We played wiffle ball because it was hard and cheap. Plus, our backyard made the greatest Wiffle field west of the Mississippi. We had a flat pad of well-drained Kentucky bluegrass, the size of a racquetball court, right behind our house. The rest of the yard was a steep hillside where my parents built garden terraces using shattered concrete from the Denver landfill.
Throughout the summer of 1989, my little brother Mitch and I stood barefooted in the bluegrass, staring each other down. One July afternoon, he did his best Kevin Mitchell imitation, trying to lock his left leg straight the way the Giants outfielder did. I copycatted Dodgers pitcher Orel Hershiser and threw him a hanging curve that he slapped into the wood fence behind me. The ball bounced into one of our flower beds.
We had a dozen beds, and by midsummer they sprouted not only flowers but pumpkins, beets and bell peppers alongside 10 tomato varieties. The blooms signaled pollinators from around the neighborhood, and birds came from the nearby pond to feast on the bugs. As kids, we knew nothing about the adults in Moscow and Washington dragging the Cold War toward its end that year. Besides my dad calling my brother “Mikhail” because he had a Gorbachev-style Ukraine-shaped birthmark on his forehead, we had no clue that we were Cold War babies. But we knew our insects and weeds. We knew when and how much to water.
I walked into the flower bed and picked up the ball. My brother had fast eyes and fast hands, but he didn’t like inside pitches. My strategy decided, I marched back to the imaginary mound, only to trip over the aluminum edging separating turf from soil and open a 4-inch gash in my right foot. I sat down and screamed.
“Alex!” My brother ran over, yellow bat in hand. He took a quick open-mouthed look at the blood and ran into the house to grab my dad. Mitch pulled him onto the grass and he stood over me, concerned and pale. He ran for a stack of pillows and dish towels, jamming the pillows under my bloody foot to elevate the wound. And then he went back inside.
My brother, who was 5, sat down beside me and took over the emergency.
“It’s OK, Alex,” he said. I cried and said nothing, staring at the slash. Mitch smiled at me as he pressed a dish towel over the wound and tied another over my foot, checking the wrap for snugness. My mom, the neighborhood Cub Scout leader, had taught us how to bandage things. Then my brother got me to my 9-year-old feet and made his body a crutch as we hobbled indoors to get out of the sun. My dad, no fan of blood, had passed out on his bed upstairs. So we waited on the glazed brick floor just inside the front door until my mom got back from the dollar movies. Mitch sat next to me and compressed the wound with his hands.
He still had the bat.
I GOT INTO the environmental restoration business by accident. After military tours at sea and in Iraq as a Marine grunt and sniper, I demobilized back to Salt Lake City, where my family had relocated in the early 90s. Lost but somehow alive, I moved in with my little brother and tried using civilian words and wearing sideburns again. Mitch hadn’t been to an overseas war, but he was at war with himself. And in the spring of 2011, like other combat vets I knew, he took his life.
The summer after his death, I didn’t need a job. What I needed was an escape. Recalling that birding had always offered that, I contacted Great Salt Lake Audubon to ask about bird-banding or monitoring gigs. I learned that the chapter was restoring habitat for migratory birds on 120 acres along a stretch of the Jordan River in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, property jointly owned by Audubon, the Utah Reclamation and Conservation Commission, and other public and private entities. The project needed any help it could get.
Days later, I parked on a bluff at the south end of the property, where new asphalt and curbs crisscrossed dirt plots marked with flags for new homes. Keith Johnson, the manager of the Jordan River Migratory Bird Reserve (JRMBR), waited for me by the open sliding door of his brown VW Westfalia. Keith, as I’d soon learn, was retired, and working on the reserve kept him active while allowing him to meet his personal commitment to public service. His van was the unofficial reserve work truck, and tools and plants were spread across its floor. He gave me a shovel and a tray of Fremont cottonwoods and Woods’ roses, then sent me off alone into an abandoned pasture near Willow Creek, a stream which melted off the granite giant known as Lone Peak and flowed along the east side of the property.
The livestock were long gone, and the ex-pasture held nothing but reed canary grass and mean-looking Canada thistles. As I cleared square yards of grass and weeds and dug holes for my plants, I felt calm for the first time in nearly three months. Since my brother’s suicide, my parents and I hadn’t known what to do other than cry or scream at the mountains from our backyard deck. The questions and comments we got sounded like those I still got about my war; no one really wanted to hear how we felt or what we knew. Some days, I didn’t want to hear how I felt or what I knew.
