The Man Who Created Paradise
The Man Who Created Paradise
A FABLE
GENE LOGSDON
Photographs by Gregory Spaid
Foreword by Wendell Berry
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
Copyright © 1998 by Gene Logsdon
Foreword copyright © 2001 by Wendell Berry
Photographs copyright © 2001 by Gregory Spaid
Text previously printed in a limited edition, Cleveland, 1998
First Ohio University Press edition 2001
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved
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Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
First paperback edition published 2017
ISBN 978-0-8214-2306-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Logsdon, Gene.
The man who created Paradise : a fable / Gene Logsdon ; photographs by Gregory Spaid ; foreword by Wendell Berry.—1st Ohio University Press ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8214-1407-0 (acid-free paper)
1. Restoration ecology—Fiction. 2. Farm life—Fiction. 3. Farmers—Fiction. 4. Ohio—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.0453 M36 2001
813'.54—dc21
The Ohio Art Council helped fund publication of this book with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, educational excellence, and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans.
For
Wallace Aiken & John Gallman
Foreword
Maybe we continue to need to think of Paradise, and of making Paradise, because the earth as it was given to us (as we realize from time to time) was so nearly paradisal, and we are so talented at making a Hell of it.
Surely strip mining is the definitive sin of the industrial age. At least it is (so far) our most direct and deliberate act of Hell-making. We come to the coal-bearing slopes, rich on the surface with fertile soils and with forests. We find those soils and that forest—and all else we mean by “place”—to be in the way between us and what we want, i.e. coal, i.e. money. We therefore employ technologies more violent that earthquakes and avalanches to remove what is in the way, no matter that we destroy a greater wealth than we gain, and ruin a renewable resource for the sake of an exhaustible one. And then we foster and raise up the worst Hell of all: a mind almost inconceivably narrow, which can justify this Hell-making as a necessity, a feat of economic progress, and a human good.
On the contrary, surely there is something wondrous and redemptive about a mind that can confront this definitive work of Hell of Earth Enterprises, Inc., and imagine the opposite story: How a member of the same species, out of his own horror at what has been done and his merely personal refusal to accept Hell as an acceptable human product, might employ the technology of destruction to begin the restoration of what has been destroyed; and how this singular effort might inspire the efforts of others to do the same thing; and how finally a whole community of people might ally themselves with the inherent goodwill of any place to heal itself and become the Paradise it once was.
This, then is a book of two visions: one of disease, one of health. Or to put it another way, Gene Logsdon has had the generosity and the courage to allow a vision of Hell to call forth in himself its natural opposite. But can we properly dignify the story of Wally Spero by the term “vision,” or is it merely a reactionary fantasy? In my opinion, if you think this is merely a fantasy, you had better be careful. If you can look at the landscapes produced by strip mining without reacting toward some vision of the land restored, then you not only are looking at one of the versions of Hell; you are in it.
But can somebody really or “realistically” hope to accomplish what is accomplished in this story? Well, so far as I know, we don’t yet have an example of a whole new community sprouting from the spoil banks of a strip mine. But it is possible for one inspired man and an old bulldozer to make a creditable beginning, as Gene Logsdon knows, because he has seen it, as I have myself.
Wendell Berry
The Man Who Created Paradise
The letter stood out in sharp contrast to the others that fluttered across my desk regularly at Farmer’s Journal magazine. Handwritten on yellow, lined tablet paper, it managed to convey in just a few words both fervent dedication and humor—a rare combination. The script slanted forcefully to the right in large, generous, yet angular, almost bayonet-like letters. I imagined the writer marching forward buoyantly but resolutely toward whatever life offered—the kind of personality one might expect from a man whose last name translated from Latin meant “I hope.”
May 22, 1965
Dear associate editor Gene Blair,
Your article about how hybrid poplar tree cuttings will root and grow even on strip-mined spoil banks is exactly right. Isn’t that amazing? I mean the poplar trees, not that you are exactly right. Know any other plants that would grow well on spoil banks?
I make farms. Alice helps a lot. Alice is my bulldozer. You should stop by and take a look at what we’ve done.
Yours truly,
Wally Spero
Paradise Road
Route 4
Old Salem, Ohio
I was used to getting letters from rural people who did not bother to give me enough details to grasp their situation clearly. In their intimate worlds, farmers knew the neighborhood details, no need to elaborate. And by habit, they tended to see everyone as a neighbor—able to “stop by sometime” even though I worked in Philadelphia, at least four hundred miles away from Old Salem, Ohio. But about the statement: “I make farms,” I was mystified. If Mr. Spero was interested in spoil bank reclamation, I figured he must be using the bulldozer to level the banks or at least rearrange them into a more amenable landscape. But make farms on the strip-mined desolation of Appalachia? I had seen some of that land. One could sooner farm on the moon. I decided I would “stop by sometime.”
Working as a journalist, even on a farm magazine, or perhaps especially on a farm magazine, had not given me much cause for hopefulness about what humans were doing to the planet. My work invoked in me only an angry sadness as I watched wealth and power, in the guise of “feeding the world,” make land ownership, the lifeblood of democracy, more and more difficult for middle class people and impossible for poorer people. What coal companies did to Appalachia seemed to me no different than what agribusiness was doing to