When most people experience rural areas of the Midwest, they do so through the windows of their cars as they speed across the region’s many interstate freeways. Cattle grazing, corn and soy fields rolling to the horizon, tumble-down barns, and silver silos—these sights are common to any driver who has traveled through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, or any of the other “cut-through” states of the Midwest. Specific features of the landscape blur when viewed at 65 mph, leaving travelers with a sense of open space or nothingness as they hurry to other destinations. 

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Deborah Fleming’s Ghosts of an Old Forest calls us all to pause and to look more carefully at the landscapes that many of us only ever experience through the windows of our cars. In many ways, Ghosts of an Old Forest builds upon Fleming’s 2020 PEN America Literary Award winning collection Resurrection of the Wild (Kent State University Press, 2019). In the first essay in Resurrection of the Wild, Fleming explains the need for readers to pay attention to the landscapes they might have been taught to see as uninteresting or hopelessly polluted: “The problem of deleting long-abused land from an environmental ethic means that we idealize a distant landscape at the expense of neglecting the one in which we live, the one we call home” (2). Ghosts of an Old Forest continues the work of helping readers correct this imbalance. With each essay, Fleming gestures to a world of richness that many of her readers have likely overlooked before reading her collection: flame azaleas, bank barns, sandhill cranes, springhouses, twelve-spot skipper dragonflies, and the increasingly unfamiliar rhythms of rural life. 

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In 14 essays ranging in tone from meditation to lament to rallying cry, Fleming guides her readers to consider what we all risk losing if the narrative of “flyover country” continues to dominate our perceptions of the region. As a longtime Ohio resident, Fleming recounts her increasing levels of frustration with outsiders who view her rural Ohio county as “land ‘where nobody lives’” (71). The inability to see this place and its inhabitants, Fleming argues, is what leads to the treatment of land in Ohio and other Midwestern states as nothing more than empty space to be subjected to monoculture, built over, and, ultimately, erased. 

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While Fleming is adept at drawing the reader’s attention to the beauty and abundance of Ohio’s rural landscapes, she does not flinch from explaining the risks and challenges inherent in these spaces. Noise pollution, corporatized agriculture, the destruction of independently owned farms, toxic waste oozing from fracking sites, strip mining, climate change, a lack of political leadership willing to protect natural resources, and the increasing sprawl of suburbia all threaten Ohio’s rural landscapes and the ways of life they nurture. With increasing urgency, Fleming arranges her essays as a call to do more than slow down and spot the wildlife. We all, she insists, rely on the well-being of our natural environment. She explains, “The salvation of the woods, wetlands, and biosphere need the protection of the people of the cities—their numbers and political will are the only things that will save the rural and natural environments from becoming sacrifice zones” (181). 

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Aware that many of her readers may not share her experience of rural life, Fleming nevertheless insists on its value. While Ohio’s rural landscapes may be largely agricultural, Fleming is insistent that agricultural landscapes of the Midwest are as much a part of nature as are the wild, rugged landscapes of other regions of the country. Agricultural use is one relationship that the people of Ohio have to the land, but Fleming shows her readers that “the wild batters at our windows, feasts on our gardens, tunnels beneath our buildings, and springs up along our fence lines, for the most part ignoring us, for all our furious history and our grand philosophies” (59). The wild is here; we just need eyes to see it.

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Perhaps this is where the collection makes its greatest impact on the reader, in the sense that each essay takes us a little further down the path away from ourselves and away from our preconceptions of this land. The Ohio landscape Fleming describes seems familiarly tame at first. The fields, barns, and stands of trees we see from the freeway are all present. Yet, Fleming is not content to let the reader drift through her collection with a hazy sense of appreciation for native species and rural quaintness. She interviews local farmers, visits fracking sites, and highlights the work of countless people, past and present, who likewise refuse to accept that the wild is not worth protecting in Ohio. By refusing to communicate via generalization, Fleming strips her readers of their excuses of ignorance or carelessness. In the final essay of the collection she says, “If greed is the progenitor of destruction, carelessness is the other parent. Imagination inspires the desire for more, but lack of imagination enables people to destroy without conscience” (199). This essay collection takes the reader through an overlooked and often misunderstood landscape to spur us to open our imaginations to the place we inhabit and to challenge the carelessness threatening to destroy it.

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Emerson laments in the opening pages of Nature, “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature.” In Ghosts of an Old Forest, Deborah Fleming shows herself to be one of those few who do have eyes to see, and with each essay the reader, too, is taught to see more—more of nature than of nothing in Ohio and the surrounding region.