Several years ago, with my son and some friends, I hiked across southern England on a trail called the South Downs Way. The path traversed both private and public land, most of it open high meadows from which we looked onto rolling hills, forests, and farms. It seemed idyllic to me. But in the villages and pubs along the way, the people with whom I talked commented that the downs were much diminished. After expressing amazement that we were walking ten days to a place we might easily reach by car in one, they would set down their pints, wipe the foam from their upper lips, and shake their heads ruefully. “Ah yes, the downs aren’t what they were, ya know.”
In their memory, the downs had always been grazing land, but now much of it was under the plow. This lament was so commonplace that though the countryside continued to look quaint and lush to me, I felt disquieted by the sense that I might be among the last who could enjoy it, and that I wasn’t likely to be able to repeat the experience a few years later.
I carried this sadness along as palpably as the pack on my back until we reached Chichester and the South Downs Museum. There I studied a diorama of the downs depicting the uses to which the land had been put since the fourteenth century. What struck me was the fact that for the past six centuries the nature of the downs had never remained unaltered for more than fifty years. In succession, the land had been forest, grazing pastures, and cultivated fields. I realized then that what the villagers had been lamenting wasn’t necessarily the beginning of the end for the downs but rather its latest transformation.
Once I studied some photographs taken around 1920 of the farmland and forests of western Michigan, where I grew up. I’d recognize a particular hill in relation to the captioned lake, or a unique bend in a certain road. Though I knew what these places looked like in my boyhood, there was something oddly remote about them in those sepia photographs. Finally it occurred to me that the landscapes looked unfamiliar because in 1920 there were no trees. The forested hillsides and lake shores I’d believed to be ancient sanctuaries of wild beauty had been stripped bare only twenty years before my birth. How much more “natural” the land appeared to me today, softened by dense growths of pine, maple, hemlock, beech, and oak.
I’m fairly certain my great-great-grandfather, who came to Michigan in the 1840s to establish a tanning business, didn’t give much thought to stewardship of the land and would have had little cause to do so. The sparseness of human population by itself insured the abundance of the land. Yet the journal of one of his sons suggests that my great-great-grandfather was an anomaly among the settlers of his generation, in that he loved huge trees and apparently hugged them and exclaimed over their size and beauty. It wasn’t an altogether pure love, of course; he depended on hemlock and tamarack bark for the tannic acid he used in curing hides. And since he was an industrious man, already involved in harvesting trees for their chemical properties, he also founded a lumber mill.
Sometimes our love of a place, coupled with our human impulse to share that love, contributes to the erosion of what it was we most loved about it. Twenty-two years ago I discovered Key West, and it soon became my second hometown. It was like no other place I’d ever been. Its history as a haven for pirates and salvagers lent it an aura of mystery and danger. A decade or two earlier it had harbored a community of artists and writers, drawn by its simultaneous remoteness and accessibility. No one stumbled upon it passing through. At the very end of America, it was a foreign country for which you needed no visa. Its main features were a naval base, a shrimping industry, a dedicated cadre of sport fishermen, and little to offer vacationers in the way of elegant accommodations, good restaurants, or bathing beaches.
But writers write out of their enthusiasms, and inevitably we sang the praises of Key West in our stories. Hordes of vacationers and those in search of the “last good place” responded, developers swooped in to accommodate them, and property values and prices soared so high that many of the natives could no longer afford to live there. Now Key West isn’t what it used to be — but what is?
Each of us wants to be the last one allowed into paradise and to be able to lock the door behind us. But there is no door. My own love of the natural world was kindled largely by my early reading of Thoreau. Have my many trips to enjoy nature — from a simple walk in the woods near my house to dozens of expeditions to wild places, not to mention the resources consumed along the way — contributed to the demise of what I was seeking? And is it Thoreau’s fault, since he encouraged me?
I need to know there is wildness, even if I were never to see it. I need to know there are wolves, bears, and sharks sharing this world, and not just chickadees (though I love chickadees, too). But though I prefer those places touched only lightly by human influence, I love storied places too, where human life and the landscape have struggled and reached a harmony of sorts. “The story of any country,” Willa Cather wrote, “begins in the heart of a man or a woman.” I love wormy old barns and stone walls built from the rocks of the fields they enclose. And I love wild places not only because they are wild but because they call forth some vital aspect of my mind when I look on them, or even when I reflect on them amid the turmoil of everyday life.
But I can’t escape the fact that I’m a human being, and that my presence alters, however subtly, the environment I enter. I need to be careful not to translate my affinity for nature into a belief that I own a more compelling right of access to it than other people, even if they happen to work for the paper company or the mining company I perceive as a threat to the natural world.
In Buddhism the bodhisattva, the awakened being, subordinates his or her desire for personal enlightenment to help all others achieve realization first. And this, it seems to me, is a reflection of our present mission on earth. “Here,” we might say, “let me care for this meadow, and if it is attended to so that you may enjoy it, then I may enjoy it too.” We can’t take whatever we think is good about our world and keep it inviolate for ourselves. Cut off from the sustenance of its surroundings, its greater context, it would wither like a small, isolated truth to which we’ve clung too tightly.
So when I ask how to care for nature, I come back to the question of what nature is. My answer is this: nature is our experience of a consciousness in the world itself, uncircumscribed by conventional thought, liberated, as Frederick Turner puts it, from “the vicious circle of expectations governing perceptions which in turn confirm expectations.” Nature is more than just a place free of human domination (though it may be that, too). We can take ourselves to the wildest reaches of the world, but if we don’t leave our everyday concerns behind, our concerns and not nature are what we will experience.
Often when I walk into the hills surrounding my house, I discover after twenty minutes or so that I have taken the house with me — the unanswered letters and telephone calls, the windows that need caulking, the slights I suffered last week, the things I should have said but didn’t, and the things I plan to say next week but probably won’t. My feet have been taking a walk without me. Words like ground squirrel, cinquefoil, osprey, and dove flit across my consciousness in response to my surroundings, but I don’t see them. It doesn’t matter whether the ground I’m walking over is cultivated alfalfa or wild knapweed, whether the trees are virgin or second growth. If I am not aware of them, not conscious of their consciousness, nature doesn’t exist for me, though I may be walking in the wilds of Tierra del Fuego. Nature is the great emptiness, the source out of which our culture comes, and in order for us not to lose sight of this it is vital that wildness be preserved for its own sake, which is to say, for our sakes.
This essay originally appeared in a slightly different form in the anthology Sacred Trusts (Mercury House, 1993).
— Ed.
