Spores of bluefern growing in the hollows along the riverbank float toward the water in silver-blue lines hard to see unless you are in or near them, lying right at the river’s edge when the sunshots are low and drained. Often they are mistook for insects — but they are seeds in which the whole generation sleeps confident of a future. And for a moment it is easy to believe each one has one — will become all of what is contained in the spore: will live out its days as planned. This moment of certainty lasts no longer than that; longer, perhaps, than the spore itself.1
—Toni Morrison, Beloved
It’s been almost forty years since Morrison wrote those words of future potential in her novel Beloved, and twenty years since I taught them as a student-teacher at Buchtel High School in Akron, Ohio. While the narrative itself accounts Sethe’s journey toward potential freedom in the Civil War-era, that freedom found in a specific place as she crosses the Ohio River, those words are as alive as they ever were. In 2006, I didn’t quite understand potential yet. Now at least I understand this: that we are all, in the ever-present moment, always at the beginning of our own potential, at the beginning of our collective story of this place, and hopeful that what we’re building outlasts us. The question of exactly what we’re building in this place is one I encourage my students at Orange High School to sit with, and it’s also one that compels my work in rebuilding regenerative, place-based systems as the co-founder of the Rust Belt Fibershed.
To help us answer this question, who better to guide us than Toni Morrison? She grew up on the lip of Lake Erie in Lorain, Ohio in this same glacially-shaped, industrially-scarred landscape in which we live. She wrote about its waters, its divisions, and its people carrying futures inside of them towards freedom. To consider the potential of this region through Morrison’s language is more than just a literary exercise; it can help us continue to construct the story of our place. Water is what moves this story forward. It has always been the carrier character in this Great Lakes region. It is the flow that moves the spores that hold the future. But what happens when the flow changes, when industry redirects it, speeds it up, and contaminates it?
Those familiar with Morrison’s work will recognize this tension in her imagery: the blue of Lake Erie set against the orange-patched sky of the steel mills, nature and industry occupying opposite ends of the same landscape but never touching. In The Bluest Eye, she captures this divide precisely:
The lakefront houses were the loveliest. Garden furniture, ornaments, windows like shiny eyeglasses, and no sign of life. The backyards of these houses fell away in green slopes down to a strip of sand, and then the blue Lake Erie, lapping all the way to Canada. The orange-patched sky of the steel-mill section never reached this part of town. The sky was always blue.2
So while she wrote about both the industry and the ecosystems of this particular region, she did not integrate the two. This tension between industry and ecosystems, especially water systems, created a static characterization of this place, and this is the story that most of us have inherited.
If you’ve spent any time driving around the Cleveland area, you’ve seen it on a bumper sticker, salted-out and peeling: “Stuck in Ohio.” It’s easy to understand. This place has been handed quite the static narrative of an industry that took and left, and that story can be heavy to carry. The people who feel stuck aren’t wrong about what happened here because that is what extreme extraction does—it disrupts the flow of water, the flow of community-building, the flow of future. How can we build up a place where industry and ecosystems are no longer siloed? How can we facilitate the exchange among those things?
It’s not impossible. Many of us, myself included, have moved away to other parts of the world only to come back because we see the potential to build something here. Maybe we want to build families. Maybe we want to build careers. Maybe we want to build communities. Whatever it is, we can sense that there is flow in the future here. The spores of this place are still moving, unaffected by the story of the Rust Belt. They float in the water anyway, carrying everything they need. Morrison’s image reminds us that we don’t have to wait for conditions to be perfect for the narrative to change because it always holds the potential for change, sometimes we just can’t see it. So maybe in order for the rest of us to not feel so stuck in this story, we don’t have to write a new story at all. Perhaps we can model the building of our place after an ecological model of cooperation and flow that we paved over decades ago: the wetlands.
Just west of Lorain County, where Toni Morrison grew up, existed what is historically referred to as The Great Black Swamp, centered in the Maumee River watershed among the Toledo, Bowling Green, Sandusky areas. For centuries, The Great Black Swamp covered a fifteen hundred square mile area, shaped by the same receding glaciers and glacial lakes that shaped Lorain county and the rest of Ohio. It held diverse old-growth forests and an exceptional amount of diverse habitats. It was an area that was long inhabited by the Erie, the Wyandot, the Potawatomi, and the Lenape nations (most likely among others unnamed) who understood this watershed as a relationship.
