Roots in the Trail
4/23/26 - A few thoughts on a short walk
Hello everyone:
I’m taking my own advice this week, having written in “Earth Through the Window” that the earth at our feet has more to tell us about life than the Earth viewed from space.
As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.
Now on to this week’s writing:
The Enterprise and Adventure of the Day
There is an art to walking on trails in the Maine woods. We must, while moving steadily along, be able to look down, ahead, and around all at the same time. We look around to inhabit the forest we’re passing through; we look ahead to gauge our progress; and we look down, again and again, to avoid falling on our face.
The trail demands our attention because the trail is not merely a line drawn through the good green forest. It is a beaten path, sunken slightly into the hidden world below our feet. And it is a revelator, exposing the intricate lacing of tree roots and stones that bind the forest and snag the boot. A root-laced trail is always a walking meditation; we might be wandering, but our mind cannot.
I have wondered whether, if given a suitable quantity of millennia to evolve ourselves perfectly to the task, our eyes might shift one over the other, wide-spaced, like a prey animal concerned with up and down rather than left and right…
Henry David Thoreau, the patron saint of New England walkers, was so talkative upon the art of sauntering that he gives the impression in “Walking” and his journals of having written essays while on the hoof. But he’d never have survived putting pencil to notebook page if he’d composed while walking these trails. His bits of wisdom are clearly notes scribbled at the cabin table after a long day of footloose contemplation:
An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.
I think I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and fields absolutely free from all worldly engagements.
The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours… but it is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.
Roots Rock Reggae
I walked a fair amount in my first few decades: all through Maine and New Hampshire, the northern half of the Appalachian Trail, the South Island of New Zealand, a month in Nepal, and more. I spent years cultivating the joy of walking long distances with no agenda other than another day or week or even month of stepping out into the real world. Heather and I are out on the local trails here, but I miss the unscheduled days and their long trail unspooling out ahead.
Roots and stones were a natural feature elsewhere, certainly, but not like here in the thin soils of northern New England, where they often define the experience. Boots stumble, slip, slide, and wobble over the ankle-height topography, and our legs adjust as we go. When my friend Izak and I were hiking south together on the Appalachian Trail through Maine, our torsos and 50-lb backpacks waltzing in response to our jolted boots, he called the dance Roots Rock Reggae (after the Bob Marley song). It was a good name for the enterprise and adventure of those lovely days.
One of the ironies of spending so much time on a trail is how it fosters the desire to spend more time off the trail. To wander up a stream and kneel to moss, to photograph the light through the leaves, to see what’s happening on either side of the root-crossed corridor. To saunter at will like Thoreau amid the forest rather than on a marked line that cuts through it. To slow, and to stop; to study the world that these walks have taught you to love.
But another irony is that sticking to the trail is a gift to its natural surroundings. So much of the world is fragmented and diminished by our hands that in these rare places where our primary intervention is our footpath through them we are obliged to treat what remains with an excess of respect. Sticking to the trail minimizes our impact. The beaten path is a revelator of many things: the path forward, yes, but also the tension between the woven Earth and the trampled Earth.
To walk in the woods now is to dance quietly in that tension.
A Few Veins of Truth
We live now in the awareness of Suzanne Simard’s “wood-wide web,” the knowledge that these big trees swaying in the wind are less individuals in a population than voices in a diverse and inseparable chorus. Forests are expressions of their tangled roots, and those roots comprise a fabric that feeds, supports, and communicates with itself in astonishing and myriad unseen ways.
The living soil is among the most ancient and evolved of this planet’s worlds, but it remains abstract to us and, too often, beneath our notice. It’s good that, if the image of fungal mycelia weaving the hidden world together doesn’t easily come to mind, these visible roots offer a large-print version we can all comprehend at a glance.
Another irony, with a metaphor: These roots under our feet both reveal the web and expose our harms to it. I’m thinking not only of how we compress the trail’s soil but also - in the big picture - of the cost of how we go about acquiring so much of our knowledge. A culture informed by the extraordinary lessons of science but behaving like a bulldozer in a swamp is not acquiring wisdom from its data. From sea to sky and across the land we’ve worn down the most vital communities of life - e.g. the soil which births all terrestrial life - in order to reveal a few of the most obvious veins of truth.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer reminded us in Braiding Sweetgrass, we are a species that claims superiority over life but in fact knows far less about how to live than the plants who build the forests that sustain us:
In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.
