Washers: Land, Memory, and What Stays

I keep coming back to them.

Gray figures standing in cold water, hands deep in the current, rubbing fabric over stone. People call them Washers. Nobody is sure when they first appeared. Maybe they were always there, like the creek itself. Their skin has that river-stone color, soft gray. Their hair goes silver in patches, like something the light wrote on them and then didn’t erase.

They don’t really care what you call them. He, she, they — none of that seems to trouble them. They wash what they arrived wearing. Then they wash what they were carrying when they got here, the shame, the fear, the disgust they’ve picked up by walking through other people’s categories. They’re often nude in the water, not as a performance, but because clothing is just another thing that can hold residue.

They’re not saints. They’re not apparitions. They’re more like a lesson.

Because the Washers aren’t only rinsing cloth. They’re showing something truer and much harder: what it looks like to face damage without pretending it never happened.

That is exactly where the land is right now.

Ecologists have been saying, very plainly, that our past never actually goes away. Foster and colleagues write that “the legacies of land-use activities continue to influence ecosystem structure and function for decades or centuries — or even longer — after those activities have ceased” (Foster et al., 2003, p. 77).

So the Washers, waist-deep in a river, are not fantasy. They are a mirror.

The gray tint of their skin isn’t disease. It’s contact. Constant exposure. You live in water long enough and water marks you. Land works the same way, but on a slower clock. The paper calls these marks “legacies of land-use,” and it defines them as the long-term imprints of human activity — logging, agriculture, burning, drainage, settlement — that stay in soil, water, vegetation, and structure even after the activity stops. Foster et al. explain that these legacies are “remarkably persistent,” and that history leaves “persistent imprints on ecosystem structure and function.” (Foster et al., 2003, pp. 77–78).

In other words: the land keeps score.

This matters for vulnerability now. The places we call fragile, flood-prone, contaminated, eroded, “at risk,” are not just unlucky. They are living inside decisions that were made about them generations ago — decisions about extraction, about who gets protected, and who gets used. The article puts it bluntly: human land use is so widespread that “a consideration of land-use legacies could be boundless,” because our activity is both direct, like logging, and indirect, like “global climate change” (Foster et al., 2003, p. 78).

That’s what we mean when we say: how the histories of land use, extraction, and governance shape current vulnerability.

The Washers don’t pretend the fabric was always clean. They touch what’s stained. They work it. No denial. No revisionist story.

Foster and colleagues argue for exactly that kind of honesty at the policy level. They say that land-use history has to be treated as “a legitimate and essential subject of environmental science,” and not as something optional or sentimental (Foster et al., 2003, p. 77).

That line — “legitimate and essential” — is doing a lot of work. It says: stop treating the damage as an accident of nature. Name who did what. Name when. Name how it still shapes the soil.

Because it does shape the soil. The paper documents that even when you abandon farmland and let it reforest, the original disturbance shows up in soil chemistry, carbon and nitrogen levels, and structure “for decades or centuries” (Foster et al., 2003, pp. 80–81). Forests that look “natural” on the surface are still carrying the chemical profile of older clearing, plowing, or fertilizing.

In their words, these past uses leave “persistent legacies through subsequent episodes of natural disturbance and environmental change,” including storms, fire, erosion, flooding (Foster et al., 2003, p. 78).

In plain terms: even if you stop, the land cannot immediately reset. The damage doesn’t end when the machine leaves. It keeps echoing.

And that echo is political.

One of the strongest sentences in the article is this: recognition of these legacies “adds explanatory power to our understanding of modern conditions at scales from organisms to the globe and reduces missteps in anticipating or managing for future conditions” (Foster et al., 2003, p. 77).

“Adds explanatory power” means: this is why certain coastlines collapse faster than others; why floods hit some neighborhoods harder; why contamination appears “random” until you overlay it with maps of waste sites, plantation agriculture, housing segregation, drainage projects, and inland sand mining. It is not abstract. It is cause.

There’s another quote that matters for how people talk about “nature.” The authors say there was a major shift in ecology when scientists finally accepted that “most ‘natural areas’ have more cultural history than assumed,” and that past land use is basically everywhere (Foster et al., 2003, p. 77).

