Something We May Never See Again

I discovered a surprising book in my vast library recently: My Wilderness, East to Katahdin, by a certain William O. Douglas. Many of us think of the modern era of environmental awareness as having begun with the 1962 publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. But My Wilderness, published in 1961, has some of the same ideas, though in a less organized form. Rachel Carson organized the concepts into a powerful argument and provided all of the scientific references, but William O. Douglas and probably many others had thought of them earlier.

One of these concepts was the interconnectedness of nature and how modern industrial society can mess everything up by ignoring these connections. One example about which Douglas wrote was the federal government practice, in the 1950s, of dropping poison bait from airplanes to kill off the wolves. But the result was to kill off many other kinds of animals, some of which had kept populations of agricultural pests such as grasshoppers in check. The result was population explosions of insect pests. The answer to this was, of course, more spraying. Another example was the attempt to destroy the sagebrush by herbicides, to encourage the grass to grow for the ranchers to graze their livestock. But wildlife that depended on the sagebrush began to die as a result.

Another concept was the government practice of renting out federal land very, very cheaply to ranchers to graze their livestock. At that point, the ranchers began to act as if the federal land was actually their private land that the government should just let them keep. This continues to happen today, such as the takeover of federal land by the armed Bundy family militia in late 2015. But it is nothing new. Douglas quotes an acquaintance who worked for the federal government (I presume the Bureau of Land Management) who said, “…a permittee who has the right to run sheep on public land pretty soon begins to think he owns the range. Take it away from him, or cut down on the number of sheep or cattle he can graze, or increase the rental, and he hollers as if his property has been confiscated” (page 41). Then as now, ranchers who pretend to be wild west cowboys want to take land that belongs to the taxpayers—that is, as much as to me as to them—and keep it for themselves. This is a practice that they refuse to call socialism.

Douglas was a man who hiked all over the continent. He writes of backpacking in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming; Zion National Park in Utah; Maroon Bells in Colorado; Baboquivari along the Arizona-Sonora border; Quetico Provincial Park in Canada; The Smoky Mountains; the Everglades; the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal near Washington, D. C.; and the White Mountains, Allagash, and Mt. Katahdin in the northeast United States. He was no stranger to the challenges of survival in the wild. The descriptions in this book are sometimes evocative and help you to feel like you are actually present in a place you will probably never visit. But, although I have no doubt that he saw all of these organisms, his descriptions were usually lists of plants and animals that sound like he copied them out of a guidebook. There were quite a few books of this sort published about the same time, such as The Singing Wilderness by Sigurd Olson, The Near Woods by Millard Davis, and One Day at Teton Marsh by Sally Carrighar. Douglas’s book is highly disorganized, except for each chapter being about his experience in one particular place.

What makes this book unique is the person who wrote it. Who was he? Do the black robes in this portrait give you a hint?

William O. Douglas was, throughout nearly all of the time during which he took the hikes he describes, a Supreme Court justice. He still holds the record of serving the longest on the Supreme Court, almost 37 years, from 1939 to 1975. Aside from Teddy Roosevelt shooting big animals and mistaking it for a love of nature, we have never had—and almost certainly will never again have—a prominent politician who had or will have such a passionate and thorough knowledge of the natural world. Today, with the new “conservative” (vs. conservationist) takeover, it seems that the less you know about science and nature, the more qualified you are for any office, particularly positions in which you are supervising government conservation and scientific activities. But even the few remaining liberals in government seem to think that the Earth is just a stage on which the human drama takes place. Douglas was most famous for writing the “Rights of Rocks” statement. In the Sierra Club v. Morton suit regarding the commercial development of Mineral King, just south of Sequoia National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, Douglas wrote, “Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.” That is, trees should be able to sue for their own preservation. Can you imagine any Supreme Court justice, or any other prominent politician, saying anything like this today?

Douglas considered Nature to be a holy place. Thousands of books are published with such a theme, and millions of people believe it, but none of them in such a prominent position as the one Douglas held. Just read these words: “If we make conservation a national cause we can raise generations who will learn that the earth itself is sacred. Once a person breaks through to the level where love of beauty is the ideal, he will worship the rocks and plains that are America. Then he will look on a tuft of grass with awe. For it has the secret of chlorophyll that man hardly comprehends” (page 32).

