Champions of Nature #27
Susan J. Tweit
This is a series of flash interviews with people I admire, people who are doing something—anything, a lot of things—for the Earth. These folks walk the walk, each of them in their own way, using their own unique skillset. They dedicate their energy, their time, and their hearts to a crucial cause: the preservation of this precious planet we call home.
Decades ago Susan Tweit was a field ecologist, dissecting piles of grizzly bear scat and studying Rocky Mountain habitats. Somewhere along the way, the scientist discovered something surprising.
“I realized I loved the stories in the data more than collecting those data,” she says.
So the scientist morphed into a storyteller. Her byline began appearing in magazines, newspapers, journals, anthologies and on websites and radio shows—always carrying the message that humans and our environment are intricately, irrevocably intertwined.
Terraphilia is a word Susan and her late husband, Richard, adopted to describe their shared affection for and commitment to the Earth and its well-being. It’s a sense of being connected to all the various forms of life that inhabit our planet. “Without this bond,” she says, “We are lonely, lacking, no longer whole. “
Susan has written 13 books, all of them focusing on the ecology and nature of the U.S. West and Northwest. (Details are at her website.) Her work, she says, is “… suffused with the joy I feel at being alive and part of the life and lives that animate this numinous planet.”
For Susan, writing is not just a way to make a living. It’s a practice of living. Every morning she writes (and shares) a nature-based haiku and photo on her social media platforms. She’s currently in the middle of a project called A Year of Spiritual Thinking: Every month she posts an essay in her Substack newsletter, which is called Practicing Terraphilia. This month’s subject was the hope and courage of migrants—both avian and human.
“Hope is a way to live,” Susan wrote in that essay. “The power to make the world a kinder and more loving place. That is hope worth nurturing and practicing—every day with everyone we meet, human and moreso.”
The scientist-turned-storyteller lives in a small passive-solar house set amidst native prairie outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. She tends an organic kitchen garden and practices what she calls “restorying”—bringing old, unloved houses and damaged pieces of land back to life. In the past decade, Susan has teamed up with friends and tradespeople to restore, finish or build ten homes. She also puts her botanical knowledge to use reclaiming and reviving former industrial sites, city parks, wild lands, and an urban creek.
Susan is now at work on a new book, one that will tell the story of those efforts, and why they matter. Its beautiful title: The Ditch & The Meadow: How Re-storying Our Yards and Neighborhoods Can Heal the Earth and Ourselves.
Here’s what Susan shared with me about her enchanted, Earth-based childhood and how that has echoed through her life.
Susan, please tell me about some of your early experiences in nature.
I was born to a family culture of science and nature study, to parents who loved the outdoors. My mother, raised in Berkeley, California to a third-generation Bay Area family, grew up camping and hiking with her dad in the Sierras in the 1930s and 1940s. She met my dad (a New Jersey boy) at UC Berkeley and introduced him to the outdoors and nature study. My brother and I grew up thinking it was normal to go camping on weekends and spend summers on the road in the West, hiking, backpacking, searching for wildflowers and fossils and birds, and hanging out in wild places. I don’t ever remember thinking of “nature” as something outside myself. I grew up immersed in the more-than-human world. It was home.
One of my earliest memories is the smell of an approaching thunderstorm in the desert outside Tucson. It was hot until a growing cloud cast cool shade over us, and then a gust blew the fragrance of rain toward us from the storm coming our way. Suddenly the air that had been dusty and pore-sucking dry felt so vivid and alive. Startled, I sat down abruptly—and landed right on a fishhook cactus. I was about four, and my mom told me years later that it took her a good five minutes to work the spines out of my butt! She said I cried, but only for a minute, because I was so fascinated by the lightning strikes “walking” closer. She was shaking, she said, desperately hurrying to remove the spines so we could race down the trail and back to our camper, which we reached just before the rain and lightning hit.
Another memory is lying on my belly in a meadow high above timberline, watching a hummingbird zip from flower to flower just inches above the ground, while the rest of my family summited a small peak nearby. I didn’t care about the peak; I was totally absorbed in the miniature life of that alpine meadow—the Lilliputian flowers, the bees droning past, the whistles of a pika from a nearby talus slope. I could hear my mom, dad, and brother at a distance, but I was in my own world. I was probably five or six then, and we were in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, I think.
As I wrote in Walking Nature Home, A Life’s Journey, my first memoir:
“In my childhood home, drawers in the basement cabinets held collections of neatly labeled seashells and rock specimens. We had a black light for fluorescing minerals, a garden of native wildflowers rescued from development sites, roadkill held for study in the freezer, binoculars and a shelf of nature field guides close at hand.”
