Underground Ambassador
- Katy Adams
- Oct 2
- 11 min read
Most mornings when I arrive at the park, our groundhog is already awake. Their main burrow entrance sits right at the top of the driveway, tucked out of sight amid a patch of tall ragweed that glows bright yellow this time of year. Sometimes the groundhog is standing upright in a nearby lawn of clover, alert and watchful. Other times I only see the flick of a tail before they vanish underground.
In my mind, this groundhog has become an unlikely ambassador for the park. In fact, they are the animal on our logo, not because they live at the park’s entrance but because their life and habits make them a fitting symbol for Fellowfield.
Choosing an animal described as solitary, shy, and nearly invisible might seem like an odd decision for an organization devoted to building community and making visible change. After all, groundhogs spend most of their time alone. Underground. It’s hard to witness what they do or the effect they have . . . But stick with me. The deeper we look, the more sense it makes.
More Than Meets the Eye
If you only look at the surface, you’ll miss so much that is fascinating about a groundhog. Their lives are largely focused on what lies below.
An adult groundhog might maintain multiple burrows, each with a dozen or more entry points and chambers. These are not random holes — they are systems: ventilation tunnels, sleeping quarters, nurseries, escape routes, and seasonal residences adapted for heat and cold. A groundhog can move up to 700 pounds of soil creating just one of these burrows, which can delve up to 5 feet deep and extend 50 feet.
They maintain the network regularly. They inspect, clear, and reshape it as needed. It is not just shelter; it is the groundhog’s home, a place where it knows every turn, where past seasons leave their traces, and where the work of one generation can guide the next.
Those burrows don’t just serve the groundhog. As groundhogs dig, they blend together rich topsoil with deeper clay and mineral layers. This mixing helps water soak into the ground more easily and brings nutrients to new places. Around the burrow openings, the loose piles of earth catch seeds on the wind, providing space for goldenrod, asters, and native grasses. Even the groundhog’s waste chambers become pockets of fertilizer, quietly feeding the plants above.
Once a tunnel is left behind, it often becomes home to someone else: red foxes raise their young there, skunks and cottontail rabbits take shelter, turtles and snakes find safe spots to hibernate, and even screech owls may settle by the entrance mounds. What starts as one animal’s refuge becomes the underground scaffolding for an entire web of life. The groundhog’s labor builds the literal foundation for a neighborhood to thrive.
Cultural Burrows
The burrows are not unlike the cultural structures we humans build. Our ideas, stories, systems, and habits — what we believe, how we speak, what we normalize — shape what grows and who thrives.
What beliefs lie beneath our systems of education, housing, energy, medicine, or recreation?
What cultural “burrows” support our society?
I have to confess, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the underground. Fellowfield’s ecojustice education approach depends upon it.
Ecojustice education begins with questions like:
What stories are we living by without noticing?
Who benefits from the rules we treat as “normal”?
Which unspoken values are steering our choices?
At its core, ecojustice invites us to examine the cultural “underground” that shapes both our environmental and social problems as a pathway to solving them. Scholars like Rebecca Martusewicz and John Lupinacci argue that many modern problems stem from cultural assumptions buried so deep we rarely notice them.
For example: Why do we describe land as “vacant” when it’s alive with plants and animals? Why do we call some people “unskilled” when their labor sustains our daily lives? These words both carry the same implicit assumption that some people, species, or places are less valuable or expendable. When we collectively think this way, it opens the door to justifying practices like deforestation or low wages, making them seem not only reasonable but may even be defended as necessary or morally right.
If there is any hope for social and environmental health and justice, we need to pay attention to the hidden architecture of our lives: the cultural paradigms, assumptions, and habits that quietly shape what is possible or prioritized. In ecojustice education, we call this critical cultural analysis.
By digging into those unseen assumptions, we begin to see how culture operates like a burrow system: shaping the flow of resources, channeling what gets valued, and determining who is protected and who is not. Naming these hidden patterns and understanding their sources and purposes, gives us the chance to imagine and build alternatives.
Survival Depends on Structure
The groundhog doesn’t dig just for fun. Their survival depends on it.
Burrows provide protection from predators and weather, a safe space to raise young, live, and hibernate with access to needed warmth, food, and rest. Abandoning a burrow or having it collapse can be fatal. So they work attentively, season after season, to keep it strong.
