How to Inherit 600 Acres and Heal

Throughout her 20’s, erin was mentored by “plant grannies,” who taught her all of what she knew about plant medicine. At the time of our interview, erin explained many of her mentors have since died—usually as a result of cancer or other health conditions related to living in or around coal mining and other resource extraction sites. As a result of these losses, erin grapples with the ebbs and flows related to being a keeper of surviving knowledge and wonders how to transmit generational wisdom most effectively.

Not really any of the folks who were my organizer and Forest Granny, plant mentors, are still alive. They've all died of cancer, basically, from my time deeper in the coal fields. And that is the reality. Its this heartbreaking irony of people who are more connected to a land base and land-based skills and knowledge have also been on the receiving end of way more environmental toxicity: less nutritious food, shittier access to healthcare, and have died young. And the stress of having your whole existence be fighting this thing that's hundreds of years with billions of dollars behind it that's trying to literally snatch the ground underneath your home.

The flavor of erin’s work has changed but there is no shortage in the quantity of her efforts. erin explained that now she spends a lot of time fighting frack gas pipelines and supporting mutual aid efforts. She is “continuing to try to strengthen the fabric of people who live here, who are looking out for each other and doing good stuff.” Supporting these efforts and contributing to social justice efforts is instinctual for erin, but outmigration and climate change have made participation challenging and, at times, painful. Reflecting on her organizing efforts now compared to before, she described:

One of the big differences is that there are so few folks who are generationally rooted, compared to then. Now I am the person who's from here and most of the folks who I'm working with are not. I’m maybe always a little bit holding my breath that anybody who I am connecting and building with is going to get to a point where they feel over this crappy, militarized college town and move on to somewhere else.

erin wrestles with the realities of living in the place she grew up, a place where so much has changed. Farms she used to play on or pass by as a kid are now subdivisions for student housing, and remote working insulates people from opportunities that would have previously cultivated community and place-making. erin has stepped away from some cultural practices like square dancing—partly due to COVID-19 and her shifting comfort around crowds—but erin explained that some feelings of attachment have also shifted after losing mentors and members of the community she grew close to during her time organizing in the coal fields. The changes in her sense of close community have shifted, but she displayed an honest curiosity as to why, and a tenderness that leaves room for a variety of change forces.

Now, living full-time on her family’s farmland on the outskirts of Blacksburg, VA, erin focuses on ecological restoration and planting medicinal crops, adapting to climate change challenges. She emphasizes the importance of long-term, community-based land stewardship and the intergenerational impact of her work. The land erin has focused her attention on has a long history, which she is intimately familiar with and continues to educate herself about. erin’s deep knowledge of the land shapes her personal and political aspirations.

Like most agricultural land in this neck of the woods, there is a dark history of plantation time enslavement. This was a part of a so-called plantation that was many 1000s of acres, stretched the hole up and down the valley. Prior to that, it was a land grant from the King in colonial times. We are a little bit further West than the western boundary of the original colony. But there was a while during settler times in the 16 and 1700s when this was the “wild western frontier.”

This is the territory of the people who call themselves the Yésah. I grew up hearing that this was Monacan land, and then more recently learned that the more a local band is Tutelo, and then more recently, learned that their own name for themselves is the Yésah. I've always wished that I knew what they call this mountain or this river, but I don't know whether or not they gave them names.

One thing that I learned that really gives me a lens to think about what came before colonization on this land I learned from my mom when she was young. The Country Club is a few miles south of here. In the 60s, they were excavating to put in a swimming pool and encountered an archeological site of what was a palisaded village site from the eastern woodland times the ancestors of the more recent day Tutelo.

It was a village site that had been surrounded by a wall of upright timbers. There were ancestors’ remains, and they found all kinds of artifacts. My grandfather brought my mom with him to go. He got an invitation to go see the archeological dig, and she was there and looked down on some of the remains and sites that were found. And it was incredibly profound and impactful to her, and I think really opened her eyes to an interest in Turtle Island's indigenous history.

As a kid and throughout my time here on the farm, we've found arrowheads. We are definitely within the frequently used area of those peoples. I am intrigued, I'm curious, and now I am also mad and frustrated to think that those ancestry remains are in a drawer in some museum in Richmond or something shitty. I would love to offer this land as somewhere for rematriation of remains because were the closest, biggest intact piece of forest to that area.

When I came back onto this land, I left a lot of the community that I've been investing in. So now I feel I'm really challenging myself to not just love my time in the woods and walking on the hill and in the Creek, but really think about how this increasingly rare big piece of land can be preserved.

With whom does it make sense to try to share access to this place? To what are the best uses going forward? How? How can there be a combination of producing food here and preserving open space? And what does it mean to have dreams of transferring land out of private family ownership into some more community? What are the different versions of that?

Ecological restoration is now a big part of erin’s life. The cattle farming her grandfather enacted on the farm degraded the riverbanks and the watershed and prioritized grass above all else. She has a long list of land projects to address and restore the land. And like any project, these take time and labor.

Nature does a lot undoing some of the damage of non-ecologically minded humans. But this work is an infinite task—especially in the face of climate change. Increasing droughts and increasing opportunistic troublesome species, and insect plagues are killing trees.

Its been a good, steady, and tangible focus to work on ecological restoration work while visioning and scheming and trying to plant seeds for what the future of this farm beyond my own family is going to look like.