In the mid-1800s, an historic event took place in Northwestern Ohio: Humans who had long ago disconnected from the land decided they could make this “vacant” land more “usable”—no matter that wetland ecosystems harbor the most populated and diverse life in our bioregion. The internal compass of these developers and investors had been duped by the new, flattened narrative of fast money. They believed the stories they heard of progress, and felt that the wetland was “vacant” and “unusable” as is because the wetland was unpredictable, its boundaries hard to work with, its water not well-contained. And so they drained the swamp, all fifteen hundred square miles of what-was-once-wetland, rerouting water to the nearby Maumee River, backfilling the lakes, creeks, tributaries, and ponds, and building roadways that could now move industry and people so much faster. And just like the flow of water in a river rather than a swamp, everything seemed to speed up.
The speeding up of “progress” left massive consequences in its wake. As short term gains were prioritized over long term gains, investors made long shots, bringing in industry without thinking through pollutants. The gameplan of paving over wetlands to create a direct channel or flow was a blueprint that many Ohio cities followed. As Akron and Cleveland paved over more than 90% of their wetlands along the Cuyahoga River, industry could now be built directly on the banks of the river, drawing from the water, and pumping the contaminated water back into the fast moving river. Eventually, as the momentum built, so did the toxins in the river, and in 1969 the Cuyahoga River caught fire. This stark moment helped spark the modern environmental movement. One year later in 1970, Toni Morrison published The Bluest Eye, set in the landscape that produced that fire. She was writing about this place in the immediate aftermath of another infamous wound. Morrison understood the blueprint long before most were willing to name it.
In “The Site of Memory,” Morrison writes of another river with the same story:
They straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.3
For over a century, all over the Great Lakes Region, humans have engineered new systems to redirect the water; we’ve channeled, drained, and contained, as if control could erase what came before, but water does not forget. It remembers the slow logic of floodplains and root systems, of absorption and return. And as the industrial systems that once overpowered it began to falter with mills closing, infrastructures aging, water began its quiet reclamation. Rust, after all, is what happens when water and iron meet over time. The very name we gave this place, the Rust Belt, contains the story of water’s return, slowly transforming the steel and iron of industry back into the earth it came from.
This is the echo that, as the co-founder of the Rust Belt Fibershed, I consider quite often. A fibershed is a bioregional textile system: fiber grown, processed, and used within a defined geography, much like a watershed defines the flow of water or a foodshed defines the flow of food. Our fibershed operates within two hundred fifty miles of Cleveland, connecting farmers, mills, dyers, makers, and wearers into a supply web rooted in this place. Those who participate are committed to building the dynamic future of this region. So then, what can watersheds teach us about the pace and flow of our work? About the containment, the pressure, the leakage of energy? About the closed loop systems and biocycling that’s possible when revitalizing an industry?
Before they were dismissed as wastelands, drained, and paved, wetlands operated as some of the most sophisticated systems on the planet, and this region held some of the most extraordinary examples of wetland on the continent. Wetlands filter toxins, absorb excess, slow the flow, and create conditions for life to flourish in relationship rather than dominance. They do not separate waste from resource, nor isolate one function from another; instead, they hold complexity, turning what passes through them into something usable again. To imagine a future Rust Belt, we don’t have to invent some hip new tech-inspired hub of industry. We only have to remember what was here, and model it from there.
This part of the story is already being written. The city of Lorain is currently restoring sixteen acres of urban wetland at Martin’s Run Wetland Complex, reconnecting channels to floodplains, slowing the flow, and passively treating stormwater in the heart of an industrialized landscape. This project isn’t the only one occurring, all along the Great Lakes region, there are communities who are working to reclaim what was drained, patch by patch. This literal reconstruction of the wetlands is the least we can do, but all stories written are both literal and figurative. How can we biomimic the model of the wetland as a conceptual system for building any other system?
