Ginseng and the Future of the Commons
"Understanding the commons and its role within the larger regional culture," writes Gary Snyder, "is one more step toward integrating ecology with economy."18 Environmental policy, focused too narrowly on physical resources, loses sight of the web of social relationships and processes in which those resources are embedded and made significant. "They're taking our dignity by destroying our forest," as Vernon Williams, of Peach Tree Creek, put it.
Williams was referring to the landscapes taking shape on the plateaus during the present coal and timber boom. Since 1990 the state has permitted tens of thousands of acres in southern West Virginia for mountaintop removal and reclamation. Mountaintop removal is a method of mining that shears off the top of a mountain, allowing the efficient recovery of multiple seams of coal.19 When the "topped" mountains are rigorously reclaimed under the terms of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, the rich soils essential to ginseng and hardwood cove forests are gone, and with them the multigenerational achievement of the commons.
What is missing in the environmental planning process is any recognition of the commons and its critical role in community life. Such recognition, not unusual in the countries of Europe, could reopen portions of the civic commons that is suppressed in environmental planning by an unwieldy and inaccessible process of technical assessment. For instance, a slurry pond that fills the evacuated hollow of Shumate's Branch was permitted on the grounds that there were no endangered species, no historic artifacts (with the exception of a cemetery, which was relocated), and no prime farmland (despite a history of subsistence farming at least three generations deep). With that testimony, the commons specified in Cuba Wiley's narratives was quietly erased.20
As vital cultural resources, ginseng, commons, and community life are inseparable, yet there are presently no means available for safeguarding that relationship. A standard recourse, declaring ginseng an endangered species, would clearly be culturally destructive, since it would make a vital cultural practice illegal. Wild ginseng in fact would seem to merit federal protection not because it is endangered but because within its limited range it is integral to the venerable social institution of the commons.
Ginseng may be a powerful resource for resolving some very thorny dilemmas. A touchstone for economic, cultural, and environmental interests, ginseng provides a tangible link between ecology and economy. Given ginseng's predilection for native hardwood forest and rich soils, national recognition of its cultural value would be a way to begin safeguarding both a globally significant hardwood forest and the cultural landscape to which it belongs.
—Mary Hufford
Reprinted from Folklife Center News 19, nos. 1 and 2, Winter-Spring 1997
Notes
- Snyder, 228-29. [Return to Text]
- The present boom is an effect of the Clean Air Act of 1990, which set acceptable levels for sulphate emissions from coal-fired facilities and increased the national demand for the low-sulphur bituminous coal found in the region. [Return to Text]
- Because the region's low-sulphur coal has to be washed to come into compliance with the Clean Air Act, valleys must be found for storing the "slurry"--fine, wet, black refuse from the coal-cleaning and separation process. To contain the slurry, towering impoundments are built at the mouths of hollows out of the coarse refuse. "There's a saying around here," said one storekeeper. "'We fear the river above more than the river below.'" A similar structure collapsed on October 30, 1996, near Pennington Cap, Virginia. See Spencer S. Hsu, "Rural Va. Coal Field Accident Turns Streams Black, Chokes Thousands of Fish," The Washington Post , November 1, 1996, p. B4. [Return to Text]