About that roadkill in the freezer: I had a school friend over to play one summer afternoon. We came inside from arcing high on the rope swing in the back yard, and decided we wanted popsicles. She pulled open the freezer drawer and there, on top of the popsicles, was a red-tailed hawk, wings folded, beak upright, frozen eyes staring. She shrieked, raced out of the kitchen, and never touched the freezer again. (She did eat a popsicle, but I had to get it for her.)
How did those early experiences shape your relationship with the natural world?
Looking back, I realize that I had a very eccentric upbringing for a white, middle-class kid who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. When I was living it though, it was just my life. I went through years when I wanted with every fiber of my being to be “normal” like other kids. But I wasn’t. My small nuclear family was immersed in what we now call the “more-than-human” world. In time, I came to understand the richness of those experiences, and my sense of family extended to the other lives around us— especially the plants, always my special kin. Nature is still home for me. It’s not that I don’t love humans, but the natural world is my source of solace and inspiration.
I left the Midwest when I was 19, bound for a job in Yellowstone National Park. Except for a few semesters in college when I actually had to be on campus instead of doing fieldwork in Yellowstone, I’ve been in the West ever since, immersed in nature and a relationship with the wild. I studied photography and field botany in undergraduate school, getting credit for my fieldwork, and then went to work for the Park Service and then the U.S. Forest Service in the area around Yellowstone. I began my career there as an ecologist mapping habitat types, and studying sagebrush ecosystems, wildfire, and grizzly bear habitat. Much of my fieldwork was in the backcountry, a long hike or horseback ride away from roads and towns and people.
How do you connect with nature now … through your work or leisure or both?
I’ve been a freelance writer for the past decades, writing about the nature of life and humans’ place in it. I’ve written 13 books and hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles about nature, ranging from the ecology of dam removal to gardening for wildlife. I keep my hand in botany fieldwork by restoring (I call it re-storying) abused land—whether a block of channelized creek, industrial parcels, or rangelands—removing invasive plants and restoring native species to reweave the community of the land. For the past seven months, I’ve been engaged in a “Year of Spiritual Thinking” project aimed at better understanding my inchoate spiritual relationship with nature, as a way to help others re-connect to the sacredness and healing of the more-than-human world. I teach the practice of terraphilia, humans' inborn affection for and connection to the earth and the web of life that animates this green and numinous planet. I write about that project in my Substack newsletter, Practicing Terraphilia.
What are your biggest fears for the future of our planet?
Like many of us, I grieve the losses of climate change and human population growth. We are losing species, companions in this extraordinary web of life; we are losing experiences of awe and wonder and connection; we are losing knowledge and culture and spirit. Life on the planet will survive—perhaps not in the form we would most prefer, but life is tenacious and creative. My biggest fear is that humans will not survive. And that would be a loss—not because we are a superior form of life, but because of what we bring to the planet, humans’ unique contribution to the community of life on Earth. As I wrote in The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes, my ode to a particular place that taught me about the nature of home and our place in it,
“What we do best comes not from our heads but our hearts, an ineffable impulse that resists logic and definitions and calculation: love. Love is what connects us to the rest of the living world, the divine urging from within that guides our best steps in the dance of life.”
Without humans to love this planet and the explosion of life forms that make Earth a verdant and habitable place, who will stand in awe and wonder, shout in joy or terror, shine the beams of heart and spirit across the miles?
What is your biggest hope for the future of our planet?
Re-storying. The work that I and thousands, perhaps millions of others are doing to heal land and water, earth and air. We are weeding out invasive plants to make space for natives, removing dams to restore flows and fish, re-flooding marshes to provide nurseries for birds and sharks and clams and otters. We are removing tons of plastic trash from beaches, hauling piles of discarded fast fashion from desert playas so that ephemeral wildflowers can bloom after rains that may only come every few years. We are teaching gardeners how to eschew pesticides and herbicides so that fireflies return to blink their mating signals in the magic of summer nights. We are planting pollinator plants in urban food deserts, seeding native trees to return rainforests and revive watersheds, returning cultural fire to nurture native willows and dogwood shrubs for basketry, daylighting urban streams buried in concrete tunnels. In so many ways, across all of the continents, as individuals or groups, humans are working at re-storying and mending nature nearby, and in the doing, mending each other and all of us. That steady, patient, loving work gives me a great deal of hope.
Thank you, Susan, for being a Champion of Nature!
People like Susan are who give me hope. They carry on the fight to save our planet's fragile natural balance.
Susan Tweit is a remarkable person! So is all of the work she does. I will be adding a few of her books to my Stack of Books. Thank you!