Dear HCN,
I would like to respond
on behalf of the Great Old Broads for Wilderness to the Steve
Hinchman interview Ed Marston did for the July 31
edition.
I know Steve and respect and admire the
work he has done on the West Slope. Recently, as executive director
of the Colorado Environmental Coalition, I had several
opportunities to talk with Steve about things relevant to that part
of our world. I am not surprised by his take on wilderness, and his
thoughts are not “new.” In the several years I’ve been at this
work, I have heard these discouraged, slightly embittered views,
generally from young men and women, like Steve, who are tired of
fighting this good fight. I think he is wise to move on, and I wish
him well.
This supreme, oftentimes tiresome and
mean-spirited effort to protect America’s wild lands, including
wilderness, is about the land, not the people. Obviously not every
activist will agree or, if they do, wouldn’t say it. But the Great
Old Broads for Wilderness know our time on the Earth is almost
over. We know how fleeting is a single human lifetime and how
vulnerable and unique the wild is, with its once-only “life”
time.
“Life carries on … and on … and on …
and on,” as Peter Gabriel’s song says. Every single person
complaining about this year’s bad hunting season, or next year’s
drought, will be dead in less than 100 years.
I
recall a stupid question I put to poet Simon Ortiz and his wise,
perfect answer. I asked him if he missed Acoma, where he is from.
He said, “Every place is Acoma.” We are not different from place,
from the wild places or wilderness. We are only a part of place, an
integral part of it, unique only in our power to destroy
it.
Powerful we may be, but we are not as clever
by half as we think we are. We’re mistake-making humans. We make
bad decisions because we want our personal glory, good feeling, and
happiness to grow and last. We want to pass all that on to our
actual children (as opposed to those of others’, or other
generations, out there, yet unborn).
But it would
be a sad, very sad, day when wildness and wilderness are just
“nostalgia.” Perhaps Steve’s frustration stems in some part from
our collective desire to protect and our individual inability to do
so. We do not know all the answers.
I have heard
of an Indian tribe that once killed all predators, destroying the
tribe’s ability to exist in that system. Realizing what they had
done, the tribe moved to another, fully intact system. (They could
do that in those far past days.) Thereafter, when they met at
council to make any decision, someone asked, “Who speaks for the
wolf?”
In our decisions about the use of our
public lands, we hear from people about people’s needs. The
land-management agencies represent people, being more responsive to
congressional or local political pressure than to the
laws.
But, who speaks for the
wolf?
The Great Old Broads for Wilderness will
continue to seek maximum acres of designated wilderness and work
for protection of roadless areas and for whatever other protection
for the rest of it that can legally be provided. This we do, not
for us to use, but for the land itself. We humans can “deal,” as my
granddaughter would say. We can decide to change our lifestyles and
shift our priorities, and still have full and happy lives. We die
and our progeny march off in their own direction. Nature doesn’t
“decide.” It is. It simply is. It has no progeny. Once wilderness
is all gone, it is gone.
Susan
Tixier
Escalante, Utah
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Wilderness needs strong advocates.
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