While industries in our region are being tempted by “greener solutions” that often simply end up with greener packaging, it’s important that we ask a different question entirely, one that honors what we’ve paved over: what would it mean for a region to function like a wetland with industry and ecosystems no longer divided, but integrated? What if our industries filtered rather than extracted, circulated rather than depleted, and created conditions for diverse forms of life, human and more-than-human, to live fully together? With this framing, revitalization of our region doesn’t depend on attracting the next dominant industry (and let’s face it, I’m not sure anyone truly wants our farmlands dotted with data centers), but on cultivating systems that, like wetlands, are resilient precisely because they are interconnected, adaptive, and alive. The wetland, it turns out, can be our model for moving forward. It can carry us.
The following is what it could look like if we were to create a local textile industry with a wetland system as a model, but these design principles could also be applied to any current extractive industry. Some of my favorite systems in need of a wetland overhaul include our food systems, our healthcare systems, our solid waste systems, our transportation systems, our educational systems, our building and construction systems…you name it. As an example, though, let’s talk about textile systems.
Principle #1: Wetlands slow the pace.
A wetland slows everything down. Water that would otherwise just rush through a channeled river might instead spread across a vast floodplain, seeping into root systems and pooling in low places. While we might have been trained to think of this as inefficient, moving water faster was never the wetland’s goal. Slowness is not inefficiency. Slowness in a wetland offers filtration, absorption of nutrients, and facilitation of more life. When we drained the wetlands, we sped up the flow of water. We sped up everything.
One of the most unsustainable parts of a global textile supply chain is the pace of consumerism. Fast fashion churns out new trends every week of mostly polymer-synthetic, chemically-saturated clothing, marketed for a quick, cheap impulse purchase. The harm from such a pace impacts all aspects of the supply chain, with maximum extraction of land and people.
We have been trained to equate speed with success (which is one reason we paved over the wetlands in the first place). Nowhere is that more visible than in the word “fashion” itself. To be fashionable is, by definition, to be temporarily ahead of the trend. Always one season away from being left behind. The entire system is engineered around that anxiety: the manufactured scarcity, the urgency to consume right before the moment passes. But what if the moment isn’t passing? What if presence—real attention to material, to maker, to place—is actually where the value lives? Like the wetland, we don’t need to rush the pace of consumerism. Bioregional supply chains do the work of slowing the pace so that we can notice the materials, energy, stories, and currency that is flowing among us. Would it be so radical to say that instead of 52 seasons of fashion, there are four seasons of clothing? I’m curious how our cultural conditioning might shift toward relationship with our land and the seasons of the year—those seasons that dictate our food options too, by the way—if we looked at our clothing as agriculture.
The Rust Belt Fibershed operates with exactly that understanding: that slowness is not a limitation but a condition for quality and relationship. Fiber is grown, processed, and made within the rhythms of a place, creating something that is complexly and uniquely seasonal, material, and human. Rather than accelerating production for scale, the system allows time for connection along the supply web: between farmer and soil, maker and material and wearer and garment. In a culture where quantity is prized over quality, this deliberate slowing becomes a form of resistance and a prerequisite for regeneration.
Principle #2: Wetlands filter and transform.
A wetland does not treat waste as something to remove, but as something to transform. Nutrients, pollutants, and organic matter pass through layers of plant, soil, and microbial life, becoming inputs for other forms of life.
The global textile industry is the second largest polluter in the world, and what it produces is designed to be thrown away. And because ecosystems all overlap, the impact of one industry across the globe greatly impacts that region of production, but it also bleeds into our waters, lands, and life here in this bioregion. Additionally, the waste that we’re left with—synthetic microfibers and the take-make-waste cultural conditioning—fills our waters and our landfills with pollution that was made overseas and sold to us as a “deal.” The waste of it all is nearly immeasurable.
In our fibershed, this principle shows up in how no material is considered “waste.” Organic materials are already moving. Lower-grade wool becomes insulation, seedling mats, or pelletized compost, literally slowing water absorption into gardens and feeding the soil. Natural dye plant matter can be returned to the soil. Organic “scrap” material from cut-and-sew operations are being composted at the local facilities. Even skills and knowledge are treated as open-sourced material that is encouraged to be shared rather than siloed.
