You know, I never thought I would ever say this, but I’m starting to miss Andy Kerr. Ever since he left, it seems like the Oregon Natural Resources Council (ONRC), which he helped build into one of the most effective environmental organizations around, has suffered from what seems like a crippling lack of vision. In Klamath County, Oregon, where I live, the two most recent ONRC lawsuits are very disturbing to me, not so much because their stated purpose is to put many of my friends and colleagues out of business, but because they really seem to be just plain disruptive for disruption’s sake.
With Andy, you always had the sense that ONRC actions were guided by very concrete and well-defined goals, that there was always some shining prize they always kept their eyes on. Anymore, it seems as if the regional representatives just sit back, watching other stakeholders participate in admittedly tedious efforts to find equitable solutions to very complicated problems. And then, when the conclusions do not precisely coincide with ONRC demands, they file a lawsuit, claiming that they gave everybody every opportunity to submit to the pristine and irrefutable truth of ONRC positions. “What else could we do?” they ask innocently. “They just wouldn’t listen to reason.”
Random litigation may be a tried-and-true means of publicizing one’s advocacy group, but in the early days the ONRC did more than raise money. It inspired people, right or wrong, to make great sacrifices in the name of realizing a vision. Many have noted that for the most part, the source of this vision was Andy Kerr, and I think we all recall the palpable panic among sympathetic environmentalists as Andy announced his resignation. I think the main reason I miss Andy is that he possessed a kind of heedless honesty, a willingness to face head-on and sort out contradictions within his own constituency, and not just those of his enemies.
I was reminded of this recently as I read a short piece Andy wrote about cowboy music. It was called “‘Home on the Range’ is Actually an Environmental Folk Song,” and in it he confesses to the “inconsistency” of his liking cowboy music, even though he “can take or leave cowboys.” He quotes the lyrics to “Home on the Range” in their entirety, and makes the observation that this “most well-known of cowboy folk songs does not contain a single reference to cows.”
His point, of course, is that livestock production is not central to the appeal of western lifestyles and landscapes, and that eliminating livestock from the range would do nothing but enhance those characteristics that cowboys “really” valued. He ends the piece by suggesting a new verse:
Oh it will not be long ’til the livestock are gone,
And the bighorn range without fear;
When the native biotic will retake the exotic,
And the streams again will run clear.
But Andy, you came so close to getting it!
No, the song doesn’t mention cows, but as Andy himself points out, along with “wide open spaces, clean air, bright stars, birds and flowers,” cowboy music is primarily concerned with “friendship, freedom, love, honor and duty.” I would add family and history to that list, and then remind Mr. Kerr that the name of the song is “HOME on the Range.”
Now, when I think of my “home”—and I bet this is true of most folks—I don’t think of just landscapes or just animals or just occupations or just family and friends. My memories of my childhood home, not to mention my affections for my present one, are made up of an inseparable mixture of all of these things, a mixture that always comes out of my head in the form of stories—stories about certain people doing a particular set of things in very specific landscapes. Like picking grapes with Mexican “gangas” as the early morning mists slid under Stag’s Leap. Or the time the whole neighborhood turned out to chase a maniacal steer through farm and field, only to finally watch it shot and slaughtered right there on the manicured lawn of a local millionaire.
I suppose I could write a song about these things, too. And while it may never achieve “folk” status, my song would be doing the same thing for me that “Home on the Range” did for long-ago cowboys: wrap up all my experiences, sensory and otherwise, and stick them in the ground somewhere down there where I was raised, or where I am right now—down home.
What I’m talking about here—this elusive soup of landscape and community, of people and place, all kept together with a collection of shared stories—is not the sole property of cowboys, or even of agriculture. In fact, most of the best talk about these matters has come out of the environmental movement under the heading of “bioregionalism” or “sense of place.”
Which brings me back to the ONRC, since my guess is that the ONRC has reached a point in its history where it might do it some good to start shifting at least part of its efforts toward working out the real, live nuts and bolts of how human communities are supposed to draw sustenance from their respective homes. Ever since the emphasis has shifted from corporate logging and the spotted owl to farming and ranching, the ONRC seems to be stumbling over its inability to conjure up any corporate demons or alien behemoths to serve as targets for urban-environmental rage.
In Klamath County, where there simply isn’t any corporate farming or ranching to speak of, the ONRC has the monumental task of trying to convince potential supporters that a family like mine—with two little kids, living off around $15,000 a year—is the fire-breathing incarnation of industrial agriculture, responsible for heartlessly sacrificing birds and fish in the never-ending quest to satisfy our infinite and unmitigated greed. Klamath County agriculture really is just a bunch of family farms, and to its credit, even the ONRC seems to be realizing that the tactics that got this group so far on the spotted owl issue may not work so well when the only boutique species you have are cryptobiotic crust and bottom feeders.
