They are polite, eager,
inquisitive. I can’t decide if they make me feel 20 years
younger or exhausted. Every teacher should be so lucky.
I’m driving around the West with 21 students from Whitman
College in Washington, where I teach, and we’ve talked to
ranchers and environmentalists, looked at forests that have been
logged and some that were left alone, to forests under restoration.
My job has been to force students to examine the foundations of
their environmental commitments – their belief that
intervening in nature can only endanger it, because nature knows
best.
Why would I want to encourage students to
critically examine their green faith? Aren’t I encouraging
cynicism? These are good questions, and I lose sleep over them. But
I see no alternative.
If the West is about anything,
it’s irony, which tends to expose how unstable are the
categories that we use to understand our world. At the OK Corral in
Tombstone, Ariz., a sign warns visitors that guns are not allowed.
Forests may have to be burned to save them. Wilderness areas around
Moab require extensive management to keep them from being overrun.
People with the best of intentions often end up damaging what they
care about most.
Many students have come to think about
people in natural resource industries as the enemy. The logger is
cast as a forest rapist, while the public-lands rancher always
wears the black hat. But in the field, we meet tree farmers and
ranchers who not only talk the green talk, they can show us the
healthy ground where they walk. Some claim they can
“out-environmental any environmentalist any day of the
week.” Others ask only for better communication and more
understanding among those with competing aims for our public lands.
These experiences make a powerful impression on students.
Combined with extensive study in ecology, they show students that
what we find on the ground is not untouched nature, but a nature
that is complex and unpredictable, made even more so by a history
of human-nature interactions that characterize all Western
landscapes, no matter how empty they might appear.
All
this can be confusing. One student writes, “How can I defend
nature if we can’t say for sure what nature is supposed to
look like? I get the irony thing, but where does this leave
us?” My answer is simple: Unstable categories leave us in an
ideal position for an epiphany, an “aha!” moment where
it seems possible to re-imagine the world.
Irony is
creativity’s best traveling companion. Earlier in the
semester, we spent a morning with Doug McDaniel, a rancher in
northeast Oregon who is spending tens of thousands of his dollars
to restore meanders in the Wallowa River, which were straightened
by the Army Corps in the 1950s as part of an effort to conserve
farmland and water. Because meanders are essential habitat for
migrating salmon, we wonder aloud how people back then could have
been so shortsighted.
Doug tells us something that
students will return to again and again: “Look, no one wakes
up in the morning and says, ‘Gee, how can I screw this place
up today?’ We didn’t know then what we know now. But
casting blame isn’t going to bring back the fish. We have to
roll up our sleeves and find ways we can work together.”
A few weeks later, we hear another message that ricochets
through our semester-long discussions. It comes from Greg
Neudecker, who came to Montana’s Blackfoot Valley as a
wildlife official, certain that his expertise enabled him to tell
people how to manage their property to restore streams.
“It wasn’t long,” Greg explains, “until I
found myself running up against a wall. I learned that if you think
you have all the answers so that you don’t feel you have to
listen to anyone else, you are probably wrong.”
Perhaps all we need is a little less certainty and a little more
humility.
As the sun sinks lower, many of our questions
remain unresolved. We head for our camp just above the Santa Fe
River, which (ironically) begins flowing at the Santa Fe Sewage
Treatment Facility. After enchiladas from the Dutch oven, we gather
in a circle to share and discuss our epiphanies.
Darkness
and cold descend upon us, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
Silence sometimes interrupts our lively discussions, and we pause
to take in the wonder of the stars. We remain uncertain what this
beautiful evening is telling us. But this does not diminish our
love for it, nor can unanswered questions weaken our resolve to
lead more deliberate lives.
Phil Brick is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News
(hcn.org). He teaches environmental politics at Whitman Collegte in
Walla Walla, Washington and is the founder there of Semester in the
West.
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