The survival of human life as we know it on Earth depends on our leaders having this kind of insight. And it will never happen.

Some more thoughts on Thoreau

Robert Sullivan wrote a book called The Thoreau You Don’t Know. In this book, Sullivan explains that the image that most people have of Henry David Thoreau is wrong. I happened to not learn much from this book, because I got my knowledge of Thoreau from reading introductions to his work written by competent historians, but I’ll bet there are many people who have very inaccurate views of what kind of person Thoreau was and what he did and for whom this book would be quite valuable.

Many people think that Thoreau went to Walden to be out in the wilderness, because he saw human society as something separate from Nature. This image is reinforced by the misquotation often associated with Thoreau, “In wilderness is the salvation of the world.” Thoreau said preservation, not salvation; and he said wildness, not wilderness. He meant, as Sullivan tells us, not wilderness away from man but wildness even within a human landscape. But when Thoreau built his shack near Walden Pond, he was not “in the wild.” The forest was actually an actively-harvested woodlot, harvested not the least by Thoreau’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the winter, ice-cutters harvested big blocks of ice. A railroad passed nearby, and railroad workers lived there. Thoreau did not project an attitude of “Just leave me alone already.” He left a second chair by the door of his shack to invite people to come and talk with him. He wrote not just about the wild things he saw, but also about the things he noticed in the railroad cut. When he wrote about his walk to Wachusett, he noted not only the plants and animals but also the gunshots and the “kine” (cattle) that he heard and saw, as they were part of the whole world around him. Thoreau was in favor of preserving some of the woods intact—but sustainably harvesting lumber from the rest. As ecologist Richard Primack points out, Thoreau wanted us to see nature even in a human-dominated landscape. Most days, Thoreau walked into town to visit his family or the Emersons. When he was in New York City, he enjoyed taking walks with Walt Whitman through the streets. He was not alone in a cabin in the woods.

Why, then, did Thoreau go out to Walden Pond and live in a shack for two years? He was conducting an experiment in how to live. What do you really need in order to be happy? A big house? Fancy furniture? In this experiment, Thoreau removed one item of civilized comfort after another; against which the life of a homeowner in Concord was the control. He compared his frugal use of firewood to the enormous amount that Emerson used. That’s why Thoreau kept track, down to the nearest half cent, how much it cost him to do this. And, even though he may not have actually been planning to write a book about his experience, he was thinking continually about publication. In this way, I believe (although Sullivan did not actually say this) you could think of Walden as the equivalent of Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man or A. J. Jacobs’s A Year of Living Biblically: to see if it could be done. At the very least, Thoreau was no misanthrope; his writing is full of humor, and some people today take it far too seriously. Thoreau was the kind of guy who today would hang out his clothes to dry and tell his too-serious environmentalist buddies that he was using a solar-powered clothes dryer. As Sullivan points out, if someone today wonders what kind of car would Thoreau drive, he would probably answer their question with a question: How do you know that your car isn’t driving you? Thoreau’s stuff is sometimes hard to make sense out of—which is perhaps the effect Thoreau intended. To make you think, rather than to give you clear instruction. In wildness is the preservation of the world? What? However you interpret this statement, you will probably be the wiser for the effort.

Sullivan also points out that we should consider that Thoreau’s time was one of social disruption in the United States. During a period of economic prosperity, people thought the banks were the ultimate pragmatic security; but the severe recessions of 1837 and 1857 (which most readers of Thoreau never heard of) disrupted this idea. Thousands of people went west. Thoreau’s friend Horace Greeley said, “Go west, young man!” Why? Because there aren’t any jobs in the east. Sullivan says the Oregon Trail was, in effect, a long unemployment line. When Thoreau said that most people were leading “lives of quiet desperation,” he might have been referring specifically to the fact that they lived from one mortgage payment to the next. Or not. Well, if the purpose of life is not to build a bank account, then what is it? This is what Thoreau wanted to find out. We need to think about this today.