That sentence cuts straight through a common lie — the idea that damaged places are damaged because the people living there don’t “take care” of them. No. The paper is clear: historical land use, including clearing, deforestation, plantation cycles, drainage, grazing, industrial pressure, all of that “strongly control[s] modern vegetation patterns,” soil structure, nutrient flows, and even how streams behave now (Foster et al., 2003, pp. 79–82).

So when we see a neighborhood flooding every year, or a coastline eroding faster than seems reasonable, or a “vacant lot” growing one stubborn kind of plant and nothing else, that is not random failure. That’s an archive.

Foster et al. even call these legacies “easily overlooked and yet … widespread across broad areas,” and warn that they matter not only to scientists, but to “conservationists and land managers as well as to” communities making policy (Foster et al., 2003, p. 78).

I keep thinking about the Washers while I read that. Because the Washers don’t overlook anything. They handle what everyone else pretends is gone.

There’s another moment in the article I want to hold up. The authors write that in many places around the world, “ancient land-use activity continues to influence modern pattern and process,” even a thousand years later (Foster et al., 2003, p. 79). They describe how Maya-era clearing, terracing, temple construction, erosion, and soil movement still shape present-day forest composition and even lake sediment profiles. That is: a millennium-old human decision is still active in the forest’s body.

Sit with that.

A thousand-year-old act can still decide where water sits, how soil moves, which trees grow, and which trees don’t. And then, in the present, someone will point to that altered forest and call it “natural.”

This is why the Washers don’t care about being pretty. Clean is not the point. Accuracy is.

They accept that contact changes you. They accept that what touched you is still visible on you. They show it.

This is also why the paper pushes for a historical lens, not as decoration but as method. The authors argue that “environmental history emerges as an integral part of ecological science and conservation planning” (Foster et al., 2003, p. 77).

Read that again: not optional. Integral.

That matters for places already living with climate risk, saltwater intrusion, unstable ground, toxic sediment, flood walls that favor some blocks and not others. When we talk about “current vulnerabilities,” we’re not only talking about temperature and storms. We’re talking about layered damage that was allowed, licensed, subsidized, and then politically ignored.

Which is governance.

The article says that ignoring land-use legacies leads to “missteps in anticipating or managing for future conditions” (Foster et al., 2003, p. 77). I read that as: if you pretend the stain isn’t there, your plan will fail. If you build your so-called resilience plan on top of denial, you’re just setting up the next disaster.

The Washers, standing in cold water, don’t make that mistake. They don’t say, “This was always pure.” They say, “This is what it is, and I’m willing to touch it.”

They stay with it. They keep rinsing fabric that other people would have thrown away. They make contact with the thing nobody else wants to hold.

Maybe that’s the work now.

Not false purity. Not pretending we can go “back” to something that never existed. The article makes this clear when it notes that most landscapes we call natural are already shaped by “a broad history of agriculture, logging, and reforestation,” and that this history leaves forests altered in composition and structure all the way to the present (Foster et al., 2003, pp. 79–80).

So the real task isn’t to invent an untouched past.

The real task is to admit that what we are standing in is layered, marked, inherited, and uneven — and then act from that truth.

The Washers are gray because the water stayed with them. The land is unstable in places because extraction stayed with it. The same story.

And the paper says something else that matters for the future, not just the past. It argues that recognizing land-use legacies “lays the foundation for understanding their legacies far into the future,” and that we need “very long-term experiments and monitoring programs” to guide policy (Foster et al., 2003, p. 87).

Translated: the point of telling the truth about land use is not to feel bad. It’s to govern differently.

When we say “las trayectorias históricas de uso de la tierra, extracción y gobernanza configuran las vulnerabilidades actuales,” this is exactly what we mean. The Washers show it with their bodies. Foster et al. (2003) show it with data. Both are saying: what was done here is still here. Act like you know that.

Because if we don’t? The stain stays. The break repeats.

If we do? Maybe we stop pretending the dirt isn’t ours.

Reference

Foster, D. R., Swanson, F. J., Aber, J. D., Burke, I. C., Brokaw, N., Tilman, D., & Knapp, A. K. (2003). The importance of land-use legacies to ecology and conservation. BioScience, 53(1), 77–88. https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2003)053[0077:TIOLUL]2.0.CO;2