In high school, once I’d ended my epoch of sprouts, I found a new preoccupation in an environmental club. Though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, it was a logical progression: After losing faith in nature to serve human health, I turned to the one field in which it still seemed self-evident that nature was in the right.
My discontent with environmentalism, however, had already been simmering. The entire endeavor seemed long on talk and short on action. A series of teachers had done their part, screening documentary horror films about the destruction of the planet. But evangelical movies weren’t helpful for those of us who were already convinced. When teachers did suggest token measures, they were so obviously inadequate that, even to an idealistic teenager, they appeared condescending and ridiculous. I still find it fundamentally unfair for a teacher to show children images of the rainforest’s cathedral groves burning or fishermen butchering a foundering population of whales, and then turn to the rows of stricken faces and instruct them to make dioramas about recycling. My generation was bequeathed ecological anxiety, but not the tools to change anything. Some of my friends grew prematurely jaded and started dropping their Twinkies wrappers on the field during recess.
All this was especially upsetting for me, because in my mind, my health and happiness were inextricably bound up with a misty conception of environmental purity. But the best thing I could do for nature, I was learning, was stay out of it. When human touch can only spread ugliness and decay, the role for a young environmentalist grows claustrophobically narrow. His only course of action is to restrain people, pick up their snack wrappers, and find ways to soften their casual destruction. He is reduced to a scold, forever battling humanity’s sprawling exuberance.
By the time I joined the environmental club, I’d decided that the real problem was not people’s penchant for casual pollution, but people themselves—humanity in its totality. The only solutions to that problem were desperate ones: We would have to be forced, en masse, out of the technological incubator that fed, clothed, and protected us; or, if not that, dramatically reduced in our number. I saw, in our little group of misfits, the beginnings of a campaign for the end of civilization.
The club was led by a tall and handsomely gaunt vegan with a Mohawk. The other members were either similarly decorated in piercings and safety pin-armored fatigues, or in beads and embroidered peasant blouses. We gathered after school on a patch of grass at the end of the English wing to deliberate over international treaties, the superiority of Marxism versus Buddhism, the carbon footprint of condoms, and the ethics of whale adoption.
I looked up to Mohawk—it was exciting to have a leader through whom I might channel my ecological anxiety. He handed out scraps of printed propaganda and suggested that we post copies around school, which I did dutifully. But a creeping sense of futility accompanied this labor as it dawned on me that, at best, I would only create more people like myself: angry but impotent. Finally, after months of meetings, Mohawk announced that we were going to do something to change the facts on the ground. Something that would transform us from passive consumers to righteous shapers of destiny. We were moving into action.
The demonstration would be in the desert at the southeastern edge of California, a 12-hour drive from Nevada City. I strained to hear the explanation of what we were protesting above Ani DiFranco’s rage, which was being expressed at high decibels from the speakers of the sport-utility vehicle a club member had borrowed from her mom. We were headed for Ward Valley—a place sacred to Native Americans and home to the endangered desert tortoise, just 15 miles from the Colorado River—to stop the nuclear industry from dumping tons of radioactive waste in shallow, unlined trenches.
I don’t know what I had been expecting to see when I arrived—flowering cacti perhaps, or graceful rock formations, or maybe a glimpse of a desert fox atop a boulder—whatever it was, it wasn’t waiting for me in Ward Valley. Instead, we drove into a flat, unremittingly ugly landscape of low brush beneath high-tension power lines, a haze of dust, and a punishing sun. A man with a missing tooth and blond dreadlocks waved our SUV into a parking area and pointed out where we might lay our sleeping bags that night. The people milling around the encampment were dressed like us in the unofficial but immediately recognizable mufti of the millennial nomad. I was among my kind, I thought, the bright new lights of the next rebellion.