On the other hand, we do have synthetic materials that are already here, so how do we steward them? While some designers and engineers in our fibershed are doing a lot of work transforming materials through an upcycling process, there also is very innovative work being done to transform toxic polymer-synthetic materials that already exist within our fibershed into a new substance that does no harm. Rust Belt Fibershed has partnerships currently piloting research for biocycling synthetic fibers and dyes using mycelium as well as exploring flax’s potential to remediate heavy metals from the soil (flax is the plant that makes linen). Our goal is to not just make textiles locally and responsibly, but to consider how we can help this place flow slowly and evenly, keeping balance as well as maintaining material use in a closed-loop ecosystem.
Principle 3: Wetlands expand through small, connected patches.
Wetlands don’t appear all at once. They form in pockets in low places where water gathers, and over time these pockets connect, creating larger systems of flow. There isn’t one part of a wetland that operates alone. Plants, animals, insects, microorganisms, and so many more lifeforms create an elegant network where resilience emerges from this interdependence.
This is how regenerative work in the Rust Belt is unfolding. Small farms, local mills, community dye gardens and flax plots, educational programs and art projects, each may seem minor in isolation, but together they function as emerging “islands” of a different system. A fibershed is not a single industry but a web where value is created through connection and relationships instead of isolating one step and scaling it through extractive practices. The price of a garment carries the story of that relationship, and so when someone purchases an item made locally and responsibly, they are supporting their neighbors, their land, their creeks, and their rivers. The relationships and connections are actually the mechanisms of scale. The patches connect, and the landscape shifts, and the webs expand to connect and create channels for the flow of exchange. This is the future story that is also the past story, and following where the water goes will allow us to flood back into balanced systems, balanced relationships with the land and with each other.
And this is not only about textiles. This fibershed is one entry point—just one set of patches beginning to connect—but the same logic applies to every industry ripe for remembering. Food systems, healthcare, education, construction. What would it look like if we knew our neighbors well enough to fill in each other’s gaps? If we followed what genuinely excited us and used our passions and place-based knowledge to trust that the connections between us are the economy? This is the new economic model: not a single dominant system, but a cooperative web of relationships, each patch finding the others, capital flowing in forms we haven’t yet named.
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The fern spores noted in the epigraph are nearly invisible, easy to mistake for something else entirely, but each one carries a whole future inside it that isn’t guaranteed, isn’t permanent, but present. And Morrison tells us exactly how to find them: you have to be there. In or near them. At the river’s edge, in the low light. Presence is the condition for seeing what is already here. This is how a place metabolizes its past. We don’t have to create a new grand gesture of innovation, we just need the flow to be right: the accumulation of people who show up, who pay attention, who stay to contribute to this place. Who, paradoxically, can celebrate the moment while planning a joy-filled, community-driven, eco-system-minded future that they may never see.
There is another important detail about the fern spore passage in Beloved that I’ve left until now. Just before Morrison details the spores floating down the river, a massive event occurs: Sethe, the main character, gives birth to her daughter in the Ohio River. It is not easy; there are no essential oils, pillows, or a birth plan. Sethe carried her child inside of her all the way to the actual line of freedom, the Ohio River, where she births her baby—the perfection of a future story—birthed directly into the water, the exponential possibilities that come through another human life form on this earth as the embodiment of potential. There are birthing pains, and her trip probably will only be more challenging from here, but also far more resonant. The building of this future story has its own birthing pains: While some of us won’t make it, that future story itself isn’t actually what matters. Morrison reminds us that through all of this, it actually isn’t about the outcome. We can’t predict the future. It’s about the present potential of the building of something that will outlast all of us, anyways.
We can all get in the flow, starting now. Participate in this region. Get to know your neighbors. Share your gifts and talents so we can build our economies and our communities as we would build wetlands (let’s reconstruct some wetlands too while we’re at it!). This place is full of those spores. In the people rebuilding relationships with land and water. In the farmers and fiber growers and community makers who follow the material back to its source.
When we integrate the human and nonhuman lives of this region, the natural and the made, the ancient and the industrial, we become part of the flow. And if we’re part of the flow, we’re never stuck.
- Toni Morrison, Beloved (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). ↩︎
- Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970), 105. ↩︎
- Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. W. Zinsser (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 95. ↩︎
Jess Boeke
Jess Boeke is a secondary English Teacher in Northeast Ohio and co-founder of the Rust Belt Fibershed, a 501(c)3 building a circular, bioregional textile ecosystem within 250 miles of Cleveland. Her work weaves together literature, place-based education, and regenerative systems thinking.