Some restoration projects include fencing the cows out of the waterways, planting trees, and invasive species mitigation and removal, and preparing for droughts. There are places in the woods where the understory is damaged because cows were allowed to graze up the hills. To help heal and nurture the understory, erin has planted stands of ginseng, golden seal, Solomon seal, and other woodland medicines that a mentor of hers, Carol Judy, shared during their time together.

She taught me about how you could, at the end of the growing season—right before all the sang harvesters would come through—pull off most of the leaves so that the ginseng wouldn't be quickly spotted or identified. It would be a little bit of nutrient cost to the plant, maybe it didn't have the full end of the season to bring all those sugars from the leaves down to its roots, but a harm reduction model of keeping it because, because of economic pressures and not everybody having access to a, solid, pragmatic forest granny who would knock some sense into them about over harvesting.

All those plants are wildly threatened, over-harvested, and completely stripped from the woods. So she would to guard these stands preciously and do all these different things to protect them. But every time I would go and spend time with her, she'd send me home with a little zip lock baggie packed with some moist moss with little rootlets and seeds of different woodland crops made in here, fern and ‘seng and trillium. These beautiful plants.

So the first, as soon as I was able to get, kind of a promise of protection to a piece of woods up in the mountain here that the cows would stay fenced out of them. We've been calling it the Carol Judy Woods and, for a decade, planting little bits.

erin explained that her ideas about ecological restoration ten years ago have shifted because of how quickly climate change has impacted Virginia in terms of rainfall and temperature changes. What were once realistic measures are no longer viable. For example, the sugar maples erin planted years ago—because she loves tapping trees and they benefit the overall environment—rely on freeze and thaw times. Without predictable or reliable Winter and Spring temperatures, these trees do not hold the certainty in erin’s vision as they once did.

I feel very anxious about the drought. That seems to just be the increasing norm. So much of the magic of Appalachia is its temperate rainforest. And it's wild that I got to spend a lot of really formative time learning about plant medicine and plant communities in the forests that are all there because of the high amount of rainfall that they get.

To adapt to changes associated with climate change, erin is in partnership with the cattle farmer who leases much of the pastureland she owns. They collaborate on sustainable farming efforts, and the relationship and willingness to learn are mutually beneficial because ecologically sustainable pasture techniques are also cost-effective. She has also partnered with a graduate student from Virginia Tech who is passionate about ecologically sustainable pasture production. Together, they are developing plans for a Silvopasture project—which involves the intentional integration of forages, trees, and livestock. These systems are designed and managed in ways that increase productivity on a unit of land by producing livestock and timber products. erin is thinking into the future and planning accordingly:

Maybe I should plant pecans in the silvopasture range. Maybe I need to think about what's a couple of zones South of here and invest in the future in terms of plant communities that can handle heat and dryness.

erin’s journey of learning how to be climate resilient is ongoing. She took a year-long community herbalism course and has made regional connections with other farmers grappling with the realities of climate change. She takes the politics of plant knowledge seriously and is careful not to participate in knowledge hoarding or gatekeeping. She remains critical of plant knowledge as a specialized skill instead of a collective heritage of knowing.

There can be a colonial mindset in a lot of these different plant and farming communities that I'm really trying to not replicate or buy into, even though I am the recipient of that colonial heritage that says that this plot of land belongs to my family.

There are a lot of uncertainties, but erin is open to learning, and adapting, and remains open to change. Our conversation was difficult at times; these topics take a lifetime to understand. Some of them, we might never fully. In the spirit of ending on a high note, I asked erin what feels good about life right now. After pausing, she said:

What feels really good is that if you give a plant or a project the right conditions to grow, it will grow. I'm maybe extra freaked out about the drought right now because it's been such a horrifyingly scarily dry couple of months this fall but it's so amazing to see when things grow and thrive. So many of the medicinal plants that I'm really excited about are long-lived or perennials that you get established, and then they do their own thing. They're kind of wild and weedy. My partner and I have been building what we call the Solidarity Row.

It's this big, long, kind of patchwork quilt-styled garden with a bunch of medicinal plants that are just basically wildflowers. There’s mondara, there's echinacea, there's anise hyssop, there's elecampane, there's lavender, all these plants, some of which are native to this area, some of which are brought in because they're useful for us.

But once they're there, they're doing their own thing, and seeing that take shape over the past few years has been really exciting.

There was a time when I thought that my future was also going to look like staying in that neck of the woods. But I realized that I have more of an opportunity, more power that I could leverage coming back to where I'm from, where I'm from from.

The contours of erin’s ever-unfolding life story is a testament to the adaptability and innovative spirit that flows through Appalachia. erin has a gracious patience that I have never quite encountered. She is a highly skilled, intelligent, ambitious, charming, and critical Appalachian person, and her company compels me to speak less and listen more. Learning more about her background—accompanied by her descriptions of the present and aspirational visions for the future— was like fitting a puzzle piece snug where it belongs. It made sense. It couldn’t have been any other way. Like her Solidarity Row, erin’s patchwork life will grow wild and weedy with purpose. I left my interview with a handful of freshly cut catnip, a bag of homegrown jalapeños, and an unmistakable sense of being alive.

*Note: Words like “um” and “like” have been removed for readability.

*Note: erin spells her name with a lower-case E.