Wildness needs our protection, and we need wildness to be fully alive. Only a human presence completes wildness. Love and restraint temper our personal wildness and keep it constructive.
Richard Rankin
Welcome to the fifteenth entry in our blog series, WRITING MATTERS, in which Kelley interviews some of our wonderful authors who share about their books and writing processes. This post features Richard Rankin, author of MUP books WHILE THERE WERE STILL WILD BIRDS (2018) and LOCAL SIGNS AND WONDERS (2024). Richard writes books and articles on cultural history, nature, and hunting. After a long career as a college professor and administrator and an independent school headmaster, Rankin directs the Interlaken Wildlife Center in Cameron, South Carolina. An outdoorsman, conservationist, and Presbyterian layman, he and his family are the sixth generation living on family land in the North Carolina Piedmont.
Kelley @ MUP: Richard, you have published two books with Mercer University Press that focus on natural settings and the effects of human influence: While There Were Still Wild Birds (2018) and Local Signs & Wonders (2024). Tell us about your interest in nature. When did it start, and how have you continued to learn about the natural world?
Richard Rankin: It started as a child. My family lived just outside a small Piedmont, North Carolina town, and there were beautiful old woods and two creeks running through the adjoining property. As a boy, I hiked, played in the creeks, and explored the place almost daily. Also, as I have written about in Local Signs and Wonders, my family spent considerable time at a retreat my parents built on our family’s old farmland nearby. These woods are truly exceptional and now part of a designated state-level natural area. The wonder of it all fascinated me.
As a teenager, I began hunting bobwhite quail with my father in Clarendon County, South Carolina, as I have written about in While There Were Still Wild Birds. This gave me another important way of relating to nature. A few years later, I became involved in my first conservation effort, writing letters to South Carolina politicians in support of saving what is now Congaree National Park. As an adult, I joined the local land trust in my part of North Carolina’s Piedmont, the Catawba Lands Conservancy, and soon became an active volunteer and leader. This work eventually focused on protecting our family land and surrounding properties. I also became a self-taught naturalist, especially on wildflowers. I began reading leading nature writers and edited the anthology North Carolina Nature Writing: Four Centuries of Personal Narratives and Descriptions (John F. Blair, 1996). And I continued to hunt. In all these ways, my love of nature grew and deepened. Eventually, it just made sense to write about it.
K: Where do you find the balance between humans owning land and humans allowing the land to be as wild and free as possible?
RR: That’s the challenge, isn’t it? I think Aldo Leopold said it elegantly: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (A Sand County Almanac, 1949). This requires love, limits, restraint, and regulatory oversight. The right balance involves a long view, not a quick return. Economic development and capitalism are great benefits. But good planning and policy involve an honest recognition of the true long-term costs of development. Because human health and happiness are derived from creation, environmental health and well-being have to be the ultimate measure of a civilization.
Due to the scale of human impact on nature, human intervention and wildlife management are necessary to foster wildness. Parks and preserves need to be set aside for wildlife, but wildness is often as close as our backyards. Wildness needs our protection, and we need wildness to be fully alive. Only a human presence completes wildness. Love and restraint temper our personal wildness and keep it constructive.
K: What do you think is our human responsibility as part of creation, and how do you carry out this mission in your daily life?
RR: For me as a Presbyterian—which is my primary identification—humankind’s chief end is to glorify and enjoy God. A big part of that is caring for creation and its creatures. In my daily life, this means practicing an ethic of love toward others, including the natural world. If the golden rule is expanded to include not only our neighbors but the neighborhood (the natural world), then the choices become clearer. The concept of stewardship becomes central to carrying out this mission. This has to involve action; it’s not enough to be a well-wisher or a sideline observer.
There are lots of levels to good stewardship. Daily personal practices and interactions like recycling are essential. But it needs to move beyond individual contributions to include organized movements and policies that protect the natural world and its creatures. Writing is an important way to get the message out.
K: In While There Were Still Wild Birds, you tell the story of your personal connection to quail hunting in South Carolina. As a conservationist, what role do you feel hunting plays in the ecological balance?
RR: Hunting pays for conservation. Good sportsmen are the world’s best conservationists. Passed in 1937, the Pittman-Robertson Act, which is a federal excise tax on guns and ammunition, has produced over $7 billion in funding for state wildlife agencies and their conservation work. Ecological balance in the world today can only be achieved using the science of wildlife management. In the Southeast, game management is responsible for bringing back threatened species like wild turkey and the black bear. Because hunting funds wildlife conservation, it is an act of stewardship and rewilding.
K: In Local Signs & Wonders, you offer a collection of essays relating to your homeplace and the surrounding areas. You even include a piece of writing by your grandfather. Did you write/edit these essays with the intention of completing a book, or did you put the separate pieces together when you recognized their connections?
RR: Both. For many years, I imagined writing a collection of essays about my relationship with our family property, and even occasionally composed a tentative list of chapters/subjects in my journals. But the effort never quite came into focus. Independent of that plan, I spontaneously wrote a number of essays about compelling local subjects over the last twenty years, and in several cases tried without success to place them in literary journals. With my wife’s help as the book designer and publisher, I even self-published an essay collection, Margins of a Greater Wildness, that included two essays later reworked for Local Signs and Wonders. All of these accumulated writings were local and therefore thematically connected through my love of place. Honestly, at a certain point, I never thought any of this writing would see print, except perhaps through self-publication.
After While There Were Still Wild Birds (2018) was published, I realized there really was an audience for my writing and became more deliberate about Local Signs and Wonders. I had already accumulated almost half of the chapters as the earlier occasional pieces. And a number of other subjects floating around in my head surfaced as topics. I worked up a chapter list and saw how the various pieces reinforced and informed each other. Then I started writing the unfinished chapters. Once I have a subject in mind, I sometimes think I compose it unconsciously in my sleep because it comes out pretty fast and surprisingly well formed! It took me about three years to complete the new material and finish the manuscript.
