part because I was catching so much hell from oilcompanies for suggesting that we needed to overhaul industrial civilization. But the argument persists. It’s not easy to see what the idea of something apart from man, something untrammeled, will amount to in a globally warmed, genetically engineered world, a world totally reshaped by our recklessness and our shortsighted desire. Mightn’t we just give up on the whole thing and go play video games?
For me, though, the idea that there’s no such thing as pure wilderness has made the
relative wild
all the more precious. Yes, Cronon’s right, and so was I—there’s no place that isn’t touched by man. I have a friend, Curt Stager, who teaches biology at Paul Smith’s College, the only four-year school in the Adirondacks. Curt spent years out with his students looking for a pristine Adirondack Lake, one that hadn’t been sterilized by acid rain, one whose sediment cores didn’t show telltale signs of logging or roadbuilding in the watershed. He never found one, and he had three thousand to choose from. And now it rains or snows or doesn’t on those lakes in some small measure because of the kind of cars we drive or the ways we heat our homes. In 2003, scientists summed up a review of many different studies—studies of leaf-out in the spring, of migration dates, of hibernation patterns—and concluded that because of global warming, spring was coming seven days earlier at this latitude than just a few decades before.
But it’s precisely
because
of such things that we badly need more wild, not less. For pragmatic reasons: if plants and animals are going to need to move north against the rising temperature, we have to give them as much room, and as many corridors, as we can carve out (assuming, that is, that you buy the basic conservationist argument that plants and animals are worth preserving). But beyond that, we need more wild for
human
reasons: we need to set aside land from our use simply to prove to ourselves that we can do it, that we don’t need to be in control of everything around us. The battle for the future is precisely between those who are willing to engineer every organism for our convenience, who will countenance the radical change of our climate rather than risk any damage to our cosseted and swaddled Economy, and those who are willing to say there is something other than us that counts. Wilderness and Gandhian nonviolence were the two most potentially revolutionary ideas of the twentieth century, precisely because they were the two most humble: they imagine a whole different possibility for people.
There’s another, less stern, reason we need the wild, too, of course, and that’s for sheer comfort. I’d hiked Giant several times in my life—the best was on the first anniversary of meeting my wife, Sue, when we walked up in a gray fog with a bottle of champagne, only to have the clouds instantly part as we sat on the summit, pulled away like stage curtains to reveal the late-September glorybelow. Probably because of that good memory, I headed back on one of the darker days of my life, the morning after the elections of 1994, when Newt Gingrich swept into control of the House on the strength of his Contract with America. It seemed to me as if the nation I loved had finally gone totally crazy, that it had settled for the most gimcrack and transparent kind of fraud, and that a kind of intolerance was settling over the land that would eventually make life scary for people like myself, who seemed suddenly not critics of the ruling order, but
dissidents
. Anyway, a hard day’s solitary hike was enough to restore a bit of equilibrium, and Gingrich landed harder than I did in the end—but a world without Giant Mountain, or a Giant Mountain with a toll road on it, or a gondola, or an ATV mosh pit, seems more worth fighting against than ever. “Forever wild,” as the New York constitution puts it, even if “wild” means a little less than it used
For me, though, the idea that there’s no such thing as pure wilderness has made the
relative wild
all the more precious. Yes, Cronon’s right, and so was I—there’s no place that isn’t touched by man. I have a friend, Curt Stager, who teaches biology at Paul Smith’s College, the only four-year school in the Adirondacks. Curt spent years out with his students looking for a pristine Adirondack Lake, one that hadn’t been sterilized by acid rain, one whose sediment cores didn’t show telltale signs of logging or roadbuilding in the watershed. He never found one, and he had three thousand to choose from. And now it rains or snows or doesn’t on those lakes in some small measure because of the kind of cars we drive or the ways we heat our homes. In 2003, scientists summed up a review of many different studies—studies of leaf-out in the spring, of migration dates, of hibernation patterns—and concluded that because of global warming, spring was coming seven days earlier at this latitude than just a few decades before.
But it’s precisely
because
of such things that we badly need more wild, not less. For pragmatic reasons: if plants and animals are going to need to move north against the rising temperature, we have to give them as much room, and as many corridors, as we can carve out (assuming, that is, that you buy the basic conservationist argument that plants and animals are worth preserving). But beyond that, we need more wild for
human
reasons: we need to set aside land from our use simply to prove to ourselves that we can do it, that we don’t need to be in control of everything around us. The battle for the future is precisely between those who are willing to engineer every organism for our convenience, who will countenance the radical change of our climate rather than risk any damage to our cosseted and swaddled Economy, and those who are willing to say there is something other than us that counts. Wilderness and Gandhian nonviolence were the two most potentially revolutionary ideas of the twentieth century, precisely because they were the two most humble: they imagine a whole different possibility for people.
There’s another, less stern, reason we need the wild, too, of course, and that’s for sheer comfort. I’d hiked Giant several times in my life—the best was on the first anniversary of meeting my wife, Sue, when we walked up in a gray fog with a bottle of champagne, only to have the clouds instantly part as we sat on the summit, pulled away like stage curtains to reveal the late-September glorybelow. Probably because of that good memory, I headed back on one of the darker days of my life, the morning after the elections of 1994, when Newt Gingrich swept into control of the House on the strength of his Contract with America. It seemed to me as if the nation I loved had finally gone totally crazy, that it had settled for the most gimcrack and transparent kind of fraud, and that a kind of intolerance was settling over the land that would eventually make life scary for people like myself, who seemed suddenly not critics of the ruling order, but
dissidents
. Anyway, a hard day’s solitary hike was enough to restore a bit of equilibrium, and Gingrich landed harder than I did in the end—but a world without Giant Mountain, or a Giant Mountain with a toll road on it, or a gondola, or an ATV mosh pit, seems more worth fighting against than ever. “Forever wild,” as the New York constitution puts it, even if “wild” means a little less than it used
Similar Books
