I retired in January 2016 at age 55 from a career in business. I had enough good fortune over time to have the resources to be able to do so. I am one of the lucky, to be sure.
About two years before I retired, I started volunteering within the George Washington Memorial Parkway (GWMP), helping to maintain a section of the Potomac Heritage Trail (PHT) and also removing invasive vines. To begin in 2014, I volunteered with the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club (PATC), which maintains the PHT on behalf of the Park Service. To begin, I took a hike with the local leader of the PATC and he pointed out three species of vine that were problematic– English Ivy, Oriental Bittersweet, and Porcelain Berry. And off I went for the next year. My motives at first were not particularly environmental in orientation– I really just thought the vines were ugly and I wanted a more beautiful park in which to walk.
What I saw over time, however, was that the vines were killing the large trees along the river by smothering them outright or by weighting them down until they fell in a storm. My early theory was that this was a “legacy tree” project– to preserve the local legacy of these old trees, some of which had been growing for 150 years (since the Civil War)– and to pass them on to the next generation.
I had no background in environmental science, per se, other than my two years of college science classes before dropping my pre-med intentions and shifting to business. And a long-standing love of nature, going back to my childhood.
As I worked that first year, I learned about tools and efficiency (what worked the best) and about the importance of weight (what was worth the trouble to haul around). I made mistakes, some of which I still feel badly about to this day. Mostly, I had a million questions.
In 2016, my wife and I joined the Arlington Regional Master Naturalists, which included taking a wonderful educational program touching on all aspects of the local ecology.
Long story cut short, I now view the overall challenge as enabling the native plants at all layers of the landscape to recover and become resilient to shocks over time. Over the last 4 years I have learned a lot, but still feel like I am just starting to learn. There is so much. Over that time, there are two things I have found particularly profound.
First, working outside in the park was absurdly beautiful, strangely calming, and great exercise. In the last years of my full-time professional life, I had developed profound anxiety– to the point that I could not work some days and to the point I could not relax. Being outside was healing to me. Sometimes I felt like I was doing penance — for too many years working behind a desk. But as I began to see the profound beauty more clearly, I saw that what I really needed was to give my brain a chance to rewire itself. I needed to let the natural processes take over.
The second profound experience for me has been to see nature respond to the work I have done. It does not do so quickly, as plants operate on a different and slower time scale than people. But as I have watched and observed, I have seen a slow-motion miracle unfold. Perhaps that slow speed makes the miracle more spectacular. I once heard something attributed to an old Chinese proverb:
“If you want to learn about the world, climb one mountain 500 times rather than climbing 500 mountains once”
Inanimate objects and animate life have rhythms. Over time, large boulders split and shift; stream beds move about after large floods; a ravine becomes deeper and wider. The life surrounding is also in constant change. A tree falls and new types of plants and fungus sprout; seeds get dispersed and plants grow in new locations; spring wildflowers expand in range and become abundant; new species of fall flowering plants emerge from nowhere. We just have to watch and be patient. And while I have tried to help the local environment, I have also been healing. In the end, I get more out of it than I put in.
One final thought. After a lifetime in business, working with and managing large teams and being on a continual quest to make things go faster and better, I decided at first that I wanted none of that any more. So, I have spent a great amount of time working on my own, even as I leveraged a network of others in our community for insight, fellowship, and encouragement. In the last few months, I have decided I am ready again to seek broader impact than just what I can do with my own two hands, and that is the origin of this website. I am hopeful that my experience personally and in nature can be of assistance in creating more interest and more impact in the natural systems that surround us.