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Colin Hill
Preserve the Hallowed Stomping Ground: The Convergence of Place and Identity in
Janisse Rays Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
The ecology that Janisse Ray writes of in her book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is
that of environmental symbiosis between the being and their relationship to the nature around
them. For Ray, nature is akin to something holy. Ray derives her spirituality from the landscape
around her through geopiety. The Junkyard is holy. Baxley is holy. Ray projects her sacred
meaning and significance to the nature she holds dear. Ultimately, from a position of spirituality,
Ray would argue that people dont have the right to ruin Gods creation. Ray writes of a great
sense of connectedness with nature in her memoir, and as a result Ray establishes, the memory
of what they (her ancestors) entered is scrawled on my bones, so that I carry the landscape inside
like an ache. The story of who I am cannot be severed from the story of the flatwoods (Ray 4).
The trees of the Flatwoods however, are being severed from the ground in which their roots dig
deep. The landscape that Ray calls home is under a threat of disappearance, and it is at least
experiencing a transmogrification from a rural haven into a new land laid bare as a vultures
pate (184). A land where the scriveners came on their tree-planting tractors, driving down new
words to replace the old one, forest. (125). In an environmental way Rays home is under threat,
and because the people of Baxley are tied to their land they are also under a threat which
manifests both physically and mentally. Ray presents the problem as it affects her identity with
nostalgic emphasis, the ecosystem in an extinguishing sense, and ultimately the world in a way
where life is jeopardized with the disappearance of a natural culture. The solution, to get back to
nature, not just in a political way, or through scholarly dialogue, but through the experience of

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natural environments for oneself with a mindfulness of logos, and by turning positive acts of
conservation into habit.
Susan Clayton writes in her book Identity and the Natural Environment: The
Psychological Significance of Nature, the deep ecology sense of self requires a further maturity
and growth, an identification which goes beyond humanity to include the nonhuman world
(Clayton 32). Clayton encourages to not only be familiar with the cars driving passed ones
house, as Rays grandmamma does, but to have a hand in keeping place alive. Like the way
Rays father does for the beagle hit by the car. The beagle mangled by the same perpetrators, part
man and machine, the same offenders that compromise Rays place of rural transcendence. It is
through the tangible that the individual can actualize the fragility of existence, a fragility that is
necessary to understand in order for a person to put their hedged bets aside and necessitate a
serious change in lifestyle.
The conservationist, and biologist Aldo Leopold said when we see land as a community
to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect (Leopold VIII). A place
cannot be used with the proper love and respect if its not used in the first place. Instead of seeing
land as community, commonfolk and people of industry alike abuse the land because as Leopold
puts it instead we regard it as a commodity( VIII). Throughout Ecology, Ray contrasts her
closeness with nature to an overwhelming growth in the detachment that todays society
experiences with the natural world that Ray admires. Conversely, if she were to distance herself
from her natural surroundings, she would experience a greater separation from the world around
her. Ray demonstrates her need to connect to nature when she writes of familiarizing herself with
the minutiae of her natural surroundings, and searching for knowledge from the land when she
says "I think of my own life, how it embraces a great quest to know every cog of nature (96).

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Ray searches for hope while becoming absorbed into the sensory experiences of her victimized
landscape.
The poem The Bright Field by R.S. Thomas, published in 1975, contains thematic
parallels between Thomas poem and Rays memoir. At a surface level the poem is about a
person who realizes they have missed their opportunity. Thomas writes,
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it.
The way that The Bright Field follows the chronology, and the development of Rays
sentiment offers a harmonious cross-examination between these two pieces of literature. Ray
however seems to have realized the treasure in her landscape early enough to not be overcome by
a regret of inaction, and instead she has spent her life capitalizing on bringing others attention to
realize the treasure of the field in the same way Thomas did in his writing.
In Christopher Morgans exploration of Thomas life and work, he addresses the
aforementioned way in which society has detached themselves from their place. Morgan writes
It would seem that humanity has achieved, by the early twenty-first century, the ability to stand
apart from itself, to view itself in detachment, looking on dispassionately (Morgan 49). A
disregard or separation from the natural world, will cause only further detachment from oneself.
Nature cannot be fostered in the way Rays father nursed the beagle who got hit by a car off U.S
1. Both the wilderness and the people of Baxley have to hunker down because of the forecast of

