camp:
Lone Pine, California
We
seek to control nature, but we’ve forgotten how to live here. In ignorance and
with hubris, we slaughtered the wolves and drove away the beavers. We took
fires out of forests and replaced them with prescribed burns. We plowed
prairies, killed the bison and planted wheat, assuming the rain would follow.
When it didn’t, we damned and diverted rivers to feed cities in the middle of
deserts.
It’s
not that people have never changed nature. But we’ve never done it on this
scale with this attitude. Native Americans set fires and built dams, but they
also understood themselves as part of the natural world. They knew that a
relationship based on taking what they could from the earth would not be
sustainable.
Our
culture is beginning to understand this. We know wolves are needed for
functional ecosystems, so we’re reintroducing them. We write Environmental
Impact Statements to get funding to burn parts of forest which should have been
left to burn naturally. Some people are even starting to talk about taking down
the dams.
These
solutions will help restore ecosystems. They are vital, necessary and
absolutely should be done. But they still leave me with a bitter taste in my
mouth. Can we truly restore nature without learning to live in balance with it?
If the extent of our land ethic is that we go from ignorant destroyers to
benevolent engineers, what are we telling ourselves about our relationship to
nature?
I
think back to a book I read called Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening From
the Nightmare of Zoos. The author, Derrick Jensen spoke about the human cruelty
and arrogance which underscores the idea of a zoo. Living in a cage, an animal
loses its soul, its wild essence. You may go up to the bars, see the sign
telling you you’re looking at a grizzly bear, Ursus arctos, or a wolf, Canis
lupus. But until you’ve seen that animal in the wild, where it was born,
where is knows how to life—you’ve never really seen a bear or a wolf. You’ll
always be looking at a shadow, a prisoner.
I
think back to Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, and it seems like a similar
shadow. We’ve taken something wild—a forest—and tamed it to suit our needs. We
preserve it under multiple use, but somehow habitat and intrinsic value never
make it on the list. We’ve been doing this for so long that no one in living
memory knows what the forest was like before cows came and industrial timber
took over.
I
know it’s naive and idealistic, but I want that forest back. I want our land
ethic back, one based on balance and give and take, not rape, pillage and
plunder. We need practical solutions to problems, so for the moment, I accept
the need for radio collars, prescribed burns and fuel reduction. But we’re
going to need more than that to carry us through in the long run. We’re going
to need girls growing up knowing the plants two jackrabbits might eat if they
got hungry hiking through a desert covered in sagebrush*. We’re going to need
grandparents teaching their grandchildren to hunt deer and make jam out of wild
blackberries. We’re going to need people willing to work hard to take care of
themselves, people who are ok being a little too war, or cold and walking
places they need to go. None of this will be easy. This isn’t about fifty
simple things you can do to save the earth. It’s not even about fifty difficult
things. It’s nothing less than a shift in the entire way we perceive our
relationship to the natural world. We’re not gods, and we’re not meant to
control everything. The sooner we accept that, the more likely it is that earth
will survive with us.
*This
was a reference to an essay that writer Michael Branch read to us at his home
in Reno, Nevada, where we camped for a night. The essay was published in the
January/February 2011 issue of Orion and can be found here.
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