July 2010 Archives

As a teen growing up in the Midwest, I often dreamed of the big national parks and wilderness preserves far to the west. I took comfort in the notion that no matter what happened in the more civilized parts of the country, at least these places would remain pristine. A still point between the constant inhaling and exhaling of progress.

But of course that perspective missed entirely the intimate connections that define life on this planet. Global climate change has already resulted in key losses in those same places I used to dream about. Three out of four amphibian species in Yellowstone, for example, as well as trumpeter swan populations, are in severe decline. Unusually warm water temperatures in 2007 led to the largest die-off of cutthroat trout in Yellowstone history. Elsewhere, 90% of the pinion forests in Mesa Verde are gone. The beautiful white-tailed ptarmigan of Rocky Mountain National Park will likely be locally extinct in twenty years.

Yet held within the profound sadness of all this, inside the feeling many of us have of being totally overwhelmed, such conditions offer us another chance to get the lessons we missed earlier: That life is utterly interdependent. That what we do to one corner of the globe, we do to all of it. That, as popular social commentator Jim Hightower's father used to tell him: "Everybody does better when everybody does better."   

In 1996 I wrote a book called Shouting at the Sky: Troubled Teens and the Promise of the Wild, about a compassionate wilderness program for troubled 14 - 17 year-olds. Some struggled with drug and alcohol addictions. Others were brittle with anger. Still others wore on their faces what seemed a nearly fatal sadness. Several weeks into the therapy each teen went on "solo," spending two days and nights alone (discreetly watched over by staff), keeping a journal about the experience. I lost track of how many came back looking astonished, bewildered. "That's the first time I've ever known what I think," they often told me.

Knowing what you think seems harder now than ever. As I've noted on this site before, a group of researchers recently set out to estimate the number of years today's 14 year-old will, during her lifetime, be "plugged in" to some electronic device - computer, cell phone, television, etc. Their best guess was a staggering 28 years.

Concurrent with that trend we need doses of nature. Not just for entertainment. Not even solely for beauty. We need such medicine because quiet moments in the woods can also reveal nature as overwhelmingly complex. Utterly impossible to comprehend. And on the other side of that small confusion, that slight discomfort, is a powerful sense of the imagination being set free. A sense of the world no longer fully fixed, no longer already framed. Suddenly there's not just the woods, but the potential of the woods. Minds quiet down in such wordless places. And in that calm we come to know what we think. What we need. What we might do.

On two days this past week the temperature never made it out of the 50's. In the valleys a cold rain fell, while up in the mountains came snow - closing for a time the road to Yellowstone. The foothills are starting to turn brown, as they always do this time of year, but more slowly, reluctantly, as the cool, wet days keep spurring new flushes of green.

This is the time when the feet of the aspen are cradled by lavender-colored lupine flowers, as well as the scarlet blooms of paintbrush. The time when wild roses along the creek are fully open, their scent easy to detect in the cool hours of morning. The time when cottonwood seeds are floating everywhere, up and down and sideways, like a million feathers cast down from the clouds.

The sun is drifting south, of course, summer leaving us by degrees. By that's of no concern. Things are still being planted. Things are growing. The mountains are letting out breath.

I'm on the roof of my house, enjoying the view. To the north, about two miles away, I can hear the announcer's voice booming from a loudspeaker across the East Bench, as he calls the annual 4^th of July rodeo. In fact we've had three rodeos in three days. Three days of parades, too.

If I turn and face the other direction, to the south, I see almost nothing but the crumpled foothills of the Rockies, wrapped in blankets of Engelmann Spruce and lodgepole pine. On the high plateaus beyond, at over 10,000 feet, the snow has all but melted away, leaving thousands of acres of puddles across the tundra.

I think people who are fond of nature have reason to feel a little extra happy on patriotic holidays like this one. For well over half our nation's history, landscape was a big part of what shaped how we saw ourselves as a people. Pundits in the late 1700's predicted we would produce more artists than anywhere else in the world, simply because of the time we spent rubbing elbows with the woods. We had a national tree, and were awfully fond of it. (At the onset of the Civil War, some said we should prune it back to stubs to show our state of moral decline, having taken up arms against each other). In the early 1800's there was a great theological discussion going on in the East, involving orthodox and progressive clergy alike, centered on this question: Is nature the hand voice of God? Or is nature God Himself?

One of the most popular books of the 1880's was called Progress and Poverty, by Henry George. Like so many other authors of his time, he finds a strong link between patriotism and the preservation of unfettered land:

The free, independent spirit, the energy and hopefulness that have marked our people are not causes, but results. They have sprung from unfenced land. Public domain has given a consciousness of freedom even to the dweller in crowded cities, and has been a well-spring of hope even to those who have never thought of taking refuge upon it.

                                                                                            Henry George, 1879