The ONRC has recently announced the “Oregon Wild Campaign,” through which it hopes to reclaim some of the vitality that characterized the organization back even before the spotted owl came along by focusing on federal designation of wilderness areas. The public outreach segment of this campaign is the “Adopt a Wilderness” program, whereby individual supporters become “parents of place” by helping with the assessment, mapping, interpretation, monitoring, and advocacy for a particular tract of land.
The point I’d like to make about this program is that, like urban American environmentalism in general, it seems to me to be rooted more in the institutionalized separation of humans and nature than in an acknowledgment of interconnectedness and interdependence, more in unwitting assertions of human superiority than in moves toward ecological humility.
The ONRC’s promotional literature for the Oregon Wild Campaign makes use of three common metaphors in attempting to justify federal wilderness designation as the solution to our environmental ills.
First, it describes nature as a “life-support system” that provides us with “important resources” and “ecosystem services.” Human economic activity (or even social and cultural activity, if it is sedentary) constitutes a kind of suicidal wrench we are throwing in the ecological clockworks that sustain us all.
Second, nature is described as a kind of “therapy” that “rejuvenates our spirit” and provides us with “the simple pleasures of human-powered recreation.” Of course, nature has not always been seen this way. Early in this continent’s Euro-American history, people celebrated the “City Upon a Hill” as a haven from the dark and dangerous wild without. But then sometime during the nineteenth century, those cozy little cities became stinky, poisonous, violent, and noisy industrial monsters, and all of a sudden it was the “wildness of nature” that seemed more like a haven. The important point here is that, for Euro-Americans, the world has always been split into “civilization” and “nature,” and that what we now call “environmentalism” was made possible by simply sliding nature from the bad to the good side of the split.
Finally, nature is described as a kind of “citizen” whose value should have nothing to do with its usefulness to human beings, as one of many competing “interests” with all the rights that citizenship grants (but not, you’ll notice, any of the responsibilities). “We’ve done pretty well including humans in our moral contracts,” proponents argue; “now it’s time to include nature.”
All three of these metaphors, while they seem on the surface to be promoting greater respect for nature, rely heavily on the classically Euro-American separation of human communities and the ecosystems in which they are embedded. The first two make it very clear: Nature is a “resource,” a pool of stuff “out there” that can help us with our own physical, emotional, and spiritual health. The third, while it disassociates the value of nature from human needs, it also pits human communities and nature against each other in a Hobbesian legal struggle of all against all. Worse yet, it seems to be saying to nature, “We realize that the concept of rights has not occurred to you, or that you have found no use for it, but we have concluded that it is in your best interest, so we are going to force it on you.”
In the case of the ONRC’s Oregon Wild Campaign, the connection between its particular brand of nature appreciation and the traditional American segregation of civilization and nature is just too blatant to ignore. How else could the ONRC see a solution to the problem of “mankind’s alienation from nature” in the bureaucratic designation of wilderness areas? How else could it see the systematic exclusion of human communities from certain landscapes as the only way to foster a sense of respect for those landscapes?
The ONRC is able to come to these conclusions because, frankly, its members live in cities and suburbs, where the suppression of wildness is so basic that even they don’t notice how thoroughly it influences their lifestyles. Whether or not they like to think so, they have bracketed off their own lifestyles—relentless wonderlands of technological artifice and corporate insinuation—as the “norm,” as the only possible way for humans to live in this day and age. They reluctantly resign themselves to the fact that their own “places” are sort of industrial sacrifice areas, beyond hope. They recognize that the human animal needs a closer connection with nature than urban life provides, so they resolve to make sure there is some wilderness out there “somewhere.”
But even for those hapless urbanites sitting at computers on the fourteenth floor, there is wilderness all around them and, for that matter, all through them. Somewhere fourteen floors down is some dirt; and mixed in with that is the residue of the plants and animals and human communities that that dirt used to support. Somewhere under that asphalt you drive home on are biota frozen since the machines rolled over, some seeds waiting for sunshine. And I suppose we all know that one of these days they’ll get what they’re waiting for.
What I’m trying to say is that it’s just plain lazy to think of nature or wilderness as something that exists only somewhere else. Yes, you urban folks have done a much better job mangling native landscapes than we rural folks have, but I guess I don’t see that as a good reason to write them off, spending all your time and effort trying to preserve distant landscapes, just so you can go there once in a while and remind yourself how far gone your own home is.
