On Sustenance
Land and home as nourishment
My introduction to a conservation ethic was not through Thoreau or Leopold or Muir, but through the quiet, day-to-day choices and actions of a particular person: my father; and a particular bit of land that my family called home for two decades: Lost Farm. My dad — a lanky plant ecologist who is forever bearded and always seen wearing worn-out clothes and a tattered baseball cap, even on the most special of occasions (i.e., my wedding) — moved with my brother and me from our home in Norman, Oklahoma, to Nantucket Island, 25 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, when I was 11 years old. Here he worked for the Massachusetts Audubon Society and lived on Lost Farm, a 70-acre parcel of conserved Audubon land in the center of the island, featuring windswept meadows, stout pitch pine forests, and ample frontage along Hummock Pond. As Nantucket’s sole Audubon employee, he set about managing and learning the land. He conducted plant surveys, kept a daily log of the weather and rainfall, and set up plots and experiments.
As children, my younger brother Nathan and I were his mostly willing and sometimes begrudging assistants. We trimmed the trails, mowed the meadows, tediously entered weather data into spreadsheets, and helped feed the sheep that had a long stint on Lost Farm as part of the grassland management plan. And we played in the woods and on the pond and in the dirt, where we scratched out worlds and territories with sticks.
We played in the woods and on the pond. Hummock Pond. Photo © Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
We participated, albeit in a modest way, in the cycles of nourishment the land offered: we picked pints and pints of blueberries and blackberries. Dad taught us how to forage for mushrooms: puffballs and boletes and chanterelles. We collected wind-felled branches for smoking fish. The sheep ate the grass and leaves from the cherry trees. The ever-hungry ticks latched onto us whenever they could. The ducks ate the ticks. The hawks and the snapping turtles ate the unlucky ducks.
In considering Lost Farm’s various ecosystems and the plants’ and animals’ ways of both eating and being eaten, I thought of, and then looked up, the word “sustenance.” One definition was, expectedly: FOOD, PROVISIONS; also NOURISHMENT.
But there was also this:
● a means of support, maintenance, or subsistence: LIVING;
● the act of sustaining: the state of being sustained;
● a supplying or being supplied with the necessaries of life; and
● something that gives support, endurance, strength.
What came to mind when I read those other definitions of this word was not the deer-fenced garden my dad built, or the sizzle of sliced mushrooms sauteed in butter and salt, but the place itself, in its entirety. The way that Lost Farm sustained and nourished us as a family. The way its fertility was not only in the literal food it grew for its myriad creatures, but in its ability to become for us a home.
Dad taught us how to forage for mushrooms. Photo © Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
In the uncomplicated, present-tense way of a child, my time at Lost Farm when I was young did not require any lengthy reflection or analysis. It simply was. My family played a role in seeing to the needs of the land; the land played no small part in defining the shape and habits of our family and our time together. The plants and creatures became our ecological lexicon as my dad taught us what and who was living alongside us: bayberry, huckleberry, cattail, invasive phragmites, painted turtles.
Lost Farm was the place in my world where I felt utterly at ease. It was where the quiet within me could be expansive, not small, because the land could hold it.
And in this way, I took the land for granted. Not in the sense of intentionally taking advantage, but in the sense of a child’s unconditional, unquestioned love. I did not think about, nor, therefore, fully appreciate what it meant that this land had been protected, or how fortunate we were to get to live there.
Sustenance, in its simplest definition — living — was mutual and reciprocal at Lost Farm, and in many ways unextraordinary and perfunctory.
And therefore, as children do, I assumed that what I most loved would always be there.
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But, of course, my father knew all along what my childhood self did not — and what my adult self still sometimes struggles to accept — that our time at Lost Farm was always going to be temporary. His retirement would mean passing his position and this home on to someone else.
In October of 2019, Nathan and I traveled to Lost Farm one last time. My dad and stepmom had retired and therefore lost their rent-subsidizing incomes which had enabled them to live on Nantucket. They were preparing to move to Omaha, Nebraska, my father’s childhood home. Over the course of three days, we packed up the small, gray shingled house, made trips to the dump, taped boxes, and soaked up as much of the land as we could. The trails we’d walked thousands of times, the shape of the pond and the soft line of fog above it, the smell of the pitch pine trees. I tried to cram as much of it into my memory as I could, as if I could collect perfect sensory snapshots and carry them home with me like treasures in a stuffed suitcase.
And then the moving truck came, and the house was empty, and we were on the ferry. This place that had been a home for my family for more than 20 years suddenly slipped through my fingers one fall morning. Then Nantucket was a thin line on the far horizon. I haven’t been able to bring myself back to the island since.
