Nature preserves only alleviate our collective guilt

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      This article was originally published by the Daily Climate

      By Al Kesselheim

      BOZEMAN, Montana—It’s spring and the rivers are up, so a couple of times a week I trot my canoe down the street and put in on the East Gallatin River. It’s a town stream, running through golf courses, trailer parks, past the wastewater-treatment plant, through subdivisions, just below the old city landfill. I paddle stretches between bridges, an hour or two at a time, like going to the gym.

      Nothing about this stream qualifies it as wilderness or a recreation area. There is no protective line drawn around it on maps. Old cars sit layered like fossils in the banks, the flotsam of city trash washes up on gravel bars. Nobody else goes there.

      I might rarely see an angler, maybe a person walking on a trail. Mostly I startle folks in their breakfast nooks, or a golfer lining up for a putt on the 9th hole. That stealth quality gives me great, smug pleasure.

      Wild and vibrant

      Here’s the thing. This winding, willowy, heads-up ribbon of spring current is more wild and vibrant and risky than most designated wild places I know. There are always surprises: a new beaver dam, a cottonwood down across the river, a line of fence someone decides to string across the flow. On almost every run, I’m forced out of the boat to navigate some new gnarly problem.

      Resident wildlife never got the memo that this is not designated for nature either: white-tailed deer bound into the brush; red-tailed hawks scream overhead; sandhill cranes and Canada geese nest along the banks; warblers are busy in the underbrush. Muskrats, beaver, skunk… more critters per mile than anywhere I else I paddle.

      The delicious thing is that I drop off of the urban radar, as if popping down a manhole, and an hour later, at a bridge, I pop back up to load my canoe.

      Lesson reinforced

      More to the point, these runs reinforce an important lesson. I am reminded, each time out, not to separate myself from the world. Not to forget that nature is all around, all the time—in the deer that browse in my back yard two blocks off Main Street, in the bears that come to town, in the birds and butterflies and mammals that thrive, surprisingly, in our cities. In the air I breathe and water I drink and trees shading my yard.

      Modern industrialized life has brought us to the point that we set aside parcels of land as protected enclaves, that we separate ourselves from nature, drawing lines around sacred sites, places beyond the reach of our everyday lives. Aboriginal cultures everywhere on Earth have no concept of wilderness. They are part of the web of life. Nature is the world they live in.

      In his 1995 essay The Trouble With Wilderness, environmentalist Bill Cronon wrote that “wilderness poses a serious threat to responsible environmentalism at the end of the 20th century”.

      That statement made me angry the first time I read it, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think he’s on to something. He doesn’t advocate doing away with protecting wild lands, but he argues that by setting aside wild places, far away from our towns, where people don’t live, we “leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like”.

      “The place where we are is the place where nature is not,” he says.

      Separating ourselves

      The problem is by separating ourselves, and assuaging our guilt by establishing far-off preserves, we don’t have to think about the consequences of our actions the rest of the time.

      It is that very separation that allows us to trash the places where we live and work. It is that separation that permits punching thousands of holes through the crust of the Earth, pumping millions of gallons of pressurized hot water and chemicals miles down so we can drive our cars and power our computers.

      It allows us to strip layers off of mountaintops, pour pesticides into rivers, belch smoke into the air, lay concrete over topsoil, build mansions on ridge tops, raze forests and dam rivers and mess with Mother Nature.

      New England writer and environmental advocate John Elder, said recently: “To find the sacred only in the wilderness would be like finding it only in a beautiful church on Easter. Unless the sacred is imbued in your day-to-day life…its value is limited.”

      And so, every spring, when the Montana snowmelt engorges the creeks with muddy torrents of headlong current, I set my boat in the flow just down the street. My heart rate ticks up in anticipation, a killdeer calls from the far bank, and I disappear into the wild gauntlet through the oblivious thicket of my hometown.

      Alan Kesselheim is a writer based in Bozeman, Montana, and is a frequent contributor to the Daily Climate, an independent, foundation-funded news service covering energy, the environment, and climate change.

      Comments

      2 Comments

      deep ecology?

      May 12, 2014 at 10:28pm

      Well, about the only way to avoid trashing your environment is to avoid having enough money to do it. every thing, every vacation, every date with a cute boy/girl, all of that trashes the environment. how many of you will do the environmentally responsible thing and drop out of those activities? It starts with not working. then you don't have money for vacations, dates (at least not the sort that the majority of people want), things. You shouldn't even really stop wearing clothes if they're torn---after all, sewing machines use petroleum. even if you hand-sew, what do you think made that needle and thread?

      No matter what you do, it is simply a distraction, one that will not solve the problem. it is insoluble. So why not enjoy life?

      Greybeard

      May 13, 2014 at 11:24am

      The author should that we are not "...pumping millions of gallons of pressurized hot water and chemicals miles down so we can drive our cars and power our computers," we are doing it to make short-term profit for big petro. Only a fool thinks otherwise.