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| Government | Living in Place | Monkeywrenching | Musings | Reality | War & Peace | Wilderness |
February 19,2006Saving WildernessThose among the local human inhabitants who desire a respite from urban busyness hie themselves to the few remaining natural areas for what passes as a "wilderness experience" in these waning days of civilization. Crammed into sleek metallic hybrid automobiles, rumbling, high-wheeled mini-trucks, gleaming low-riders with deep bass sound systems set on stun, these nature seekers travel hundreds of miles, over thousands of miles of cement and macadam, on their butts, to commune with nature. They crowd into parking lots, don their colorful nature-industry protective clothing, complete and replete with individually labeled pockets for iPod and headphones, designer sunglasses, electronic computerized camera, cell phone, GPS receiver and wilderness guidebook. Over all, they strap on the latest oil-derived, Sierra Magazine (TM) approved backpack filled with the latest hiking industry products for gustatorial relief and liquid refreshment. After a day of wilderness consumption, they all head wearily back to their metal steeds, crawl through the weekend smog of permanent rush hour traffic, back to the solace of HDTV, 6.0 mbps DSL 6.0, semi-reliable cell-phones connections, lattés on demand, and retail opportunities abounding. Life is good. Unbeknownst, or at least little appreciated by the dedicated wilderness consumer, there's another wilderness that lives just outside the doorway of the average modest 2,000 square foot, million dollar California abode. It's easy and inexpensive to find and experience, requiring only a pair of feet and a willingness to use them, one at a time. On my daily commute to work and back at our local public radio station, I do something highly unusual and suspect in the United States today... I walk. Twice a day, morning and afternoon, I transport my self independently across the intervening space twixt hither and yon, about a mile and back, setting one foot before the other, tipping myself off balance on one foot in the desired direction of travel and catching myself, every time so far, on the opposite extended pedal appendage. Thus I make my way along 7th Avenue, picking up odd bits of the flotsam and jetsam of civilization tossed carelessly aside by passing motorists, depositing them in conveniently placed wheely bins left along the roadside since the last refuse pickup. The empty sidewalk reels out before me, only rarely hazarding a fellow walker. Unencumbered by a metal and plastic cocoon, I'm free to watch and listen to the non-human world that exists interposed amid the cacophony of the regular, regulated commuter experience. Crows, mocking birds, starlings, finches, sparrows, pigeons, red-tailed hawks, great blue herons, night herons, kingfishers, sea gulls and cormorants fill the air with song and the swish of wing-feathers. Raccoons, opossums, assorted rodents and their feline predators, occupy the ground level, squirrels chatter from trees, slugs, snails and myriad species of crawling and flying insects share the darker and wetter reaches of my route. Often, my pedestrian travels take me through the small boat harbor, home to, besides the boats and their nautical keepers, flights of sea gulls and terns, majestic, prehistoric soaring great blue herons, who land on the docks and stand on spindly legs, hands in pockets, contemplating deep mysteries of the universe from within their feathered cloaks. Harbor seals float languidly in the cold waters, their heads barely above the surface, looking back at me with wet, puppy eyes. They disappear quietly below the surface when the social moment becomes too intense. Sea lions bark noisily, day and night, and thrash their catch of the day on the water, breaking the still-living salmon into bite-size chunks. Nature red in tooth and fin. Last week a mob of crows harassed an immature red-tailed hawk, who flew desperately among the eucalyptus branches and the tall masts in the harbor, white bars flashing on his young pumping wings, trying to shake the pursuing pack of black, irresponsible Corvid trouble-makers. The hawk finally gave up and perched on the locked gate to X2 dock, grumbling to himself, as the crows settled in the tall white masts of the sail boats and took turns dive-bombing the disgruntled young raptor. At last, pursued by two persistent harriers, the hawk flew swiftly into a deep screen of dense eucalyptus on the slope above the harbor, there to brood on his wounded pride as the crows flew off, congratulating themselves loudly with a raucous ruckus. In the ten minutes that I stood and watched the drama unfold, not 50 feet away, no other human noted the experience. Cars drove by, their occupants safely entombed in their metal sarcophagi, unseeing, unhearing, unaware. Boat owners polished and repaired their costly craft, intent on their work, never looking up. The natural world that surrounded them might as well not have existed for all the notice they took of it. We hear much talk these days of "saving the wilderness," protecting Nature, even saving the Earth, and yet, for 99 44/100% of the people on this planet, the non-human world exists only on those rare and special occasions when it can be consumed as a commodity, packaged and presented with appropriate and expensive hyperbole and marketing acumen. The signs and signals of a natural world brought to the brink of extinction are screened from human notice by the dollar signs and economic signals of an overweening human social system that places commodity and profit above life and living. If we are to save the wilderness, if it indeed needs saving, not just leaving alone, we must first save ourselves from the illusion of separatedness from the non-human world, the fantasy of the free lunch, the unthinking expectation of continuing and unlimited economic growth. Human economic growth and development are the opposite of wilderness; the two are mutually incompatible. Wilderness, including the everyday wilderness of 7th Avenue, cannot continue to exist in a world that contains humans intent on more and better. The future, for humans at least, if there are any in it, will be a world of less and sufficient. Michael A. Lewis Leona Gulch Pacific Plate November 28, 2005 Preserving WildernessWhile preserving and expanding wilderness is an excellent idea, this retains the view of wilderness as a "resource" for human development, the very worldview that has brought us to this precipice, with our toes dangling out in the cold breeze over the edge. Wilderness preservation, rewilding and inter-ecosystem corridors are all excellent tools for preserving necessary and critical wild habitat. They are not, however, tools for preserving HUMAN habitat! Wild habitat must be preserved and enhanced for itself, not to serve as seeds for human communities after the Fall. After the End of the Age of Oil, coming soon to a fuel pump near you, humans will learn to live in less habitat than we occupy now; we take up too much critical