The Wild Lands of 2019 Beckon

As the new year approaches, I rejoice that I didn’t set out nine years ago to write a blog about politics and social issues. Considering the political landscape that looms in 2019, I’d simply despair and spend my time reading the classics, beginning with Dante: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate, and all that.

Instead, I chose to write about literature, architecture, travel and the outdoors.

Ah, let’s go outdoors and breathe the clear, politics-free air at 10,000 feet!

As far as the eye can see in that photograph, California’s White Mountains are covered with groves of Ancient Bristlecone Pines, many of them more than 4,000 years old. We’ve escaped! We’re free! We’ll stay here with the world’s oldest living things in peace and harmony. No nasty politics.

Or, for a change of scene (and to escape the snow that’s now several feet deep where I shot that photo in September, 2018), let’s flee to the New Mexico desert. We’ll hike around Chaco Canyon and marvel at the ruins of the ancient Puebloan culture from about 1200 c.e., free from political discord.

And, if we still have that cooped-up feeling, then it’s north … to Alaska! We’ll be safe there!

Obviously, if I believe “politics” aren’t at work in these places, I’m an idiot. They’re all in the United States, and the mendacious, kleptocratic miscreants who run the agencies that manage these lands are taking aggressive strides to remove protections from them and issue numerous permits and licenses for drilling, mining, logging and ranching.

As it happens, those wild places pictured above are relatively well protected. Alaska’s Denali National Park and New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park can’t be impinged on without radical action that might even be resisted by the complacent and spineless U. S. Senate. Maybe. As for the Bristlecones, they’re in a protected area controlled by the U. S. Forest Service. There’s no immediate threat to development within the boundaries of the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest I’m aware of.

But the government is doing all it can to free up more land for exploitation — often immediately adjacent to these places, or just as sensitive — eliminating protected status, all for the benefit of the oil and mining companies for whom the administrators of federal agencies have until recently worked.

In Alaska, they’re pushing to expand oil exploration into the critically sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

There’s a looming threat of permits being issued at the very boundary of Chaco Canyon to allow natural gas drilling there which which will — inevitably — damage or erase innumerable prehistoric sites, as well as wide tracts of wild or near-wild land.

In 2018, I devoted a number of blog posts to examining the question of our place as humans in the “natural” world. To what extent does being human exempt us from even being part of nature? Do we have carte blanche to declare any area to be no longer part of nature so we can do what we want with it?

My examples are from the U.S., but many countries have national parks, preserves and protected areas. The same sort of corrupt, selfish pseudo-stewards of public land are at work everywhere, attempting to limit or even shrink how much of the earth we safeguard.

If, ultimately, the bad guys win and declare that nothing matters too much because none of what people do causes climate change or long-term degradation of the planet, we’re lost. “Ignore what science says,” they tell us. “They can’t prove a thing. Our gut instinct says everything will be fine.”

That’s why I put the Bristlecones in this article. They’re in a pretty good place up there. They even resist wildfire to a great extent, thanks to their incredibly dense wood and the fact that almost nothing else grows where they do: There’s little near them to catch fire. No one’s threatening to cut them down for firewood or dig on those slopes for precious metals or coal.

But they’ve prospered up there through an astounding chain of adaptations that equip them specifically for that place with precisely those conditions. They grow at an almost imperceptible pace in the harshest possible circumstances, with the bare minimum of nutrients. They live on a knife’s edge of resources for 3,000 or 4,000 years, and continue to produce viable seeds throughout their lives.

But if the climate crashes beyond some tipping point, warming too far, or if the atmosphere becomes too toxic, they won’t make it, any more than the rest of us will. They can’t change fast enough, and they can’t migrate. They occupy the only place on the planet they can live.

I look forward to 2019. I hope to hike, explore, stand, listen, breathe and gawk. Maybe I’ll get back to northern California and see more of the Redwoods, the world’s tallest trees.

When you’re there, you see immense stands of those mighty beings. “Limitless,” you might think. In fact, we have only about 3% of the Redwoods that were standing when Europeans first arrived on the continent. We cut the rest of them down for lumber.

That’s what’s known as “forest management” in a number of administrative departments.

It’s a new year. Let’s go! Let’s hike, swim, climb. But we’re not free from the need to vote, call our representatives and do whatever else it takes, because those forests, mountains, rivers, lakes, deserts and seashores are full of political import, friends. We’re going to have to deal with that, too, like it or not, and not just here in the U.S.

Take plenty of photos while you’re out hiking. If we mess this up, they’re all we’ll have left.

I’ll see you in 2019. Happy New Year.

© Brad Nixon 2018