On wilderness and democracy

A scenic view of Heart Lake in the Scapegoat Wilderness. The United States congress designated the Scapegoat Wilderness in 1972 with a total of 239,936 acres. The long northwest border of the Scapegoat Wilderness is shared with the Bob Marshall Wilderness and the massive limestone cliffs that dominate 9,204 ft Scapegoat Mountain are an extension of the "Bob's" Chinese Wall. Elevations range from 5,000 feet on the North Fork Blackfoot River to 9,400 feet on Red Mountain; the highest peak in the Wilderness Complex. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service via Flickr | CC-BY-SA 2.0)

There is a sickness passing through the land, and it will consume us if we don’t identify it and take the necessary steps. The sickness is evident everywhere, in everything we touch and do, and our current prospects are dismal because of it.

It has to do with our alienation to the land, with our allowing that alienation to fester for so very long. But that’s all I can say I know for sure. I can’t precisely put my finger on it any more than anyone else can, but because it’s so central to what we’ve touched and done for at least the last few generations, I feel that any effort to say or write anything about the land without confronting the sickness would be just another useless, nature-writer’s jabbering on top of a pile of nature writing since the wrecking ball years of the Reagan Era, the kind that, as my friend, Stewart Brandborg (Executive Director of The Wilderness Society, 1964-76) often said, would put Jesus to sleep.

Jesus, at least the Jesus I grew up with, was a good guy. Why bore him, then, with beautiful, hollow words that miss the point of our predicament?

Given the current political landscape, the politicians in the pockets of a metastasizing plutocracy, the symptomatic fascisms that come with that sort of thing, several questions rise from the last few decades of our flaccid activism like sturdy viruses escaping from the compromised ecosystems of once-healthy forests and tundra. If we’re so smart, these questions merely beg us ask ourselves, why are the bastards still running things? The wrecking ball didn’t miss its mark. Why should we?

To point then: The environmental movement is in a pickle and you wouldn’t think this would be the case. After all, with triple-digit summers like these, all of our touchstone tenets for at least the last century and a half have been sadly, profoundly and demonstrably proven out, even the most extreme ones. Why should we have to justify ourselves to anyone anymore? And yet here we sit, still (apparently) struggling to fit into a middle that doesn’t exist.

But that’s the point with summers like these, isn’t it?

Here we sit, at the precipice of yet another “hottest year in recorded history,” not only listening, ad naseum and politely, to bloviators debating about how many oil angels can dance on the head of the global-warming pin but watching from the sidelines as a good few of our scientifically-literate colleagues, who don’t believe in angels on pin heads at all, split our hard-won victories of eco-consciousness in two (the wilderness movement in this case) over how much warmed-over corporate denial we should swallow in order to get a smidgeon of what the land needs.

“Wilderness!” you hear them say, more and more, with a roll of a condescending eye about a thing within which their lives are less and less entwined, even those who now claim the mantle of “Environmentalist.”

“That’s so Sixties!”

Well, it is just a word, after all, and an expeditious one at that. But how about “Democracy?”

That’s just a word, too, one also used to describe a land-based organism too big for us to see around the edges of, and wherever you find the land you’ll find a different species of Democracy native to that place. Here in North America, there was a vibrant form residing in human populations long before the Atlantic Ocean washed an equally-vibrant (albeit predatory) Greco-Roman form upon its shores, where they crossbred. We tend to forget that our cherished, American Democracy is a hybrid, a mix of the native and the non-native, a cut-bow trout swimming in the ever-more-sacred waters of an industrialized world on the very verge of polluting those waters to the last drop, and then privatizing the toxic result.

Then there will be no trout, no water, no Democracy—and, at least by my reckoning, no wilderness—at all.

We tend to forget that, far from being the creators of such unfathomable organisms as Democracy or wilderness, we are merely their host species, and that we neglect such symbiotic relationships at our peril.

It’s something to think about, anyway.