Humans do this with our cultural structures as well. Even when we’re not fully aware of it, we are deeply tied to the mental and social structures we rely on. If those structures begin to shift or collapse, it can feel threatening. We might resist change not because we’re stubborn, but because it creates uncertainty. It’s frightening to lose something that has kept us alive to this point. Even when it no longer fits, or you’ve become aware of it in a new light, it is hard to abandon a system you’ve trusted and used to make sense of the world or guide your decisions. Building new corridors takes time, and it’s vulnerable work.
But groundhogs do not shy away from this work. Digging is central to their life. They are not careless about it nor do they romanticize it. They simply do it with commitment, with attention, with practice. Biologists estimate that groundhogs may spend more time maintaining and reinforcing their tunnels than doing anything else. They do not treat it as a project to complete. They do not resent or resist having to work at further.
Clarity, Not Certainty
When we look beneath the surface of a policy, a cultural norm, or a disagreement, the work is first and foremost about building clarity. Slowing down to understand what kind of tunnel we’re in, how it formed, where it is likely to lead, and put ourselves in the position where we can make an informed decision about whether we want to keep going or dig in a different direction. That kind of reflection can change the way we navigate conflict or difference. It can soften defensiveness and help us find empathy. It can show us that some of the most entrenched “truths” in our world are actually cultural decisions passed down, not facts etched in stone.
When we see systems as cultural, not absolute, I think we gain freedom. We can see more clearly where our values come from and if they are serving us. We can better see how to align our values and actions. We can speak across differences without defaulting to defensiveness. We can better understand why others choose different paths. This isn’t moral relativism — it’s structural fluency. It’s knowing our burrows well enough to navigate them with skill and empathy.
Going below, of course, is not always comfortable. It can feel like tumbling down the rabbit hole as in Alice in Wonderland, where the world flips upside down and familiar logic no longer applies. In Lewis Carroll’s story, Alice finds herself in a place where perspectives shift wildly, time behaves strangely, and language stretches into absurdity.
But even in the disorientation, Alice moves forward with curiosity and compassion. She listens, she puzzles things out, and though she doesn’t always accept what she encounters, she treats even the oddest characters with a certain respect. Responding at times with laughter and at times with the ah-ha moment of a new perspective. As with Alice, when our worldview is challenged, it may feel surreal and even dangerous — “Off with her head!” But if we meet these experiences with openness and care, we may begin to see a broader world, both strange and alive, with corridors others have built that we never noticed before.
Fellowfield’s Discovery Stations
It is with this spirit we are designing our Discovery Stations to make this kind of exploration inviting. Not heavy, but playful. A place where we can practice digging in, reflecting, reshaping, finding moments to laugh at ourselves, and inspiring in each other the effort to honestly respond to what we find.
Our Discovery Stations are the anchors of your educational experience at Fellowfield. Each one designed to surface what is usually hidden — the structures, stories, and assumptions that shape how we live with one another and with the land. Rather than signs to read in passing, these are places to step into: exhibits that introduce you to critical cultural analysis through movement, play, and reflective activities.
Imagine approaching The Maze of Metaphors. Between two old oaks, you enter a narrow path between fence panels filled with familiar phrases from books, proverbs, and public discourse — expressions that frame humans as separate from nature. This part of the path reveals how either/or thinking sets up a framework of comparison and division. Two conflicting sides. Then, the trail opens and takes different paths. Here, metaphors offer nuance, diversity described as strength, creativity and resilience, humanity as a part of nature in its variety of forms. Visitors are invited to linger over examples that illustrate the power of words to change worldviews, play language games, and add their own poetry to the space.
Down the trail, you come to Borrowed Water. A shallow depression in the ground marks the site of a vernal pool and its unique ecosystem. At its edge you see models of the technologies used to drain farm fields and recover from floods. Nearby signs trace a history of SE Michigan's wetlands, and visitors can listen to the recorded story of a couple who once farmed this land. This is not a story of good versus bad decisions. It’s an invitation to notice how underlying values shape our relationship with water.
Climbing a small ridge, you see The Energy Tower above the tree line. At its base, a patterned stone path marks out a play space for a group game. The rules are the same for everyone, but the outcomes are not - why? Movement becomes insight into how laws and policies change our choices. What seems equal on the surface isn’t always fair. Around the tower, exhibits link this game to real-world social policies and the deeper question: what does justice really require of us?
These stations don’t come together quickly. The months of conversation, partnership-building, and design are not what visitors to the park will see, but they are essential to create the experience we want to offer. Our unseen work is valuable because it shifts conditions, deepens relationships, and creates fertility for what comes next.