Two large military surplus tents were set up at the center of the encampment to serve as temporary meeting rooms. I would spend much of my daylight deployment in Ward Valley beneath these canvas roofs, thankful to be in the only shade for miles in any direction. The lectures given in those tents were designed to hone the activist’s edge. But over-education can also blunt that edge, and the more I listened the more out of place I felt. For instance, the speakers sneered at the government’s temerity in suggesting that a radioactive waste dump would actually help the desert tortoise. But then they went on to explain that biologists had come to this conclusion after accounting for mitigations funded by the dump: roadside fences (to prevent roadkill, the most common cause of tortoise demise), new underpasses to allow wildlife corridors beneath the highway, and an area of high-quality tortoise habitat to be set aside elsewhere. The more detail the educators gave, the more reasonable the government naturalists actually seemed. Ditto for the plans to bury nuclear waste so near the Colorado River. The waste, it turned out, wouldn’t be glow-in-the-dark goop, but more mundane materials: uniforms worn in the plants, irradiated wrenches, and concrete from old reactors. Still, if water carrying radioactive isotopes from this garbage began to pool, there were a number of underground faults through which it might find its way down to the water table, and perhaps eventually to the river, though geologists said this was unlikely given the valley’s lack of rainfall. I began to speculate about the geology beneath labs and power plants scattered all across the United States, where the waste was currently accumulating. There are fractures everywhere, and surely few of these sites could be as hot and dry as the one where I was sitting. By the end of the first day, the people perpetrating this presumptive evil, which I had so blithely supposed I would fight, were looking more like beleaguered public servants than demons.
After the sun’s heat faded into an orangey miasma, I picked my way out through the sage hoping I might find some tortoise tracks, some flowers, or frankly anything redemptive about this place. When I brought my eyes close to the ground to examine my surroundings in detail, I could see that there were tracks everywhere, but not the type I had hoped to find. I identified instead several species of tire tread. Many of the sage bushes had been beaten down to nubs by their passing. There were decaying plastic bags and a McDonald’s cup tangled in the creosote bushes, but I found no sign of animal life.
When I returned to the encampment, a man with a mass of hair tucked into a pendulous crocheted Rasta hat handed me a plate and glopped big spoonfuls of something brown on top. I said thanks, and he winked at me. The food was filling and it was free. Sitting there, eating with my fellow activists, I felt the tide of queasy uncertainty that had risen in my stomach during the lectures begin to subside. When the girl eating beside me struck up a conversation, I made a somewhat incoherent plea for help, hoping she might reel me back into the comfortable self-assurance I’d felt on the ride down.
“I don’t know,” I concluded lamely. “It just seems less clear than I’d thought.”
She stared at me. “It seems pretty clear to me, man. Radioactive-waste dumps are bad. I don’t have to think too hard about that one.”
I winced. A woman sitting immediately to her right, however, offered an argument that I could understand: “There’s not that much of nature left. If they really have to build this dump, they should do it in a strip mall.”
This made perfect sense to me. If you are prepared to give nature some ethical standing (and I was), it is inarguably more just for the estate of civilization to swallow its own waste than to dump it on the estate of wilderness. But there seemed little chance that, aside from a small group of conscientious environmentalists, people were ready to make sacrifices in the name of justice. I laid out my sleeping bag that night envisioning a caper in which radicals surreptitiously piped spent uranium into a strip-mall Burger King. Maybe, I thought dismally, the best hope for the world would be for all our environmental efforts to fail spectacularly, and for my turtle-strangling, baby-seal-clubbing, clear-cutting, radioactive-waste-producing species to collapse on its own trash heap.
In the end, no law-enforcement officials or nuclear energy executives would dignify our protest with their attention. I’d driven the length of the state to stand in this dusty scrap of desert and shout, “Stop!” but instead of saving the environment, I’d somehow ended up at a self-congratulatory rave. On the drive home I sat in the back, searching for a way past my sense of futility as my friends joked and flirted.
The government eventually decided against building the dump, though it was populist fears about radiation in the drinking water, rather than any noble effort to aid wilderness and tortoises, that tipped the balance. Self-serving desires would, it seemed, always outweigh justice. But after this experience I began to wonder if there was some way that the selfish aims of civilization could mesh with the aims of environmentalism.
