GO WEST!

After high school I traveled quite a bit courtesy of the United States Air Force.  First I had the opportunity to journey back and forth from my home in Michigan to the West Coast a number of times over a period of a couple years.  Then I went east, and eventually across the Atlantic to England, where I was stationed for three years.  From there, I visited the Continent and my missions took me to even more exotic locations.  After that I spent awhile stationed near Washington D.C. and traveled up and down the East Coast.  Back to civilian life, business and fishing expeditions took me to other nooks and crannies of North America.  And most recently my wife and I spent a pleasant two weeks rambling along the backroads of France.

However, it was my first great journey from home to the wild wild West that made the deepest impression upon me, especially in contrast to my life soon after that in England.  It taught me both the importance of conservation while completely disabusing me of the urgency of environmentalism.   In other words, I learned that the wild spaces of the West and elsewhere would be best preserved by the evolution of our culture instead of the sledgehammer of our politics.  Let me explain.

Saguaro Forests and Sandstorms

Like many born and bred in the tamer precincts east of the Mississippi, I pictured the West as the New Land.  It was the place that remained wild on a grand scale and in spectacular form.  When I finally made it out West, I was not disappointed.  Indeed, I think one of the most exotic places in the world is the saguaro "forest" of central Arizona.  That cactus-studded desert, empty of man but brimming with life, luscious to the eye but painful to the touch, is otherworldly.

Lonely, dangerous, and beautiful is the West.  Nothing more captured these themes for me than when I blundered into a sandstorm in southern New Mexico.  Soaking up the quiet desert heat of White Sands, I looked over my shoulder to see a boiling red cloud descending from the eastern slopes of the San Andres Mountains.  Ignorantly complacent until a few minutes later when I was trapped in the bowels of a furnace of sand, it was a hellish quarter of an hour during which all my senses were denied to me by sheer overload.  But it was exciting!  Chalk it up to being too young and stupid to know that getting caught in the open in a sandstorm could be unhealthy; but other than being in dire need of shower, I got through it in fine shape.

Of course, there are more peaceful enjoyments in the West.  One of those was Pinnacles National Monument of the Galiban Range in central California.  Crawling through the caves that riddled the shattered remnants of a volcano provided some healthy exercise.  More important was the prize at the end:  A great panorama of primeval solitude where one could hope to spy that Pleistocene relic, the California condor, soaring through the hard blue sky.  Never did see one, but that didn't diminish the lure of Pinnacles.

Then there are the sights that are ho-hum to the natives that grip the Easterner.  The monkey puzzle trees of Pacific Grove writhing in orange and black that marks the annual invasion of the monarch butterfly; chilling in a way, with so much life so different from us massed together.  Snow piled up thirty feet deep come April in the high passes of the Sierra Nevada or unexpectedly short of breath at over 11,000 feet up in the Colorado Rockies while barreling over Monarch Pass.  The eerie emptiness of west Texas, where the hand of man has platted the land with roads and fences, but seldom is a soul to be seen.  The roly-poly wheat-covered hills of southeastern Washington, sculpted in the course of a few days by a flood of Biblical proportions let loose by a retreating ice cap.  The one hundred shades of blue that compose the hazy vista of the Great Salt Lake.  And so many more.

My time in the West was a soulful one.  As a boy who loved maps and always wanted to know what those flat colored spaces actually looked like, the West was my first chance to see a land truly different from home and learn what those dots, lines, and symbols really were in space and time.  That experience sparked in me my first consciousness of the importance of conservation.  What a shame if others who came after me could not get the same easy access to the wild that I did.

A Thoroughly Used Land

But it was my experience immediately after the West that put the importance of conservation into perspective for me.  After two years of living in the western United States, I spent the next three years living in England.  To my mind these two places at the extremes of an east-west axis formed a spectrum of man's domination of the landscape which dissipated as one headed westward.

After several millennia the British Isles, on the eastern extreme of that axis, have been thoroughly used by man.  Sure there remain a few wild fringes where barren rock is slapped mercilessly by the sea.  And then there are the restoration attempts in the highlands of Scotland and Wales where the government has planted odd-looking pine forests in Euclidean patterns of orthographic rigidity.  Otherwise there are no patches of land that have not been used, used, and used again, especially since the last frontiers fell three centuries ago.  Even the lovely moors - and they are lovely - are crisscrossed by paths leading to this pasture or that.

Even so, especially after my soulful journey through the empty West, I was not disturbed by what the heavy hand of man had wrought upon these isles.  The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, its forests laid low and its hills bored out to fuel the machines of commerce, was a pleasant land that fell softly upon the senses.  A patchwork of idiosyncratic corners welded together by the weight of population, it was nonetheless a place where - outside the cities, of course - the intensity of human endeavor molded rather than destroyed nature.  Traveling the land from Dover to Dublin, from Land's End to John o'Groats, I found many redoubts of solitude and raw nature that replicated the peace I found in the West.

My favorite redoubt is the beach at St. Bees in December.  Nothing very special I suppose.  A few hundred yards of rocky beach between a pair of undramatic bluffs where the Irish Sea laps lazily at its shore.  But the Gulf Stream is vital enough to take the chill out of the air, the stillness of the sea muffles the hub-bub of the village behind the bluffs, and the time of the year keeps the bathers away.  Sinking into the soft comfort of the place, one is enveloped in its timelessness.  The sights, sounds, and smells are no different from that of previous millennia.  The hand of man disappears and one focuses upon the forces of nature.  In fact around the neck of my wife hangs mounted in silver a little flat shard of green slate rounded by the waves that I fished out of the Irish Sea there.

The False Alarm

And so it was my experience in the British Isles that put conservation into perspective for me.  It is important that we preserve sufficiently large areas of wilderness that permit robust habitat, because we really cannot replicate nature.  However, it is not so urgent that we do so that we cut corners of our liberties and use the brute force of politics to make people submit to utopian ideals of the environmentalists.

The arithmetic makes this plain.  In the British Isles a population nearly one-quarter that of the United States is crammed into a space only three percent of ours - and the devastation of the land has NOT been the result.  And even if we do not want to broach the intensity of land use found in Britain and Ireland (and we don't), the United States would have to grow to a population of nearly TWO BILLION people before we got there.  This is not going to happen.

So, there is no environmental crisis.  There is a problem, which reached the public consciousness about three decades ago, and much has been done to solve it.  Work remains, but this is the work of cultivating a conservation ethic in the American psyche.  Changing the culture is the only long-term solution that ensures what we value now will be valued in the future.  On the other hand, unreliable politics change from election to election.

The time will come when the environmental bureaucracy will be dismantled or neutered, and so the goals of conservation will no longer be sustained by force of the government.  Without a change in the culture in the meantime, there will be no consensus for conservation.  At that point, the best that we can hope for is benign neglect of the remaining wilderness.  Worse, it is easy to imagine that the power we permitted the government to protect the land will be transmuted into power to use the land as the government sees fit.

It is because I think conservation is important that I object to the false urgency of environmentalists who demand that the power of government, despite its  dismal record of perverse results and failures, protect the wilderness.  I am particularly concerned that one of those perverse results will be the permanent dimunition of our liberties in exchange for creating a federal land-use behemoth.  Politics are for intellectually lazy jaw-jackers who enjoy the fight more than accomplishing anything permanent.  Changing the culture is for serious people who don't mind dirtying their hands to get real results.