The willows and beetles didn’t ask me anything. Male lazuli buntings sang for sex and the water in the creek ripped and burped its way through the hydrology cycle and out of my life. The work was anti-inflammatory. The sight of orioles and the smell of mud activated my senses and cooled my over-fired brain. After an hour of chopping and sweating, I was tired, yet pleased with my progress. Keith, wearing a backpack oxygen tank and a nasal cannula fixed over his moustache, brought me an orange bucket of water and some cloth to suffocate any weeds around the plantings. Then he went back to the VW for more plants.
You may never see the JRMBR, but its story is like that of almost any slice of land in the country. In Midvale, Utah, just a few miles north of the riverbank where I dug holes, U.S. Smelting, Refining and Mining once ran five lead and copper smelters and an ore milling facility that produced copper, lead and zinc. Like Utah’s steel and canning industries, the smelters and milling facility parlayed the state’s geological resources into lucrative products and well-paying jobs.
The good times couldn’t last. Air pollution from the smelters blighted crops in the Salt Lake Valley, and in 1958, after decades of complaints from farmers, U.S. Smelting, Refining and Mining closed the last of its five smelters in Midvale. The company continued to operate the milling facility, but by 1965, like other corporations in Utah and throughout the country, it was subject to a statutory income tax rate of 48% that funded Cold War domestic programs and the nation’s $54 billion defense budget. Growing environmental concerns and foreign competition worsened the arithmetic, and in 1971 the facility shut down.
Throughout the state, mines, steel mills and canneries met similar fates. The canning industry, which had once provided almost 30% of the state’s manufacturing jobs, employed less than 11% of Utahns in 1988. By 2019, the U.S. was the largest steel importer in the world, and Utahns were trucking in the alloy that our modern lives demanded. Economic inequality, which in 1968 had dropped to its lowest level in U.S. history, exploded.
In Midvale, U.S. Smelting, Refining and Mining left secrets in the earth. Throughout its golden age, its operations flushed lead and zinc into the Jordan River’s floodplain and stacked tailings containing mercury and cadmium in the floodplain, too, creating piles that reached 60 feet deep. The smelters dumped massive amounts of slag throughout the floodplain’s wetlands. Birds were found dead in the tailings ponds; native fish struggled. Humans got sick, too. Midvale residents collected tailings and used them in their garden beds and sandboxes until 1982, when the Utah Department of Environmental Quality took samples of the tailings and found high levels of lead. More testing revealed the groundwater in the neighborhoods around the smelter and mill was poisoned with arsenic.
In the early 1990s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency designated the smelters and the milling facility as Superfund sites. Sharon Steel, which had purchased the facility before filing for bankruptcy in the late 1980s, agreed in a court settlement to pay at least $22 million in cleanup costs. In the early 1990s, the state of Utah and U.S. Department of the Interior were awarded $2.3 million in federal funds to compensate for “injury to natural resources” by Sharon Steel. This money, along with additional state and private funds, supported the Jordan River reserve and other restoration projects along the river.
By 2019, the U.S. was the largest steel importer in the world, and Utahns were trucking in the alloy that our modern lives demanded. Economic inequality, which in 1968 had dropped to its lowest level in U.S. history, exploded.
The water in the Jordan is governed by the laws of physics, yet it seems to have a will of its own. Centuries ago, the river meandered through tall peachleaf willows and beaver dams as wolves and bighorn sheep crisscrossed the valley. My Mormon ancestors, fleeing persecution both real and imagined, saw the Northwestern Shoshone and other tribes enjoying good grass and soil in the river’s floodplain and grabbed it for themselves. They built canals for crops and livestock; they killed the beavers and tore out their dams. As industrious as they were, though, they couldn’t use all the water in the river’s 3,800-square-mile drainage, and when the mountain snow melted in the spring, the Jordan roared. In 1896 and 1909, the river flooded parts of Salt Lake City.
Over the next 50 years, Utahns built dams across the Jordan and added surplus canals that sped runoff away from the city and into the Great Salt Lake. We uncurled its oxbows to permit barge travel. Later, we replaced small family farms with suburbs, offices and factories, so that snow and rain fell on pavement and slid into the river instead of soaking into the ground. As stormwater runoff moved faster and dirtier into the river, more and higher walls of rock and cement were needed to restrain the river and protect the cities of the Salt Lake Valley.