Our modern quest for knowledge reveals this again and again. On so many of our paths to knowledge, we learn and then either weaponize our learning against the natural world or ignore its consequences on our fellow species. We feed ourselves by poisoning the land; we warm ourselves by overheating the planet; and we drink ourselves under the table. Pure science is visionary; applied science is reckless.
Our industrial culture values empathy for information over empathy for other lives. Look no further than the current gold rush for AI-supporting data centers powered by diesel or natural gas; every aspect of it is scarcely sane. None of it is needed, and none of it benefits life. Very little of it even benefits us.
Back on the trail, the interdependent forest floor laced with roots teaches us that a path without empathy is a dead end. All of life is interdependent; and all of life, except us, lives accordingly. From the perspective of other species, we might be mere fools wobbling our way down a root-covered path, if we hadn’t somehow ended up claiming the planet as our own.
The Path Ahead
You now have a pretty good idea of what my mind is thinking about while out dancing across the roots… It’s a skill, if a strange one, and one which Thoreau claimed to disdain. While walking, he insisted in his essay “Walking,” we must inhabit the forest we’re passing through:
What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?
But Thoreau would agree that, for all of our strangeness as a species, we can know two things about ourselves with certainty: We evolved to think, and we were born to walk. Those two actions are as woven together as mycelia and root tips. I’m advocating here for us to think as much about the woods as we do about our paths.
Despite all of our questing, and all of our harms, life’s mysteries remain and the beaten path is still beautiful. Our maladaptions are being countered, fitfully, by all the good work being done to protect and rewild the Earth. That good work tells us, again and again, that what we’ve scarred can recover if we let it.
We are, for the moment, stuck in a culture that stumbles as it fails to look both down at the Earth and up ahead, but most of us insist on standing back up each time to see what kind of path we’ve made and how it might be remade. There’s so much to do, and it will take generations, but it can be done.
And for all of my worrying about that path, I want to close by saying that while the Earth isn’t ours, it is ours too. We share the place with our fellow species, and as long as we learn to act with restraint and respect, it’s okay to make permanent changes to the land. We have signatures, like beavers make ponds and termites make mounds. Flowers remade the planet, so we’re in good company.
Like so much of what characterizes the Anthropocene, most of our signatures are a problem not in their inherent nature but because of their scale. Farms, roads, and fishing boats are all lovely if kept to a minimum, but nightmares in their current numbers. If in the next century we ease back peacefully to, say, two billion people - the number of humans just a century ago - while working to unclog the atmosphere and cool down the oceans, much of the Earth will have a decent chance to thrive alongside us.
For now, remember to take a walk that offers a blessing for the whole day. I hope most of your trails are smooth and welcoming, but reserve some time for stumbling over roots and rocks. Observe the veins in the earth, remember the metaphor of the beaten path, but mostly just let yourself be woven into the woods. Find your revelators where you can.
Thanks for sticking with me.
In other Anthropocene news:
From Cory Doctorow and Pluralistic, a funny, brilliant, and hopeful rant about how the Trump administration’s cruel, dumb war in Iran is accelerating the global shift to renewable energy. (Thanks to Andy Revkin and Sustain What for bringing it to my attention.) Definitely worth your time if you like a little righteous political sarcasm mixed in with your environmental news:
The Strait of Epstein crisis is going to do more to accelerate permanent, unidirectional migration away from fossil fuels to cleantech than decades of environmental activism. Cleantech is so much better than fossil fuels – cheaper, more reliable, cleaner – that anyone who tries it becomes an instant convert. That's why the fossil fuel industry has been so insistent that no one get to try it!