I had assumed that civilization and nature were, by definition, in conflict, an assumption that had its roots in a tradition of environmentalist thought that goes back through John Muir to Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The conflict is absolute. Civilization plunders nature. Nature withers where civilization plants its foot, though perhaps—as mushrooms buckle asphalt and jungles blanket fallen monuments—nature is destined to recover its territory. The point is that the two are like oil (spilling from a crippled tanker, perhaps) and water: Civilization and nature can’t occupy the same place at the same time. The besieged grandeur we learned about in school was grand precisely because it was so remote, both uncorrupted by civilization and awesome in its strangeness. This vision of nature was so big, and so distant, that it strained the mind to imagine how we might help.
But what if this assumption of opposition is wrong? Instead of framing the problem as a desperate battle to rescue the last bits of nature from mankind, environmentalism could simply be defined as the effort to improve the neighborhood—to make the earth a better place for civilization. After all, though environmentalism sometimes presents itself as an ethic of self-denial, it’s still anthropocentric: We don’t protest for slime mold habitat and the rights of viruses—instead we protect the places and species that humans find meaningful, beautiful, or useful. Crucially, if the fundamental goal of environmentalism were to serve people—rather than to constrain, corral, and chide them—it would be much more likely to succeed.
I doubt that either Emerson or Thoreau would have approved of erasing the dividing line between nature and civilization. The qualities of nature that they loved—its purity, its quiet—depended on this division. The transcendentalists wanted people to go out into the woods and be moved by nature (as Emerson put it, “To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.”) but they didn’t want people to stick around in nature and build houses. The transcendentalists gave wonderful advice for weekend mountaineers and off-hours stargazers, but were silent on how to be an environmentalist from 9 to 5, while sustaining oneself. Thoreau tried growing food at Walden Pond, but eventually decided his gardening was an unacceptable corruption. Instead, he carried his food in from town—the uncultivated wilderness he celebrated required the corruption he disdained elsewhere. And this approach was mirrored in environmental policy: Each park or wilderness implied more intensive use of land in its shadow.
The transcendentalists, the romantics, and just about every nature writer in the English language appreciated wilderness for its power to affect people. When they expressed any sentiment about the reverse—about people affecting nature—it was usually dismay. Perhaps this is why my youthful lessons about environmentalism were so freighted with dire warnings, and so light on practical advice. The only doing that the philosophical tradition allowed in nature was the undoing of another human action. The idea that humans acting on pristine nature might improve it was anathema.
The problem, as I found when I began thinking about my own environmentalism, is that people can’t help but influence nature. It’s vitally important that we develop some credo for acting on nature because, as the human population has grown, it’s become inescapably clear that the wall between wilderness and civilization is illusory. Nature thrives within our cities, our homes, and our bodies. Every one of civilization’s burps and sneezes troubles the remotest wilderness. Civilization and nature are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are inextricable.
All this philosophizing may look like splitting hairs. As I write I’m all too aware that what I’m doing here is uncomfortably similar to what my environmental club was doing behind the English wing. But there’s a good reason for that: I think that in those embarrassingly unsophisticated bull sessions we were actually at the beginning—okay, the very beginning—of the right path. Thinking isn’t as satisfying as action, but it’s more important, since action without thoughtful direction tends to be expensive, counterproductive, and maddeningly frustrating. Our environmental failures, I suspect, are really philosophical failures. In the 1990s ecologist Daniel Botkin wrote that his fellow scientists—driven by an unexamined vision of nature as a fragile machine that must be protected—made one bad decision after another. He’d noticed this in the Tsavo National Park, in Kenya, where park managers had so successfully protected elephants from poachers that their population boomed. The elephants then devoured most of the park’s trees and brush, until the landscape resembled a desert. When a serious drought hit in 1970, six thousand elephants died. Botkin wrote: “The potential for us to make progress with environmental issues is limited by the basic assumptions that we make about nature, the unspoken, often unrecognized perspective from which we view our environment.” If there is any hope of dealing with our global environmental crisis, he observed, we must first “break free of old assumptions and old myths about nature and ourselves.”