A straightened river is a drag racer; it digs into its bed, disconnects from the spongy floodplain on its banks, and crashes into whatever it wants. By the middle of the 20th century, multiple stretches of the Jordan had carved channels 6 to 10 feet below the original floodplain, drying up the wetlands and riparian forests where migrating birds rested during their long journeys. In 1983, when record snowfall was followed by a May hot streak, the Jordan tore down its narrow lane, likely blasting through the polluted soil and industrial waste in Midvale.
Climate change reminds me of roadside bombs in Iraq. No matter how hard you worked to defend yourself, you eventually got hit. Thirty years ago, Mitch and I could expect to build snow forts from December through March; now, years of drought and 50 degree Fahrenheit January days might be followed by a year with 700 inches of white fluff in the mountains that lasts until a heat wave strikes in June. The old boundaries of flooding season are gone.
The migratory bird reserve was restored with climate change in mind. We couldn’t alter the direction of the river without heavy equipment and permits, but we could slow down and spread out the flows that entered it. Keith, his underpaid AmeriCorps technician Tyler Murdock, and my former college biology teacher Ty Harrison, whose family owned five acres within the reserve, worked with engineers to establish a new, snakelike path for Willow Creek. Natural beaver dams and their ponds further stalled the flow. As the creek widened, it watered the dried-out native chokecherries and black hawthorns in its floodplain, allowing them to pull in excess carbon.
Most of what I did at the reserve for the rest of that summer and fall was farm work — opening irrigation heads, rebuilding fences, digging, planting. I didn’t understand the story of the river and how we had changed it. I only knew I needed the escape it provided.
The trouble was that my health wasn’t good enough to sustain more than 10 hours of volunteer work a week. I didn’t realize it yet, but I’d spent seven years soaking up poisons like those left in Midvale. I absorbed lead from firing all types of Cold War weapons as I trained on some of our 750 bases worldwide, sponged up herbicides from Iraqi Anbar rice and Iranian cucumbers, and inhaled black smoke from burn pits on forward operating bases. Maybe I’d been gardening with tailings, too.
EVERY TIME MY GAL AND I drive past the northern edge of Swaner Preserve in Park City, I get excited. Pointing at native plants sandwiched along a string of beaver dam analogs — structures of logs and branches that mimic the effects of real beaver dams — along a tributary of the Weber River, I lean toward her window and yell, “I built that! I fucking built that!”
“Jesus, why are you yelling?” she’ll ask.
I’m yelling at America.
I worked at Swaner from 2020 to 2023 as a restoration technician, paid an average of $11 per hour. After I was diagnosed with heavy metals poisoning in 2012, I spent years detoxing, and by 2017 felt well enough to wander back to school on the GI Bill and earn an associate degree in the environmental restoration trade. The classroom training helped, up to a point, though I made sure to keep my boots muddy. I knew from all the generals and ambassadors I’d spent a year cussing about during the Surge that too much time in the office isolated me from the reality on the ground.
The beaver dam analog system I always admire from my seat was a team effort, but I remember my role. We walked East Canyon Creek in the fall and performed a Rapid Stream-Riparian Assessment, a low-tech protocol that any high-school grad can use to evaluate a stream’s water quality, aquatic habitat, plants and hydrogeomorphology — the effects of the constant and constantly shifting collision of water and earth. After the assessment, I picked dam sites, looking for bends where a dam could slow the creek and willow stands that would provide beaver food.
Over the winter, we begged for money from public and private sources. In late summer, when water levels were low enough not to drown us and we didn’t have to worry about frightening young birds in nests or crushing fish spawns, we waded back into the creek. We pounded rows of untreated logs into the streambed. Then we recruited volunteers to throw on waders and help build the dams with recycled Christmas trees, rocks and mud. Finally, we fired up a series of experiments designed to measure changes in the system. We even began to consider using the beaver ponds as firebreaks for prescribed burns.
This is applied science — a combination of physical and brain labor.
We jumpstarted a natural process, and I can measure its positive effects not only with hard data but with my own senses. Behind the dams, the water releases leaves, dirt and pebbles that protect caddisfly larvae or create fish-spawning beds. When water spreads across the floodplain and through the soil, it encourages the growth of grasses, flowers, shrubs and trees, which in turn attract bugs that feed amphibians, birds and bats.