Though I do not like to admit it, there is no small part of me that wishes, often, that we owned Lost Farm. I long to board the ferry, arrive on the island, walk myself down Lost Farm’s long driveway, and arrive somewhere I could still rightly call home. I wish that I didn’t have this deep ache of missing a beloved place that is no longer mine to return to.
There’s beauty in the possibility of land becoming home. Photo © Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
But of course … I know better. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve yet learned from my father’s conservation ethic came in the way he left Lost Farm. After 20 years, he simply let it go. He did not resist. He released the land back to itself and to its own future, which he would no longer have a part in shaping.
And isn’t this true of all our places, whether we own them or not? That they will never, really, be ours. This is part of what the broader work of land conservation imparts: a more inclusive definition and understanding of home — one that requires that we shift our understanding of ownership. When we do the work of protecting land, we implicitly or explicitly acknowledge that we are, always, guests. We affirm that the land belongs to itself. We accept that while we can become deeply attached to places, we must be prepared to let them go.
And this, perhaps, is the deeper fear that underlies my particular grief around my family no longer living at Lost Farm: that our time is always temporary. None of us will get to keep what or where or who we most love.
But there’s a beauty to this too, isn’t there? Beauty in the possibility of land becoming home, able to be so entangled with who we count among us as family. Beauty in what only our mortality can make so exquisitely precious to us.
As I come into my late thirties with a family and a child of my own, Lost Farm, even at its present distance, has a new possibility to it, something else the land is imparting to me, still. A way of being present, of ethically inhabiting land within our limited time.
Sustenance: something that gives support, endurance, strength.
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I am able to see Lost Farm, at last, as an adult who understands just how critical the land’s conservation was and will continue to be. I have a deeper understanding of the integrity and self-worth of the place itself, regardless of who lives there. Its permanent protection status means that, after my family departed, and after the next family departs, and the next and the next, the land will not be subdivided, extracted from, covered in concrete driveways and large summer houses.
We were privileged to call Lost Farm home for 20 years. The land’s life is far longer, and reaches much further than us. This is the sort of sustenance and nourishment we can offer to our landscapes: protections that permit places to sustain and endure, to be home to not one, but to many. To pitch pine trees and painted turtles, to bearded lichen and catbirds.
Sustenance: the act of sustaining: the state of being sustained
There is so much at stake right now in these sustaining acts of conservation, such that landscapes can retain their integrity and their ability to nourish.
There are so many — humans and nonhuman kin alike — who are losing their beloved places to sea level rise, to development, to conflict, to wildfire. One report suggests that as many as 1.2 billion people will be vulnerable to displacement by climate-related events by 2050.1 We are living in the midst of a sixth extinction. These are far greater losses than my family’s departure from Lost Farm. These are forced disruptions. To become a climate refugee is to flee. To witness the destruction and vanishing of a long-inhabited landscape is to intimately know all that is at stake in its loss. Places cannot sustain themselves, nor can we sustain places, when they are either erased or so utterly malnourished that they become increasingly empty.
Land conservation will not necessarily protect our beloved places from the myriad effects of climate change, but it will give them a chance. It will provide room to adapt and change and transform. It will ask of us that we adapt and transform as well, in part by expanding our definitions of sustenance, nourishment, and home.
The lessons imparted to me by my father — and the lessons imparted to me by Lost Farm — live in me as ways of considering how I can engage in the conscious work of nourishing land. How I can practice inhabiting a home. How I can receive, with gratitude, the gifts a place has to offer and how I can offer gifts in return.
When the land is sustained, the land sustains.
I no longer get to call Lost Farm home. I will not get to keep my father, nor will my daughter get to keep me. These are among the universal and relentlessly heartbreaking truths of being human. Sustenance, and the ability to sustain, then, does not mean to endure beyond our own human limits. But it does mean that we can participate in giving care to, and receiving care from, that which is beyond ourselves: the places that nourish us and can go on to nourish so many others.
The Earth will endure. Our home places will change; they will face hard years ahead. But the land will continue on.
Lost Farm’s greatest gift of all was this lesson: the land was never mine to keep.
Read other work by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder:
The Wonder in an Acorn, Issue 1
1 The Guardian, September 9, 2020. Climate crisis could displace 1.2 billion people by 2050, report warns.
Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder is the author of Rebirth: Mothering Through Ecological Collapse, forthcoming from Broadleaf Books in Spring 2025. Her writing can also be found in Emergence Magazine, The Common, Crannog Magazine, the EcoTheo Review, the edited poetry collection Writing the Land, and in Katie Holten’s The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape. She lives with her family in Portland, Maine.