Our current state of ecological confusion has a lot to do with the lack of a philosophical tradition that shows us not just how to be in nature, but how to be a functional part of it. By the time I began this book I was ready to abandon my old environmental ideology in exchange for some other guiding credo—one that actually had a chance of making things better. And so I began my search for humanity’s place in the world.
It’s possible, of course, that there is a place for civilization in nature only if we allow ourselves to submit to nature’s laws. This is the idea most compatible with the traditional split between humanity and nature: We are allowed back in nature only when we somehow become natural ourselves.
There’s a whole school of thought built around the idea that humanity took a turn down the wrong path when we first began controlling the environment through agriculture. The argument goes like this: First, farmers subverted nature’s plan for a piece of land by placing it under technological control. Next, these ancient agronomists had to defend their crops—creating private property for the first time. As some accumulated more than others, property gave rise to hierarchy, which in turn led to the oppression of the weak. The higher population densities allowed by agriculture also provided breeding grounds for disease, and inevitable competition between swelling tribes led to conflict. In sum, agriculture (cum corruption of the natural order) was the cause of poverty, plague, war, and slavery. It’s a Genesis-like creation story, in which human pursuit of technological control upsets Edenic harmony. But perhaps it’s only Genesis-lite, because there’s a road back to Eden: If humanity is able to surrender our and desire for control, we could become pristine.
Supposing we accepted this idea of giving up all technology, including agriculture, and went back to nature—would nature accept us? That is, if we gave up our sloppy attempts at control, would the environment revert to some nurturing Eden?
The forests of my youth offer a case study in the power of technology to upset the organic order, and the power of nature to restore it. Nevada City is the heart of California’s Mother Lode, and in the mid-1800s the land swarmed with prospectors bent on skinning the earth and turning it inside out. The pictures of the town during the 19th-century California gold rush show a landscape denuded of forest except for a few scattered pines, looking skinny and knock-kneed. The lumber had gone to build cabins, rock-crushing machines, mineshaft stays, and mile upon mile of wooden aqueducts. These flumes still stand: Their crisscrossing timbers leap over gorges and snake along the contour lines. They, more than any other gold-rush technology, blighted the ecosystem because, besides gobbling up forests, they powered water cannons that could wash away mountains. The combination of hydraulic mining and erosion from clear-cut slopes filled the San Francisco Bay with sediment (to this day most of the bay is less than 10 feet deep at low tide). Sacramento was inundated with so much mud that workers gave up the excavation and rebuilt so that the old city blocks lie buried beneath the new ones. Entire hillsides were slumping down rivers.
It’s hard to imagine a more thorough disruption of an environment; yet—once the gold was gone and the miners had disappeared—nature bounced back. When I got to Nevada City a century later, the population within city limits had fallen from its peak of 10,000 to 2,500, and the hills were thick with trees. I could see the stages of recovery in places touched more recently by humans: An area that had been cleared down to the orange subsoil would be covered in blackberry brambles and thousands of manzanita sprigs within a year. These stabilized the ground and blanketed the soil in a layer of leaf litter. Meanwhile, a crop of ponderosa pines would shoot up, outstripping the lower shrubs. Animals and insects took part in this terraforming as the pines rose: Birds and rodents carried in seeds, beetles and fungi worked leaf mulch into the soil, and predators (coyotes, hawks, spiders) arrived to regulate populations. Finally, shade-tolerant trees, like white fir and incense cedar, would rise beneath the ponderosas. Hardwoods—California bay laurel, perfuming the forest; silky-skinned madrone; and big leaf maple—would find their way into the margins and fill in the gaps as pines fell. Dogwood and buckeye would flower at eye level. One set of species subtly altered the soil chemistry, the rate of erosion, the moisture levels, until conditions were right for the next. As a boy, I learned that ultimately this process of succession led to—in ecology lingo—a climax community: a jouissance of biodiversity, each species playing its part, sustaining itself in perfect balance.