Overhead, taller trees and willows give birds safe places to nest, and the shade lowers the temperature of the too-hot creek. Cooler water increases the dissolved oxygen that stoneflies and fish like Bonneville cutthroat trout need to breathe, and that creates more places for me to cast my fly lines. When ospreys catch those trout, the nitrogen in their excrement and the picked-over fish carcasses seeps into the soil, where it is taken up by plants that can’t make that essential nutrient on their own. And when a beaver family exhausts its food and packs up for new territory, the dams slowly collapse. The pungent sediment they trap is stuffed with seeds, and once exposed, it sprouts a meadow of fresh grasses and shrubs where whitetail deer and elk can chomp away and maybe, one day, end up in your freezer.
East Canyon Creek is on its way back to health, but the Great Salt Lake is still drying up, and millions of streams across the country are still degraded by industrial pollution and bad land management. If we want to restore the natural world our lives depend on — the webs of relationships in streams and coral reefs and chaparral shrublands — we’ll need to put an army to work for the rest of the century.
For working people, especially those who were born or came of age after 9/11, pursuing the American Dream means piling side hustle upon side hustle: betting on crypto, donating plasma, flipping Power Ranger action figures on eBay. In the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War had supposedly signaled the “end of history,” young Americans were advised to load up on student loans to escape the fate of laid-off industrial workers like those once employed by Sharon Steel. But history kept breathing. As the cost of living rose and interest on personal debt accumulated, college degrees — and even trade degrees like mine — offered less protection against the economic crashes of 2001, 2008 and 2020. For some of my friends, enlistment was the only surefire way out.
If we want to restore the natural world our lives depend on we’ll need to put an army to work for the rest of the century.
Rather than tell anyone to get a third job or tout fantasies of a multiplanetary future, I keep turning the clock back. When we collected showy milkweed or rabbitbrush seeds at Swaner, I often imagined a Shoshone or Ute man around my age, maybe a combat vet like me, doing the same thing on the same spot in the 1400s. The more time I spent at a restoration site, the better I understood its ecology. I began imitating crane calls instead of baseball players. Park City locals who stopped by the preserve started calling me “the beaver guy.” I imagined that back in the day, there was another “beaver guy,” a member of one of the bands working in this part of the Wasatch Range.
As I entered my last year on the preserve, I finally understood that the stories about coyotes as trickster figures are not only spiritual warnings but original publications in ecology, and they dovetail with modern science. I wouldn’t trust a coyote around the school kids we taught — a predator is a predator — but I always trust coyotes to thin herds and clean up dead things, freeing us from unnecessary work.
I also understood that the free market, at least in its current form, can’t solve the environmental problems industry creates. If it could, the mess in Midvale would have been cleaned up a half-century ago. The nonprofit sector, where I worked and volunteered over the past decade, can’t solve these problems either, not at the scale required. Federal training programs like AmeriCorps and Job Corps are a good start, but their pay is abysmal, and their restoration work is piecemeal.
If I had my way, I’d blow the dust off the New Deal era’s Civilian Conservation Corps and put at least 10 million citizens through the kind of applied sciences program I went through. I’d rent out abandoned malls for wintertime classes and pay students $50 an hour to train hard and fast. I’d get them out in the field in spring, summer and fall, leaving their winters free to care for ailing grandparents, acquire advanced training, or assist with paperwork and science publications the way my Swaner teammates and I did. I imagine enlistments of two to four years with the contract wiping out any student debt, after which enlistees could start their own small restoration companies or manage public preserves in worker cooperatives.
Conservation work needs drone pilots, truck-and-trailer drivers, coding geeks and small engine mechanics. We need ex-platoon sergeants and managers from the busiest fast-food joints, people who can organize large groups and chew asses. We need digital mappers, chainsaw ninjas, and teachers who can translate academic jargon. And we need steel to make shovels and stream gauges and post pounders. Instead of shipping our jobs — and our restoration problems — overseas, we should use the lessons of places like Midvale to support responsible industrial practices at home.
Ultimately, we need leaders willing to gamble on creative solutions. Millions of beaver-dam analogs and the wet firebreaks they create could help us reintroduce fire to forests and sagebrush without destroying towns and infrastructure. Native prairie grasses, which scientists estimate contain about a third of all carbon stored on land, could be planted in alleyways from the Dakotas to Texas. With land bridges across railroads and highways, we could add bison to the cycle, letting them fertilize these revived bits of the Great Plains and spread their seeds farther. The coal miners who kept our lights on for the last century could use their talents to restore the mountains and streams of Appalachia and Carbon County, Utah.
