secretary of Agriculture under President Grover Cleveland. During this time, Morton was widely recognized for his pro- found appreciation of trees – their beauty, their pow- erful presence, and the necessity of their presence in any thriving natural environment. He held deep concern for the country's abundant deforestation industry, its system based on consump- tion without any intentional means of restoration. Thus, in 1872, Horton proposed a tree-planting holiday to the Nebraska Board of Agriculture. His proposal was approved, and what would become the first rec- ognized Arbor Day was celebrated on April 10. It was estimated that over one million trees were planted in Nebraska on this day alone. Arbor Day was eventually adopted by several states before being recognized as an official federal holiday, observed on the last Friday of April. In that sweltering barn on Weir Farm, I was given a copy of American Earth: Environment Writing Since Thoreau, a 2008 anthology edited by Bill McKibben, and was assigned three pieces to present the next day. One such piece was titled "About Trees," an excerpt from the essay "Arbor Day Leaves" (1893) written by a name I did not recognize at the time: J. Sterling Mor- ton. I read Morton's love and respect of trees, his de- scription of their essence as "the beautiful and useful combined in [their] music and majesty…as fancy and truth unite in an epic poem" and his belief that "the intermission of a single season of a vegetable life and growth on the earth would exterminate our own and all the animal races." I learned of his decision to create what would become Arbor Day to combat man's "im- providence and thoughtlessness." Aside from its restorative measures, Morton be-

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