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economists incoming consumption trends. After all money buys the land, and the Crackers who
were rooted generations in Rays community hadnt had the means, the education, or the ease to
care particularly about its natural communities (Ray 164). The socioeconomic factors at play
work, separate people from their place two fold, by removing the time one can spend with the
land and their community through a focus on labor which pays little, and then by developing the
natural land when it isnt able to become a commodity for the people in poverty.
Individualism reduces the connections a person is likely to make regarding how their
actions effect their surroundings. This individualism coupled with an economic focus to use the
land for money lends itself to a misuse of land. The comic George Carlin puts the mistaken selfimportance in opposition to misplaced environmentalism when he says: The planet isnt going
anywhere. We are! (Carlin, Jammin). Thus, were the ones who need the saving. In the face of
immortality, nature is indifferent. From a deterministic perspective nature, and culture, and
history conspire together to perpetuate despite the individual. Ray sets the example to participate
in a positive way in her environment, simply by respecting who and what is around her. Instead
of taking pride in her creature comfort, consequently rejecting a mutual relationship to the
totality of her place, she connects to it. And as a result is able to grow. Ultimately, Wohlpart says,
the writing of Ecology offers an opportunity for remaking her conception of self and reshaping
the values of the human community in which she is embedded (48).
Ray writes to bring the people back together with the landscape as Wohlpart says
through an analysis of the technological horizon of disclosure that has become her worldview,
she uncovers the possibility for a renewed emplacement on the land, one ecological in nature that
reveals the human interdependence with the landscape (48). In an age of retrospection, the past
gets rejected, along with the role the past plays into a place. When the benefit of retrospection is

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focused onto a persons own footprints, then the path ahead is out of view. With a decrease in the
appreciation of the plane of our existence, the value of the connection one feels with their
experiences is diminished because there is not a wharf to dock onto, no floor to drop anchor.
The human species is primarily egocentric within scopes outside of the individual self,
especially when the perspective zooms out to an ecological level. When it comes to the greater
ecosystem, people possess the utilitarian approach of us, or probably more accurately, me and
mine. However, existence is also importance. The calm moment allows evolution to be equal, in
that all things exist during the same breath. When the well being of an ecosystem is taken into
consideration, the state in which all things are living is what determines how an ecosystem is
getting on, thriving, or surviving.
Janisse Ray makes an argument for people to preserve the ecosystem around them. Under
an inevitable threat of industry, and the self-serving will of others the possibility of the
disappearance of Rays landscape should be considered. James A. Wohlpart, author of Walking in
the Land of Many Gods: Remembering Sacred Reason in Contemporary Enviornmental
Literature, says of Ecology: The intercalated chapters, interrupting the narrative of her life as
they do, have the effect not only of revealing how the human community dwells on the land but
also of suggesting how the land dwells in us (48). Formally, Ray harkens back to her
environment every other chapter, turning the landscape Ray and her people call home into the
most significant character in her book. In doing so, Ray formally constructs the interdependence
between person and place.
Wohlpart says This autobiographical act becomes, then, not only an act of ecological
restoration, metaphorically or textually restoring the land, but also an act of self-restoration,
allowing the author to re/place herself in fundamental ways(48).

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William Scammell, in the Introduction to his anthology This Green Earth: A
Celebration of Nature Poetry, writes:
nature was not so much an environment (a word that didnt get itself invented until the
nineteenth century, and grew tall with the advent of Darwinism) as the ground of being.
Consequently ideas of appreciating, loving, conserving or exploit ing it hardly arose. It
was simply there, omnipresent and all-powerful, to be propitiated, thanked, obeyed, and
co-operated with (Scammell 49).
With a decrease in the appreciation toward the plane of a persons existence, the value of
the connection one feels with their experiences is diminished because there is not a wharf to dock
onto, no floor to drop anchor. This is to echo Scammells point that the language people use to
discuss the natural landscape has become distant and convoluted, which begs that peoples
relationships, and approach to the outdoors has become limited as a result to the tune of the
individuals daily routine. The environment is too big of an abstract idea, and would have been
even more impossible to imagine before ever seeing a globe. It is the things we can touch that
makes experience real. It is the idle hour that Beulah, Rays grandmother would take in after
dinner, rocking on her front porch (184). Grandmama allowed herself to become absorbed into
her natural surrounding, and she familiarized herself with the local. It is this kind of connection
which Ray emphasizes to get back to as a society.
In order to do less harm to the place around us, it is crucial for the individual to actively
contribute. The philosopher Slavoj iek focuses fatalistic commentary onto how the egocentric
perspective of humanity limits the individuals life experience to the role of the passive observer
in the face of the inevitable. In regards to an assumption of guilt that people project onto the
decline of a natural environment iek says We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can