These are daydreams, but they’re not as far-fetched as they might sound. Between 1933 and 1942, the Civilian Conservation Corps put 3 million Americans to work in a “tree army” that planted more than three billion trees. When my grandfather returned from the Korean War, he and my grandmother applied to a homesteading program for veterans and their families. Each of the more than 3000 families chosen by lottery got up to 160 acres of land in one of six Western states, along with water, low-interest tractor and home loans, and free education in the latest agricultural science. In southern Idaho’s Minidoka County, where my grandparents farmed spuds and beets, most of the veterans in the program were white, but a handful were Nisei and Latino. Like all government homesteading programs, it had colonial roots; it also brought my grandparents out of poverty — and enabled my parents to become the first generation in the family to attend college and buy the house where my brother and I hit Wiffle balls every summer.
How will we pay for a modern restoration army? Reversing the tax cuts and subsidies enjoyed by corporations and the wealthy would be a good starting point. We can also admit that the Cold War I grew up on and the war I fought in Iraq were expressions of a reckless foreign policy that has hollowed out American industry and the opportunities it offered. We’ll always need a military, but we don’t need a global empire of bases manned by a large standing army. We need citizen marines and citizen soldiers restrained by modest objectives, not sent to chase never-ending blowback abroad. Our best long-term defense against threats of all kinds is an environment where the fish are safe to eat, the plants provide medicine, and the people who tend the land are fully employed.
WHEN MY MOM OPENED the door and looked at us, I was awake on the brick floor, and my brother was watching over me with his hands squeezing the wound. She checked the bandage approvingly, then woke up my dad. I left the emergency room with 16 stitches, and when my foot healed in the fall, we resumed our games under the garden terraces.
I still have a Wiffle bat and a bucket of balls. I keep them in my room and take hacks off my tee or slam imaginary pitches at my brother, visiting the part of my mind where a healthy scar persists. I don’t have anyone to play with yet, but I won’t give up playing.
Great Salt Lake Audubon released its part ownership of the JRMBR in the mid-2010s. Keith Johnson died. Ty Harrison died. But the parcel is still there, still alive and trying.
One afternoon this past November, I jumped the fence at the reserve, ignoring the Keep Out signs, looking for the feeling I’d had there in 2011. The Jordan River flooded in 2023 and 2024 after a serious drought ended with off-the-charts snowpack. Trails collapsed, groundwater rose and basements flooded. Yet the reserve did what it was designed to do, absorbing some of the river and slowing down Willow Creek.
Our best long-term defense against threats of all kinds is an environment where the fish are safe to eat, the plants provide medicine, and the people who tend the land are fully employed.
The cottonwoods we planted had survived voles and disease and were more than 30 feet high, the bird nests in their branches awaiting their spring tenants. Beavers had stacked their winter caches of willows in the floodplain ponds. Our Woods’ roses had grown tall and thick and were weighed down with red-brown fruits. Meanwhile, the reed canary grass and phragmites were out of control. My trained senses told me that there was still so much potential and work to be done.
I’m not my job and neither are you, but what I built on the Jordan River and elsewhere helped me rebuild myself. The process of cleaning up a stream or an acre of sagebrush mirrored the process of cleaning up my body and mind. This is why I keep working in conservation, despite the poor pay and the inadequacy of the effort. It’s also why I’m optimistic. This is a fight against ourselves, and unlike our misadventure in Iraq or the self-devouring Cold War before it, it’s one we can win. When I doubt that, I think of the last “tree army” — and remember that I turned platoons of 18- to 22-year-olds from all walks of life into snipers and gave them more responsibility than most 50-year-olds have ever known.
Standing on the reed canary grass, surrounded by a budding cottonwood forest and picking the last golden currants of the season, I could feel that my mind and body were stronger than they were on my first day at the reserve. I walked back to my truck, electrified. As I studied the first snows on the mountains, chickadees buzzed past me, disappearing into the willow forest whose cuttings once covered the floor of Keith’s VW.
I jumped back over the fence, whispering in my mind: “I built that. I fucking built that.”
Michelle Urra is a freelance illustrator based in Germany. Through her work, she likes to make sense of the world and explore literature, music, film, as well as scientific and cultural themes.
This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation. hcn.org/cbb
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This article appeared in the February 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “A fight we can win.”
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