We've done a lot of damage

Highway 49 is the primary route north into the foothills and to school. It runs from 80, which is a major east-west arterial (also how you get to Bay from here). Driving it today with overcast skies and a comforting drizzle, I marveled at the land: old farms and pasture, rolling hills, and forests of pine and oak. After Auburn, which is sprawly, there isn't much until you hit Grass Valley. The mobile home communities come first, then an old mine and a western wear store, later a strip mall, then the highway widens and you're officially within GV and Nevada City limits.

To relatively untrained eyes, we're out in the boonies. And with a 230 acre campus -- most of which is forest and scrub and includes cows (and various wild animals), a big garden, orchard, and pasture -- we seem rural and pristine. And we are - the stars are amazing at night, it's blissfully quiet -but this land has a human history that isn't far beneath the surface, and that I am just learning to see.

Our woods are full of mine tailings - big piles of stone that were waste product from mines - as well as dried up canals and logging roads. Our irrigation water for the garden and orchard comes to us via the Nevada Irrigation District, affectionately known as the Ditch, a network of ditches built by gold miners to bring snow melt from the Sierra. There's mercury in many of the water ways from hydraulic mining (importantly, there are not dangerous levels of mercury in our well). Go a little further east, and you hit moon landscapes that are the legacy of hydraulic mining that literally washed aware entire hillsides. Even further east, and you hit a band of national forest that rolls practically into Nevada. Lead levels in the soil of many parks and recreational areas are very high, also from mining (which ended decades ago).

Having lived an urban and peri-urban existence up until I came out here, this is a new lesson for me on human impact even in rural and seemingly wilderness areas. I've found the juxtaposition of mining history and contemporary attitudes about pristine wilderness curious. I think a lot of people think they are living a simpler and more natural life out here, but there are poisons in unexpected places.

Increasingly, my thinking is that environmental work has to start from that place: We've done a lot of damage. There are few untouched places left. It's not strictly about preservation any more, but restoration, careful management, and how to live in poisoned bodies on a poisoned planet.

(And for me, that work has to start in cities. Do you know anyone looking to hire an educator/writer/editor/documentarian/permaculturist in Philly? I'm looking.)