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also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West)
to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer (iek). ieks point is that
people like to fill all of the roles, both culprit and victim, defendant, and prosecutor. Still, these
roles of responsibility do not matter because of peoples immortality.
With the pessimism of both Carlin and Zizek aside, a societal scope of perspective needs
to be moved aside for a perspective of community. The conceptual gatherings of an environment
are caught up in a consumer culture where the experiences that Ray and her relatives simply
participated in, are becoming commodities. The detachment from the land lends itself to an
attachment of materials that disguise products as benefiting the environment in some way, when
the default of blind capitalism is the cause of environmental threats in the first place. To write
about getting back to nature, seems to defeat the thematic purpose of logging out in order to
physically participate in the world, because reading a paper, and going for a hike proves a
difficult multitask. Rays grandfather Charlie was a folk hero she says, Charlie going out for
days into the floodplain swamps of the Altamaha River, a truly wild place (Ray 41). It is this
sort of immersion into the wilderness that provides an accurate understanding of what the word
environment actually means in the way Scammell hopes for. However, people are not afforded
the time to conserve the land because of poverty levels as Ray addresses in Ecology. Ray says:
Our relationship with the land wasnt one of give and return. The land itself has
been the victim of social dilemmas racial injustice, lack of education, and dire poverty.
It was overtilled; eroded; cut ; littered; polluted; treated as a commodity, sometimes the
only one and not as a living thing. Most people worried about getting by, and when
getting by meant using the land, we used it. When getting by meant ignoring the land, we
ignored it. (165)

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In this regard, conservation becomes a political outlet of privilege. The need to benefit the land
around the rural inhabitants is overshadowed by the need to benefit themselves and their family.
As a result there is major gravity to the socio-economic involvement when one considers the
over-exploitation of a land and its natural resources.
The illustration of loss of home in the Coastal Louisiana that Burley highlights, to a more
catastrophic extent, in Losing Ground encourages that in order to prevent further loss of home
people have to be removed from their assumed pedestal of evolution, and regard their own
mortality alongside other species just the same. Burley muses on the outside perspective that the
people are apart of the ecosystem. In order for people in need, to have a better chance to receive
help, the people who dont suffer from being dislocated from their home, out of practicality.
David Burley explores the significance of how place factors into an individuals sense of self in
his book Losing Ground: Identity and Land Loss in Coastal Louisiana. Burley writes that place
comprises a significant part of identity. Because place is such a substantial part of these peoples
sense of who they are, processes that occur in the landscape, such as coastal land loss, impact
their identity (8). In the book Burley addresses the forced migration of people away from their
families inherited homes, which traced back centuries, following the wake of Hurricanes Katrina
and Rita. After these storms, the peoples homes of Coastal Louisiana disappeared; their world
was uprooted like the longleaf pine.
In order to make real progress in restoring a place, and to bridge the gap between people
and the natural world around them, Wohlpart points readers toward The Sunflower Forest by
William Jordan. Wohlpart writes of how Jordans concern in exploring the act of ecological
restoration is to unfold the way in which this act is also, like Ecology, a means to the creation of
values, a necessary step in the process of developing an ethical system that guides our individual

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and communal behavior (Wohlpart 48). The only way individualistic approaches to
environmental harm can be alleviated is through a reformation of habits, replacing habits that
have negative impacts on a persons surroundings with habits of sustainability, and consideration
for what lives around the self. Otherwise, the mentality of the individual should focus on efforts
of community. People need to come together to determine ways that are not limited to picking
up trash, or beautification projects, but to responsibly participate with other species, and living
organisms in the natural world. In doing so, the hope in which Ray champions for may be
actualized with a turn toward the preservation of place, and community.

Works Cited
Burley, David M.. Losing Ground : Identity and Land Loss in Coastal Louisiana. Jackson, US:
University Press of Mississippi, 2010. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 16 June 2016.

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Carlin, George. Live at the Paramount: Jammin in New York. Atlantic. 1992. YouTube.
Clayton, Susan. Identity and the Natural Environment: The Psychological Significance of
Nature. Boston. MIT Press, 2003.
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York :Oxford University Press, 1949. Print.
Morgan, Christopher. R. S. Thomas: Identity, Environment, Deity. Manchester, UP, 2003. Web.
Ray, Janisse. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Minneapolis, Milkweed. 1999. Print.
Scammell, William. This Green Earth: A Celebration of Nature Poetry. Maryport: Ellenbank,
1992. Print.
Wohlpart, A. James. Walking in the Land of Many Gods: Remembering Sacred Reason in
Contemporary Environmental Literature. Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2013. Project MUSE. Web. Jun. 2016.
iek, Slavoj. Fat-free chocolate and absolutely no smoking: why our guilt about consumption
is all consuming.lacan.com/newsletter100.html. Jun 16 2016. Web.