Why I Love This Work
Personally, I find this kind of thinking exhilarating. Cultural analysis is fun for me. I think it’s something I have always done in those moments when my mind wanders.
As a kid I remember sitting at school and noticing how some classrooms made me feel at ease, others left me anxious. Asking myself, how could two teachers both think they were doing their job well yet create such different environments and outcomes? What did they believe about learning, about power, about what it meant to be a good teacher or a good student? I figured their different rules and expectations came from somewhere, and understanding “where” was always something of interest to me.
Maybe that’s why as an adult I have spent so much time in academic environments. Not to collect degrees but because academic spaces, at their best, actively nurture cultural analysis as a group effort.
I wonder if spaces like this are becoming rarer? I worry that we are losing the practice of thinking deeply together. In many corners of our society, cultural reflection is described as something for intellectuals or idealists, or even with hostility. I believe it is a kind of work that belongs to everyone — a practice we all can take part in and all deserve to share.
The discovery stations are an attempt to make cultural analysis engaging and accessible to anyone. A place where people can encounter the unexpected and question those things they assume to be true to gain new perspectives and insights. Perhaps more importantly, the discovery stations are a place to encounter these things together because something shifts when we do this work together. The realities we live within are not just better understood. They also become shared.
At the Energy Tower game, all players are following the same rules, but the game reveals how rules that appear neutral can actually deepen inequality, depending on where you start and what you’ve already been through. It’s one thing to understand that in theory. It’s another to feel it in your body, beside someone else who’s playing the same game. In that moment, systems become visible and shared and so does the possibility of redesign.
I think the groundhog’s comfort with their underground work is inspiring. Their familiarity with the underground was built over time and through practice. And like the groundhog at ease in their burrow, the more we practice this kind of cultural analysis with one another, the easier it gets. The more comfortable it becomes. The more we trust each other to ask deep questions and pursue honest answers. The more we believe in the soundness of what we are building together.
So Why the Groundhog?
At its simplest, an ambassador carries a message between worlds. They open a point of contact where there might otherwise be distance. Our furry ambassador may seem like a solitary creature, but like so many assumptions we walk around with, this is an example of one that oversimplifies and misrepresents the true complexity of life. Long-term researchers have documented groundhogs with overlapping territories, shared nesting sites, and other cooperative behaviors. Genetic analysis and spatial tracking reveal that female groundhogs often share burrow systems with relatives. These findings reveal a flexible social structure that may not always be visible but is very much alive beneath the surface.
A groundhog’s life is rich with other kinds of relationships as well. They work in partnership with the texture of the soil and the placement of woody roots, respecting the boundaries of the groundwater, and deriving energy from the rich plant life and microbes around and within them. They keep their caverns clean, and the caverns protect their health in return. Directly and indirectly, the groundhog helps build a world that is safer, more inclusive, and more alive.
I feel an affinity for the groundhog in my role here at Fellowfield. I may be the face you see: the person writing these reflections, approaching you for a donation, or pulling together the team to work on a discovery station. But the work to build Fellowfield is shaped and sustained by a much wider circle, often unseen. In a time when so much in the world feels divided and uncertain, the support of this circle is a gift I don’t take for granted.
If you’re drawn to this kind of work, you’re welcome to join us — to lend your hands, share your skills, or donate to help build a discovery station that will help others to dig. The groundhog will welcome you at the entrance not with a wave or a smile but with a quiet blur of fur disappearing into the ground. I encourage you to take it as an invitation to do the same. To dig in. Because tending what lies beneath in ourselves, in our culture, and in the land is essential if we want to build burrows that are strong enough to hold us all.
References
Carroll, L. (2000). Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. (R. L. Green, Ed.). Penguin Classics.
Jost, J. T. (2015). Resistance to change: A social psychological perspective. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 82(3), 607–636.
Kuzmanov, I. (2025). Cognitive inertia and status quo bias: Understanding resistance to change from mind to society. Journal of Novel Research and Innovative Ideas, 8(1), 15–29.
Martusewicz, R. A., Edmundson, J., & Lupinacci, J. (2014). EcoJustice education: Toward diverse, democratic, and sustainable communities. Routledge.
Ponomarenko, D. S. (2008). Burrow morphology, burrow preservation, and evidence of digging behaviour in ground-dwelling squirrels (Sciuridae) (Master’s thesis, Carleton University). Carleton University Research Virtual Environment. https://carleton.scholaris.ca/items/69237569-be04-43bc-85e6-230e3376476c
Schmidt, M.L. (1993). Woodchuck burrowing activities. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Report.
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