A Brief Look at the Wagner’s Environmental History

September 8, 2021 By: Student Example Three

The twentieth century has brought dramatic changes to my family’s relationship with the environment, including our respective views of its value and our effect upon it. Farmers, mosaic artists, a university professor, a computer language programmer, gardeners and now me, an aspiring “environmentalist,” make up a family that has had varying connections to the world around us.

My mother’s mother, Agnes Linnevold, grew up in Texas with her five brothers and sisters on a small subsistence farm, her father supporting the family through farming and driving cattle. The soil of that dry earth and the scorching sun of Texas brought them enough to survive, but with little to spare. In contrast, my grandfather had the fortune of being the son of a Lutheran minister in a small Minnesota town living in a coal-heated home, aware of his natural environment but with no need to cull a living from it directly. They settled in Madison, Wisconsin, a city built from dairy money with a university in its midst. With my grandfather’s stable occupation as a professor, a three bedroom home made of wood and heated with oil, as well as a gas and oil guzzling automobile, my mother and her parents benefited from their middle class standing and the technological impact of the industrial revolution.

After spending his youth in Berlin, Germany, my other grandfather Gerhardt Wagner moved to New York, familiar and comfortable with the human-made, urban setting in which the family mosaic business operated. Married briefly to my father’s mother, they moved north to the suburban setting of Croton-on-Hudson, right next to the rail line that led into New York City. When they separated after World War II, my grandmother moved to Vermont with her young son Eric, to teach in a progressive school on the grounds of which there was a small farm, with crops and animals enough to feed the school’s population. Surrounded by the New England woodlands, my father began to appreciate the natural environment while simultaneously learning the benefits of using its available natural resources for agricultural purposes. He chose to stay in the native deciduous forest of the New England and New York area when he settled with my mother in Garrison, New York in 1960.

With my father gainfully employed at IBM, my parents could enjoy the beauty of their natural surroundings in the woods of Garrison without subsisting upon it. Transforming nearly two acres around the house from woods into a full lawn and spacious garden, my parents introduced a number of non-native species, including forsythia, dogwood trees and lilies. Running amok in the trees and brambles surrounding my family home as a child, I loved the wilderness for its natural obstacle courses and its beauty, and I never had to worry about either feeding a family from its bounty or the about the danger of business interests wiping it out for a quick profit. I now realize that such carefree pleasure was a luxury to me as a middle class white girl growing up in the rural United States.

The socioeconomic status and local environments of my nuclear family over the last century have directly affected our personal value of the natural world. Whereas my grandmother’s family subsisted upon their local environment for her family’s food and income, we have the ability to just sit back and appreciate the surrounding wilderness for its very existence, if we so choose. Out of my appreciation, however, has grown a passion to conserve nature, not only for its aesthetic and spiritual impact, but also for the biological and cultural diversity it sustains.