K: You write in the “Preface” of Local Signs, “In an age in which leaving home typically provides better opportunities for employment, new experiences, and a certain kind of freedom, staying put or moving back involves a serious, countercultural commitment” (viii). How would you describe your own countercultural commitment to your homeplace? Why is it so important to you?
RR: For the first twelve years of my professional career, my commitment to home was a happy accident. My first wife got a job in Charlotte as Queens College’s chaplain while I was in graduate school. After finishing my doctoral work, I gradually worked my way into a tenured position as a history professor at Queens. So I was lucky enough to find a position fifteen miles away from my childhood home. As my career at Queens progressed, I became an administrator with opportunities to become a college president elsewhere. This is when I had to weigh the tradeoffs of staying rooted in a place. In 2001, I was asked to come back and head my alma mater, Gaston Day School. Several caring people advised me against the move because they viewed it as a step down. And I knew going to Gaston Day meant giving up more prestigious and lucrative opportunities in higher education. But it also meant coming home to family, friends, and our family property. It was risky. For me, it was a choice that I hoped would allow me to live more deeply and richly in place. And it has.
A second big homecoming decision involved more sacrifice on my wife’s part than mine. When I first took the position at Gaston Day, we lived in a Gastonia neighborhood more like the one where Sarah Park grew up. Even so, she recognized how much our family property meant to me and supported our move to the country. Living at Willow Hill has fulfilled my connection to home and stimulated me as a writer. I don’t think I would have written either While There Were Still Wild Birds or Local Signs and Wonders if we hadn’t moved back. And my career as Gaston Day School head was wonderfully challenging and rewarding. My vocation as a representative of and advocate for a settled life has become more and more authentic. But it was only possible because Sarah Park has been a full partner.
K: Conservation is a politicized topic, even when it shouldn’t be. Rising ocean waters, microplastics, erosion, climate change, deforestation, dwindling natural resources, and more are major concerns as we approach the mid-twenty-first century. The problems seem so big, and people all along the political spectrum have passionate ideas about how—or if—to fix them. How do you confront feelings of overwhelm or helplessness as you work to preserve your own small part of the world?
RR: Resisting despair in the face of the mounting environmental crisis is one of the big challenges facing us. Many, many young people have given up because they recognize the apocalyptic magnitude of the crisis and don’t see an appropriate societal response. They believe we are sleepwalking toward environmental doom. And unless we wake up, they’re right! This is a human tragedy playing out right before our eyes. I know several wonderful young couples who have chosen not to have children because they believe it is unfair to bring them into a world heading toward environmental ruin. And others who refuse to engage with life because they anticipate environmental catastrophe. What’s the point, they ask? Many in older generations are oblivious to the depth of despair that our most thoughtful young people feel.
For me, conservation and restoration grow out of faith. The Creator stands with us, grieves creation’s wounds, and then brings things back to life. We must live in a hope grounded in action. That means not only working to save your own small part of the world but also advocating for greater reforms at the regional, national, and global level.
My own hands-on soil conservation work on our family property has been one of the most powerful affirmations of our ongoing partnership in creation. When you see new life and vegetation returning to eroded landscapes because of what you did, you can’t help but understand that restoration is possible. And it depends on us becoming partners in the work. The Creator stands ready to assist us: our task is to remain hopeful and get to work. The work itself is joyful. My advice is to experience the joy of working to restore creation as an antidote to despair.
K: What is one tip for conservation that you would like to share with us?
RR: I don’t have one tip; I have three:
- Love conquers all. If you love a place, you will find meaningful ways to care for it. But it starts with love.
- You can’t do it alone. Become involved as a volunteer in conservation organizations. The organizational sum is far greater than the individual contributions.
- The Creative Force is on our side. Don’t be timid. The Source of Universal Love is working with and through us as we work to preserve and restore creation.
K: Finally, can you tell us about any upcoming writing projects?
RR: Yes. Thank you for asking. I have two more books in mind, and I am working on one of them now. The first is a second collection of essays about belonging to my home place. The tentative title is Apprenticed to Creation: Further Essays about Belonging to a Place. Like Local Signs and Wonders, it will include both already written essays and new material. One chapter will discuss other writers of beloved places who have influenced me. The themes are similar ones: the advantages of a settled life, rich fellowship with neighbors and ancestors, an appreciation of local history and culture, and the joy and responsibility of stewarding creation.
When I finish Apprenticed to Creation, I hope to begin work on the second book, Hunting for More Wildness: Essays about the Meaning of Southern Hunting. I have already published several of the chapters for this book in journals or magazines and have established a firm chapter outline. And, as usual, I will write new material. The subjects include many of the great hunting writers like James Kilgo, Robert Ruark, Havilah Babcock, Nash Buckingham, and others like Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings for whom hunting was a passion. The human need to connect to wildness is an overarching theme.
Those two projects should keep me busy for a while.
© Mercer University Press 2024
To order Richard Rankin’s new title, Local Signs and Wonders, click here. Use coupon code MUPNEWS to receive 20% off your order at checkout. Shipping charges apply. (Note: While There Were Still Wild Birds is available only as a print-on-demand title.)
Kelley graduated from Mercer University in 2000 with a BA in English/Creative Writing. After twenty years as a freelance copy editor, including work for MUP, she has returned to full-time work outside the home with the good people at Mercer University Press. She loves to read and also enjoys great TV series, long walks with dachshunds Luke and Leia, and all things nerdy. Kelley is married to John, a “Double Bear” (BSE 2001 and MSE 2010), and they have two teenage daughters, a high school senior and a Mercer sophomore.
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