Even Wilderness is Not Safe

Even in wilderness, one can’t escape civilization. In the predawn, as I lie in my sleeping bag, a plane flies overhead, making two passes over the heart of a wild alpine preserve.

Places like this are defended by paper laws and small groups of rangers - and by the remote, rugged character of the land. By and large, roadless areas are those which are undesirable or impossible to have built roads within. The havens of biodiversity, river valleys and lush flatlands, have long since been paved and turned into cities, plowed and made into fields, cut and transformed into timberlands.

What is left is a remnant of a remnant. Biodiversity collapse and collapse of ecology is not a future scenario. It’s a world we live inside every day. More and more people walk the planet every day — population is projected to reach 8 billion in less than three weeks.

And there are fewer and fewer birds, trees, bears, lions, tigers, meadows, coral reefs. There is only one earth, only so much space, so much soil, so much water. And each year, more plastic, more pesticides, more more more.

Thoughtlessly, living from week to week and year to year, we squander and despoil what is here. And above my head in the great heart of the cascades, the glaciers cling to their headwalls, cold refugia, shrinking every year.

In wilderness is a glimpse of what came before, of our true birthright. It is a journey into the way everywhere used to be. But even here, the world is not safe, for boundaries on a map do not stop the pollution of a culture run amok or the minds fueling it.

Do not go to the wilderness heedlessly. Do not come here thinking only of beauty and timelessness. Come here and compare this to your cities, your factories, your fields, and know that that land was once lush as this is. Know that these small havens are not enough, and that the wild needs warriors, just as it always has and always will. The heartbeat of the wild earth beats in your veins, o you being of stone and flesh.

You are the waters of this earth, conscious, risen, stabilized by bones and skin made of the stuff of this world. And you have a sacred duty to fulfill.