I’M VERY GLAD, of course, that Laura and Guy Waterman’s fine book has emerged in a new edition, one suitable for the new earth we inhabit.
It should be said up-front that we have failed—as a species, as a civilization—most of the ethical tests set for us in the larger, frontwoods world. Simply by continuing to pour carbon into the atmosphere, we have turned the oceans 30 percent more acidic, melted much of the planet’s ice, and made its weather far more extreme (do not camp beneath that large pine bough—the fact that it’s been there for half a century does not guarantee it will last the night, given that the storms on our new planet are manifestly nastier). Some have tried—a little and around the edges—to limit their impact on the earth, but taken as a whole we’ve shown very little conscientiousness.
You might take this as license to trash your campsite, or at least build a big, honking blaze: What, after all, is a bit more carbon? But think instead of the way in which you’ve been granted a microcosm of the planet for a night. Here you are, in a place more lightly touched by humans than most other places. For a night, you are its steward. See what it takes to nurture and protect it; see what sacrifices of immediate ease and comfort you’re willing to make.
The payoff for conscientiousness, as I wrote in the original edition of this book, will be connection. You’ll have an opportunity to actually fit in with a place, to feel its tempo, to sense what it’s like without your overwhelming presence. At this late date, along with the possibly hopeless job of slowing down the destruction, our work as humans involves bearing witness. Part of that task is simply bearing witness to the beauty of the earth (and how much easier to observe this if you haven’t built that bonfire). However, we must also bear witness to our own possibility of lightness and grace, to remind ourselves, if only for a few nights, that there is nothing inevitable about the ways we currently inhabit the earth.
If you come out of the woods convinced of that truth, then perhaps you will participate in the building movement to prevent more destruction. In which case, the ethics of the backwoods will have helped preserve not only the few square meters of your campsite, but also every cubic meter of the atmosphere on which we and all else depend. Change can come, but it must start somewhere, and deep in the wild is as good a place as any!