Democracy and biodiversity celebrity in action! From Unitas Malacologica (the international society dedicated to the study of molluscs), a chance to vote for the Mollusc of the Year 2026. Be sure to look at this year’s profile pics, and at previous winners. Your candidates are:
Cumia intertexta – The Mediterranean vampire snail that drinks fish blood
Ephippodonta lunata – The clam that opened its shells and grew wings
Lithoredo abatanica – The shipworm that decided wood wasn't enough,
and learned to eat through stoneTriplofusus giganteus - The Atlantic’s giant predator snail that swallows its prey whole
Filicaulis seychellensis – The flower-powered slug with skin white as snow
From the Walrus, “Billions of Birds Have Vanished in a Generation,” a lyrical and eloquent excerpt from the gorgeous The Book of Birds written by the great Robert Macfarlane and illustrated by Jackie Morris. The article title is dark, I know, but most of the piece looks beyond the loss to the magic and beauty of the birds themselves. Read it for its celebration of Nest, Egg, and Song, and be charmed into a love of birds, a love strong enough to help protect them:
Nest is ingenuity, intricacy, improvisation. Nest is wren’s ball—pure cocoon. Nest is starling’s mess—all twigs and yarn, untidy as a teenager’s room. Nest is four glowing blue robin eggs tucked in a boot in the daytime dusk of a cobwebbed barn. Nest is bowerbird’s bling and dazzle, Nest is flamingo’s urn of sun-burned clay. Nest is a gyrfalcon eyrie used yearly since long before the Roman Empire faded away. Nest is three swallow chicks packed snug in a cup of mud above a farmhouse door.
From Owl in America: Notes from an American Environmentalist, good news about preventing the development of a large mine next to the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, thanks to a public-private partnership to protect this national treasure. The post also serves as a reintroduction to the remarkable Owl in America series that was here on Substack before moving elsewhere. As the name suggests, it’s an ambitious and eloquent accounting - in the spirit of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from An American - of the state of nature and environmental policy in the U.S.. I highly recommend you subscribe.
From Vox, a new venture capital firm has arrived to focus exclusively on companies whose products or services will benefit biodiversity, from leather made from invasive species to tech that diminishes bird collisions with wind turbines to autonomous underwater vehicles that plant seagrass. I’m not a big believer in capitalism saving the Earth… but this seems like money well-spent.
Have you ever been surrounded by rhinos while hiking in Nepal’s Chitwan National Park? I have, and so was intrigued to see the Guardian’s report on how an increase in wildlife populations (including rhinos) around the park has led to increased conflict and, more hopefully, to increased effort to teach locals how to avoid and resolve those conflicts. If nothing else, click the link to see a rhino strolling down a busy city street.
From Carbon Brief, a new report estimates that just 1% of land in the UK will be needed for renewable energy development, and that there is plenty of land in the country to meet all of the nation’s climate and nature goals.
Four stories from NPR, two small and good and two big and bad:
For Earth Day, the origin of the word “tree-hugger” in deforestation protests in India, and how the term, like the trees, is being embraced.
A Chinese EV company’s strategy for reducing battery-charging time: An automated three-minute drive-through battery swap. This is one of many new technologies bringing the EV age into alignment with drivers’ expectation of quick and convenient “fueling” stops.
“The Crisis of Overfishing in Southeast Asia,” a photoessay and article on the terrible fate of fish and fishermen in a region that suffers the most from the world’s inability to feed itself from the sea in a way that will not erase the ocean’s bounty and treat its fishermen fairly. It’s a hard story, but a necessary one to read, not least because much of the catch is sold to the U.S.. The crisis is global, but the worst impacts are regional.
And the failure of the ambitious Great Green Wall project in sub-Saharan Africa is “a cautionary tale of poorly planned projects, lacking in local participation and entangled in a labyrinth of opaque financing:”
This multi-billion dollar project was launched by the African Union in 2007. The plan: to plant a “wall” of trees spanning the entire width of Africa — 4,350 miles long and 10 miles wide — to fight desertification in the Sahel, the arid region to the south of the Sahara desert.
The Wall’s vision was boundless, and its backers called it a “new world wonder.” It would re-green nearly 250 million acres of land across 11 countries from Senegal to Djibouti, and in doing so, would sequester 250 million tons of carbon, provide “green jobs” for 10 million people and alleviate poverty, food insecurity and conflict across the region.
I thought you might enjoy this I just read in Thoreau:
“I would not have missed that walk for a good deal. If you want an exact recipe for making such a road, take one part Mud Pond, and dilute it with equal parts of Umbazookskus and Apmoojenagamook; then send a family of musquash through to locate it, look after the grades and culverts, and finish it to their minds, and let a hurricane do the fencing.” [The Maine Woods.]
Keep walking, and writing, Jason Anthony!
We have Storying the Paths in Scotland.