wild habitat as it is. As our civilization (if that's what it is, which I doubt) inevitably declines (or improves, in my perspective), we will relearn how to live in place, how to live our lives within our own bioregions, while not despoiling the wild, non-human habitat that exists around us. What we will do in the meantime, as sources of energy decline in quantity and quality, is continue to attempt to maintain our status quo up to the last bloody shovel-full of coal burned to heat our poorly built, artificial homes. Even now, as global climate change causes Arctic ice to recede further than it has in the past 1,000 years, energy companies are competing for access to delicate Arctic land and seas to suck out the last drop of oil to power our doomed industrial societies. Nothing will stop humans from racing toward the precipice at full speed, ignoring the "Bridge Out" sign printed in large, friendly letters, illuminated by the last of the fossil fuel power plants. Because of our economic focus, most of our present societies are incapable of changing to meet the demands of the world beyond the Age of Oil. Our dominant, destructive societies will just run out of energy and will no longer be able to "sustain" lifeways that destroy the neighborhood, along with the neighbors, and foul the very biological processes that allow humans to live. Things that can't go on forever, don't. Despite this gloomy outlook, from the perspective of "civilized man," I am optimistic about the future. A thousand years from now, humans will be living in healthy human habitat, alongside and among non-humans living in healthy non-human habitat. It can be no other way. We will learn to live in place, gradually taking our place among other species, living in harmony with all life. We may as well start the process now and avoid the rush. We can learn to live in place, right where we are now, start transforming our human habitat into truly sustainable human habitat, at the same time that we preserve and enhance non-human habitat (that is, stop destroying it). Healthy, thriving, diverse and untrammeled (look it up) non-human habitat is critical to human survival, not as a source of human "resources" but for its own sake, it's own evolution, its own LIFE! This does not mean that we buy a farm and go back to the land to start living in place. That just destroys more non-human habitat! No, we begin right now, right here to "be the change we wish to see in the world." We grow our food, make our clothes, walk or bicycle to work or markets, produce our own power, make decisions about our own lives and about our communities, in place, at home, in our neighborhoods, communities, villages and bioregions, right where we are, right now. The first step in living in place is to stop moving around. Then we learn about the place where we live, the other life with which we share this place, the natural cycles and processes of this place. Then we build our human lives within the natural constraints and limitations of the place where we live. In this way we change our human habitat such that we no longer destroy the non-human habitat essential to all life on this planet. We will find the wilderness, and the wilderness is us! Michael Lewis Leona Gulch Pacific Plate WILDERNESS OF THE MIND! |
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December 12,2002 For a couple of years I lived in the old town site of Kelly, that doomed little village on the Gros Ventre River that was utterly destroyed when an earthquake and landslide temporarily damned the river upstream from what was then a substantial town. Engineers were called in to examine the new impediment to the river flow, rapidly backing up a substantial lake. They stomped all over the tumbled rocks, shrugged their shoulders and pronounced it safe. Less than two years later, the dam broke loose, washing most of Kelly downstream. All that was left was the old log Presbyterian Church, which was later turned into a store for the remaining residents. The store was struck by lightning and burned to the ground, leaving only a small section of interlocked logs at one corner that still stands near the new Kelly Store. A huge safe in the old Kelly General Store, that served as the town bank, was washed away and never found. I set up the teepee on the bank of the Gros Ventre, in the Sioux, three-pole style, on a small, grass-covered dry ox-bow. I carried the long golden poles from their rack on top of the Purple Turtle, my 65 VW bus, parked on the bench above the river. The poles made a pleasing broad hour glass shape, shining in the spring sun, with their red ribbons following the breeze. With the liner and cover in place, door and smoke flaps facing the old avalanche scar to the east, the teepee made a cozy home. The outside cover came to within six inches of the ground, leaving a space between liner and cover. As the days quickly warmed, the teepee acted as a chimney, bringing cool air in from ground level, warming in the captured energy of the sun, and exiting out the smoke hole, directed by wind flaps turned away from the wind as the collar on a jacket. I lay in the teepee at night, watching the moon and stars through the smoke hole, gradually synching up with the natural rhythms of the old earth swinging through the firmament. Several nights that spring and summer, I woke to hear coyotes padding on the gravel of the river bank. They crossed the river and climbed the bank to the first bench right behind the teepee, so close I could hear their panting and the drip of river water from their sodden fur. I lay there next to the glowing coals of my fire, listening to them yip and howl, dance around each other in the dim starlight. Their timeless pathway across the river was uninterrupted by my modest dwelling. Their serenade wafted me soaring through the night stars. Schoonka, my black Lab companion, raised her head and stared toward the door, but didn't make a sound all the time they were there. I took down the teepee when winter snows threatened to tear down the cover. Though it was still comfortable with the morning fire going, the snow began to get too deep to navigate. When I returned on snowshoes, moose tracks wandered off the bench and between the skeleton poles. Coyotes still cross the Gros Ventre and sing to themselves and to others who stop long enough to listen. Moose still wade through the snow where the teepee once stood. Schoonka is buried beneath a venerable Sitka spruce in Southeast Alaska, where her collar and tags dangle in the wind. The teepee poles are long gone to firewood, and the liner and torn cover rest in a barn in Laramie, Wyoming. Nowadays, I listen to the pounding surf, sea lions and shore birds, here on a fragment of the Pacific Plate temporarily welded to the North American Continent. The moon and stars are bright tonight, secure in their customary places. A skunk wanders through the yard, stops for a moment and tests the breeze. Snails wind their slimy trails through the geraniums. The earth turns on its path through the firmament. The Universe takes no notice. Lobo Place East Mesa |