Blue Ridge Country July/August 2020 - 66

GUEST COLUMN

By ANNA ZIEGLER

Trajectory
Anna R. Ziegler is an attorney in Hinton, West Virginia, with the law firm of Ziegler and Ziegler.
She serves as president of Friends of the New River Gorge National River, is a board member with
the New River Conservancy, and a Rotarian.

grew up on the banks of the mighty New River in a
small southern West Virginia town. The New, ironically one of the oldest in the world, carves its way
through the ancient Appalachians in its defying
course to the Gulf of Mexico. My youthful proximity to this mighty force impacted the direction my
life would take. I followed the New to the Ohio River for college; the stewardship instilled in me as a river
guide steered me from a degree in pre-medicine to one in
environmental sciences. All the roads on my atlas seem
to lead back to Appalachia. These hills and rivers have
guided the trajectory of my life.
Often, the change in trajectory is inconsequential. The
whiff of a lilac pulls the hiker off trail; the melody of wa-

ter falling over rocks lulls the angler to an afternoon nap;
the coo of a mourning dove shifts thoughts from business
to personal.
And just as the natural world pulls and morphs the human's trajectory, we, too, alter the trajectory of the natural world. The impact is imperceptible, until the results
are noticeably unavoidable: too much imperious surface
results in deadly floods downstream; our insatiable drive
to keep the lights on fuels an industry which generates
byproduct that can devastate an entire ecosystem; our
customary levels of travel contribute to a diminishing polar ice shelf and rising sea levels.
At the cusp of spring, 2020, the collective trajectory
changed. The human world came to an abrupt and sudden halt. In response to a global pandemic,
people stopped. We stayed home. We did it
for our parents, our neighbors, our nurses, ourselves. We stopped to grieve.
As we stood still, the natural world kept
going. The river rolled by, carrying the spring
rains on their relentless journey to the ocean.
The song birds searched the woodlands for
good housing material. The peepers outside
my window were blissfully unaware of our
hardship. Fireflies lie in wait for just the right
moment to bedazzle the night sky. Bees are busy pollinating our food.
Remarkably, the human slowdown altered the natural
trajectory. The levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases
in the atmosphere dropped. The skies cleared in some of
the most polluted places. Big-city skylines are visible. Fish
have returned to canals and rivers which were recently
barren. As humans learned to live with fewer trips to the
store and the office, as we found entertainment in our
homes and communities, the earth took a deep breath.
Humans are a resilient species. We will recover. The
economy will recover. However, we have a unique opportunity to permanently change a critical trajectory, that
of the natural world. We've glimpsed the impacts of a
simpler life on the bigger picture. Modified lifestyles and
thoughtful investment of recovery funds into greener infrastructure are something we can visualize. We have the
power to change the trajectory.

As humans learned to live with fewer
trips to the store and the office, ...
the earth took a deep breath.

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Blue Ridge Country July/August 2020

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