By Ranjit Singh, ADVANCE ENVIRONMENTAL COLUMNIST
The red-eyed vireo is as gifted a songster as you’ll ever hear. The scarlet tanager’s brilliant plumage would be at home in a bustling papal conclave. Now, as these and many other migratory birds ready to leave our region for their southern winter homes, I can only wonder:
Will they find trees to nest in when they return next spring?
Since May, I have served as the environmental columnist for the FXBG Advance, a regional online news magazine. My writing has centered on local nature, with occasional forays into politics as it relates to our natural surroundings.
Now, as summer wanes, I’m taking stock of what I have written. And I’ve come to two disturbing realizations:
First, my homeplace is dying.
Second, I am chronicling its demise.
I live in Stafford County, Virginia. We’ve had a small family farm here for over 50 years. My FXBG Advance columns often use this locale, a marshy patch alongside Potomac Creek, to underpin essays on the links between people and their surroundings.
I never intended to become a documentarian of loss. When I accepted the position with the magazine, I thought I would spend my time pointing readers towards the wonders of surrounding nature.
But erasure is almost all I see here; local life, in its myriad forms, is simply vanishing.
It’s easy to understand why. Stafford County’s population has nearly quadrupled since my immigrant family arrived here. Each day, trees and soil are scraped away to build new schools, strip malls, townhouses, a sprawling Buc-ees, and—of course—data center “campuses” so large they replace hundreds of forested acres. A culture of growth and stringent “by-right” development laws make much of this erasure possible.
Consequently, protective wetlands disappear and historic creeks are fouled with pollution and litter. Green, open spaces are harder to find. New construction projects almost never factor in the environmental and psychological costs associated with such rapid change.
The annihilation of local nature is simply unrelenting.
So, this summer I penned lyrical essays on phenomena like birdsong and the arrival of invasive species. But I also wrote about the disappearance of a copse of trees I had admired for years, destroyed overnight by bulldozers at the height of nesting season. I recalled, too, how things used to be, like when a summer night’s drive over Potomac Creek meant a windscreen plastered with bugs of many species. I noted, “That unavoidable slaughter, a visceral indicator of biological plenty, is now gone. My windshield is clean.”
I even argued the ethics of the soil itself. Soil – unlike dirt – is composed of living matter as well as nutritive decayed life. I wrote,
This means that even here on warm, wet Potomac Creek, we literally walk and grow flowers in the loam of past peoples: of natives and immigrants, of masters and the enslaved, and of the Indigenous peoples who have persisted here for millennia.
Yet every day, acres of centuries-old topsoil are lost to gargantuan Amazon and auto parts warehouses. This happens by design. We’re trading our natural and human heritage for shopping convenience.
And, in one especially bitter column timed for July 4th, I argued our country is now at war with nature itself. We deny or dismiss the terrible harm we’re doing, risking our own species’ well-being on this planet. Recklessly undermining the welfare of future generations, I indignantly declared “America chooses oblivion.”
Such anger requires reflection. So, on this first day of September, I’m also reviewing the big and little events that inspired these columns.
That familiar copse of trees I mourned was indicative of an ugly statewide trend. According to Global Nature Watch, from 2001 to 2025 Virginia lost 1.4 million hectares of tree cover alone. That’s twenty percent of the total tree cover our state had in 2000. The toxic spills my coauthors and I tallied, that frequently make our local waters hazardous, are part of a far bigger story, too. This year, the state Department of Environmental Quality reported that 89 percent of our lakes and 75 percent of our estuaries are “impaired” waters, failing to meet health standards. And while I enjoyed writing about songbirds and other creatures, over 130 state species are now threatened or endangered.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see what we are doing is unsustainable. Nearly eighty years ago, naturalist Aldo Leopold observed that all creatures strive for safety and its attendants: “prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.” But, he reflected, “too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.”¹ Our species has an ugly habit of taking too much from the Earth.
If such destructive trends continue, our local ecosystems will collapse in coming decades. There’s simply no doubt about it. As biologist Rachel Carson warned over our gross reliance on pesticides in 1962, too much abuse of nature and the coming Spring seasons will be silent, bereft of birds.
Then, no one is safe.
Carson’s bestseller Silent Spring galvanized the environmental movement and ended the domestic use of DDT. While she faced personal vilification and fierce opposition from the chemical industry and its government allies (who called her too emotional), the very worst outcomes were avoided, at least temporarily. The birds came back.
Now, Virginia is witnessing what might be called an environmental “moment.” Community centers are filled with people expressing concern over clean air, wildlife, and natural resources. I teach a college seminar designed to inspire students – who’ve never seen a bug-spattered windshield – to become activists, demanding sustainable policies not just for flora and fauna, but for people, too. Good land, air, and water are vital to our species both biologically and psychologically.
That’s basic science, as Rachel Carson knew well. But I’ve seen it firsthand, too.
Not long ago, I asked Stafford County landowners their feelings about their properties, interviewing more than fifty people. At times, they broke into tears describing the importance of local nature. They loved opening windows to hear the songbirds’ morning chorus and eating fruit from trees planted by beloved relatives now lost. The presence of nearby wildlife added immeasurably to their lives. The steady ruination of such places clearly carries costs, even as it enriches some people.
But activists alone—young and old—cannot cannot change a culture of denial in the limited time we have to save local ecosystems. We all have choices to make. We need to take time to speak up for the nature that envelops and sustains us.
And, most importantly, we need to support “green” candidates willing to protect the interests of future generations of all native species.
There’s a story any nature writer would love to document.
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Ranjit Singh teaches in the Department of Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Mary Washington. He’s also an active environmentalist. His “No Lines in Nature” Substack blends history, science, and philosophy to explore our relationship with the natural world world. You can find it HERE, along with an earlier version of this essay.
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