There’s that word again: home. That shimmering mist of people and place all drawn together by shared stories. You have it there, in the cities and suburbs, whether you see it or not. Nature, “untrammeled by man,” is under your feet, over your head, and bubbling all through your hearts and minds, but for all the reasons we’ve talked about, you feel the need to find it elsewhere.
I suppose it is possible to “love” a federally designated wilderness area, but as seems clear from the Adopt a Wilderness program, it will be the condescending love of a parent for a child. Or it will be a kind of puppy love that focuses on the “simple pleasures,” rather on than a living, breathing grownup love that keeps front and center the fact that, as Gary Snyder put it, “there is no death that is not somebody’s food, and no life that is not somebody’s death.” It’s a good bet whoever wrote “Home on the Range” way back when lived this truth every day of his life.
A federally designated wilderness area can never be home to anybody—any human being, anyway. I realize that’s the point, but I guess it just feels like we’re faking it. In Klamath County, some farmers and ranchers have recently established a watershed council, and one of the ways we describe the work we do is simply “good housekeeping.” We do this work not to save the Earth, and not to feed the world, but for the same reason we do our dishes, sweep the floor, mow the lawn, and dust our Bibles. We live here, and we need to keep things in good working order. It’s our home, and we tend to it. This landscape of ours is the here and now that tells of generations of shared history, and every time someone says to someone else, “Remember when that happened there?” our local communities settle a little bit more into place.
There’s that other word: place. I think it’s the same thing as home. And I guess I’m suggesting to members of the ONRC that rather than being “parents of place,” consider being married to it; that instead of neglecting your own homes for the sake of occasional casual affairs with some distant landscape, give yourself up to your own landscapes “for better and for worse.” Instead of mapping potential wilderness sites, start mapping the landscapes where you live, and instead of interpreting data, start interpreting the stories and histories that connect you to your home and to the people with whom you live and love.
I read an amusing account of the 1993 Land, Air, Water Conference in Eugene. It was included in “A New Challenge: Overcoming Green Sexism,” an article written by some ONRC staff members. The authors recount that “while the organizers did include a committee on sexism, the conference was disrupted by a group of Native American drummers protesting the all-white makeup of the televised keynote panel.” Now, I don’t mean to disrespect the histories of either women or Native Americans, but I couldn’t help but be reminded of Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, in which the Judean People’s Front, the People’s Front of Judea, and the Front for Judean People argue bitterly over who are the more oppressed. The solution they come up with is, of course, to call another meeting immediately.
My point is that environmentalists seem to spend as much time and energy fighting each other as they do trying to save nature, and I would argue that this is because they are struggling for representation in an abstraction rather than working for a good life on the land. If you let it, the land will take hold of you, and the things that happen there will become stories that will bring you together.
Jim Corbett, a rancher in the Southwest who helped smuggle El Salvadorans into the United States during the 1980s, spoke to this in Sharman Apt Russell’s unfortunately titled book Kill the Cowboy: “Today, the environmental movement has all sorts of different agendas pulling people in different ways. . . . Just as heedlessly as industrial civilization displaces untamed biotic communities, it is burning its bridges with livelihoods that are rooted in humanity’s pre-industrial relations with the land. Keeping our options open by preserving these livelihoods is a matter of ecological wisdom, not just an exercise in nostalgia.” Russell herself points out that “a very, very good rancher can out-environmental the environmentalists every time.”
Aldo Leopold, whom the ONRC is fond of quoting when promoting wilderness designation, argued that “the first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.” He also claimed that
Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of the land. Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen and innumerable physical gadgets. . . . Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a “scenic” area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has “outgrown.”
We farmers and ranchers would like to keep our land and our people the way we would keep wearing an old shirt, or the way we feed a good horse years after it’s quit making money for us. And I wish the ONRC would start seeing us as people it could learn from rather than enemies to be conquered. And if the ONRC must be everywhere all the time, how about working with us instead of against us?
The ONRC also loves to quote the last paragraph of Wallace Stegner’s “wilderness letter,” in which he calls wilderness “the geography of hope.” But I’ve noticed the ONRC always forgets about the paragraph before that, in which Stegner says he has seen enough range cattle to recognize them as wild animals; and the people who herd them have, in the wilderness context, the dignity of rareness; they belong on the frontier, moreover, and have the look of rightness. The invasion they make on the virgin country is a sort of invasion that is as old as Neanderthal man, and they can, in moderation, even emphasize a man’s feeling of belonging to the natural world.
So lighten up on us cowfolk for a while, and see what we can do when we put our minds to it.