Close The National Parks
I often write in the first person because it feels natural and comfortable, especially when writing by hand. There’s something about the feeling of gripping a pen that drags the “I” to the forefront for me, and I imagine for most people. We are narcissistic creatures, and often for very good reason. It’s likely we wouldn’t have made it past the era of living in dank caves if there hadn’t been a degree of selfish desire in us. Ayn Rand didn’t start from zero, although she ended up there. Objectivism is too devoid of empathy to be worthy much when not expressed through ink and paper. With flesh and bone its shortcomings become all too obvious.
For all our natural selfishness, what empathy we do achieve is reserved for humans or whatever creatures we can successfully anthropomorphize. I’ll admit that this group seems to be getting bigger in recent years, but its basis still rests on our ability to see ourselves reflected in some way. When what requires our empathy is abstract, or puts us at some disadvantage, we have a vast history of failure. The natural environment is the most obvious example.
Yes, there has been a sustained environmental effort for roughly 150 years in America. Our destruction and supposed “taming” of the frontier awoke this spirit in the American Consciousness, but there is a flaw in every phase of the environmental movement in America, all the way back to Emerson and Thoreau, and their admirer Muir. Same goes for transcendentalists, hippies and neo-romantics. The lot of them have the same problem, as admirable as they have been in advancement of environmental thought and responsibility.
Thoreau’s most famous work, often erroneously cited as a work about nature isn’t about nature at all. Walden is in large part about men. Thoreau laments that men ignore nature, leading lives of “quiet desperation,” and embarks to the pond on a self-styled “experiment. His mentor, Emerson was obsessed with the ideas, inspirations, and knowledge that men are indebted to nature for. This again, finds men as the focus. John Muir was rhapsodic in his praise of the Yosemite Valley as a “temple,” a piece of imagery widely borrowed afterwards. Byron, before all the rest said he loved man not the less “but nature more.”
It isn’t hard to notice the connective thread these great men unwittingly wove together. The greatest and most important voices of environmentalism all thought in terms of the world in relation to man. They each admirably grappled with the question of how man should relate to wildness of the world, but not one of them seriously considered that we might should have as little relationship to it as possible. This has always seemed absurd on its face, especially to Americans, because conceiving of our absence from anything is antithetical to hundreds of years of national myth-making, not to mention the obvious implications of such an idea.
The most extreme conservationists have always insisted that, in opposition to Gifford Pinchot’s famous “best use” policy, there is inherent value in land left in its “primitive” state. It took generations for this idea to be taken seriously, but it is generally accepted by contemporary Americans. It is the unifying idea behind national parks, preserves, and monuments. Plans to dam rivers and flood valleys, to drill for oil and log forests have been rightly pilloried as diametrically opposed to the very idea of the parks. The success of stopping these ventures has been varied. But the consistent call of the resistance has been the idea that we should not despoil what we have agreed to leave alone.
Many arguments have centered around the potential loss for visitors to the parks. They want to see “unspoiled” nature, not a dam and muddy pond. But is this a realistic view of what has happened? It’s been a century and a half since the first national park, Yellowstone was announced. Has preservation in America been a success? Well, Yellowstone isn’t a series of condominiums and mini-malls, so success can be claimed on that front, but one can hardly say that Yellowstone remains “primitive.” After all, it’s been under our control since 1872. We “take care” of it so it doesn’t become a parking lot, but also so humans can enjoy it.
In the twenty first century, I don’t think this relationship is good enough if we want wildness to survive. Thoreau’s oft-quoted line, “in wildness is the preservation of the world,” is generally thought of as a definition of American Conservation, but we do not and cannot preserve wildness. By definition, wildness is without us. We need to take a step back and do our level best to entirely remove ourselves from the equation. In a few, short centuries we have utterly transformed our continent, and it’s going to take radical change now to stop the spiral of destruction.
The national parks are a drop of olive oil in the ocean. It is a simple question: Would our wild places be better off if shut off from humans altogether? Of course. It’s not a difficult query, though it is never asked. The two-prongs of reasoning behind conservation are 1. To keep the land unspoiled 2. So that humans may enjoy it. The fact that such a simple question is never seriously considered shows with typical, humanistic surety that conservation is really only about the latter.
Roderick Nash referred to the overwhelming American feeling about wilderness as “ambivalence,” and in the face of injustice, Martin Luther King tells us that silence chooses the side of the oppressor. The problem being we are the oppressors, and taking our own side is only too easy. Of course we do. It’s as natural as me defaulting to writing in first person, but I think it would behoove us to begin thinking about the natural world in terms that separate it from ourselves. I don’t believe this was inevitable, but I think centuries of what Nash termed “Ambivalence” lead us to this point. We can no longer take our own comfort into account for precisely anthropocentric reasons. If we do not start acting in the best interest of the natural world without reference to our own enjoyment and comfort, we will ride the tides of ambivalence right into extinction.
Even I have returned to people. Of course I have! I’m a person, but in order to help people, we’ve got to think less about them. Our entire history of conservation and nature-thought has been an exercise in self indulgence. It is time we struggle a little bit. We’ve made the choices that lead us to this point, so we have to deal with them. People are the central destroyer of natural wonders. It is an undeniable fact. For that reason, I think we should let some things alone, for their own good and ours.
On a macro scale, the facts of our environmental peril have been put out there so many times, they hardly bare repeating, but if we don’t curb our dependence on fossil fuel, this conversation hardly matters. Assuming we can accomplish this (which is admittedly a massive assumption), what else should we do? For The United States, one answer is clear.
Close the national parks. Keep only the smallest necessary, skeleton crew, close the gates, and don’t open them for a hundred years. Longer might be better, but for the sake of such a hypothetical, I like a round number. It would be a massive blow to tourism, to our own enjoyment, and to some it would seem to punish those who care the most about nature. I have no rebuttal. These things are all true, but what else is obviously true is that the millions of acres of land will benefit immensely. Is it fair? No, nothing about it is even remotely fair to humans, but it is eminently fair, in fact long overdue for the land itself.
It goes against everything our wildly humanistic tendencies tell us, grates painfully on our sensitivities. We can’t imagine it, but it isn’t impossible, whether we can imagine it or not. When we cultivate a garden, we pick the weeds. In this instance, we are the weeds, and the perfect state of the garden is not ordered rows, but disordered chaos. Nature is not as Emerson imagined it, sculpted by the hand of the creator, waiting only for our ability to interpret its divine meaning. We only want this to be true.
In reality, it’s messy, barbaric, and disastrous. It burns thousands of acres, booms and busts, tumbles and builds. For decades we fought fires in protected forest land, only to learn we were making the fires worse by not letting them burn out as they did for millennia before our occupation. It is illustrative of how clumsy and ill-informed we usually are. We need to let it burn.
Watch the flames from afar if we must, but don’t let our vanity convince us we can be the savior. Man as savior, pinned to two trees in the shape of a cross is an invention of man’s mind just as surely as the natural world isn’t. Embrace not knowing and accept our failure. It’s the natural conclusion of the American Conservation Movement: true conservation. Trees will fall and they will make sounds, even if we aren’t around to hear it.