Today, the rivers that were choked with mud during the gold rush run blue over polished white granite. The forest that starts above the high-water scour line sponges up winter storms then seeps water into creeks throughout the dry season. People walk through this forest every day on a track just outside Nevada City, called Independence Trail, which runs along the canyon wall above the South Fork of the Yuba River. The trail follows a hydraulic mining flume, an instrument of destruction repurposed as an instrument of appreciation. The air is cooler there in the summer, and in the fall newts plod onto the track and stare at passersby with a comically self-serious mien. It feels good: Step into this wood and you trade the messiness, the arguments, and the politicking of civilization for the order, the balance, the self-sustaining health of nature’s law. The fact that nature could take a man-made wasteland and—through this intricate process—transform it into something beautiful seemed evidence enough of its wisdom. But that was before I started talking to the people who study this sort of thing.
When I began chatting with academics and naturalists, they were able to speak in general about succession and climax communities, but none of them had expertise in the forests around Nevada City. Several suggested contacting Yuba Watershed Institute, which turned out to be organized (in part) by the parents of my friends from high school—artisans and writers from the Ridge. I spent a few pleasant evenings dialing once-memorized phone numbers and catching up. But these old friends passed the buck: The person I needed to talk to, they said, was Don Harkin. He knew more about the forest than anyone else; he had been trained at the Yale School of Forestry and spent nearly every day walking through the woods, taking measurements, and observing the changes from year to year. They also cautioned that Harkin was a difficult fellow. He was mostly deaf, lived in a cabin without electricity or refrigeration, and generally refused to answer questions directly.
I left messages for Harkin. He ignored them. Every three days or so I would call again. Eventually he realized I wasn’t going to quit and called back, addressing me with gruff displeasure, as if I’d interrupted his hibernation. He’d stopped doing interviews with journalists, he said, because they never thought for themselves.
“I could tell you that the forest should be managed one way or another, but you’d have no way of assessing that information,” he growled. “You’d have to make a faith-based decision to either trust me or not.”
The only way I could learn about the forest, he said, was to spend a decade or two living in it. Harkin only softened when I explained that I had lived in it, that I had grown up in Nevada City, playing among the trees. Eventually, he agreed to at least entertain a few of my questions, but on some other occasion. It was getting late, he said, and he liked to be in bed by 9 p.m. And so began a series of conversations over the telephone. When next we spoke I started to ask Harkin to detail for me the stages of natural recovery around Nevada City, but he cut me off.
“You’re talking about succession,” he said. “So you will be familiar with Clements.”
I admitted I was not.
“Frederic Clements, University of Nebraska. It’s a very old idea, turn of the century. I suppose there is still some validity to it in certain limited areas.” Then he reeled off a list of citations from ecology and forestry journals.
As we talked, I learned that I’d glossed over a lot of important details in constructing my story of forest succession. First, it turns out that there’s not any one inevitable climax forest for any particular piece of land. Instead of succession proceeding inexorably toward a predetermined goal, it’s more like a choose-your-own-adventure with many possible endings. Harkin reminded me of half a dozen examples of places where succession has stalled: creeks smothered in blackberries, hillsides dominated for decades by dense stands of manzanita, and land that had never recovered from the mining—like Malakoff Diggins on the Ridge, where the water cannons cut so deeply into the earth that it still looks as if an acre of southern Utah was dropped incongruously into the middle of the pine forest. For Harkin, as he walked through groves year after year, it became clear that there are so many variables affecting any given plot of land that the principles of succession were only a rough guide to predict the patterns of growth.
Also, succession doesn’t always lead to what we’d think of as richer, more majestic landscapes, he said. Occasionally, the process can create a profusion of life, a moment of peak biomass, but then proceed on to something lesser. In Alaska, for example, you can walk through a century of succession by hiking from the base of certain glaciers into the land they once covered: You’d first encounter alders (quickly thickening into a near-impassible tangle), which add nitrogen to the soil and allow (a little farther on) spruce trees to grow. But as these conifers replaced the alders, they’d mine nitrogen from the ground. As you walked you’d soon notice you were stepping over many decaying spruce trunks and, eventually, you would find yourself squishing through a mossy sphagnum bog too acidic for trees. While succession is real, it’s too unpredictable to serve as evidence that nature is purposeful.
My second problem was that the very idea of a climax forest made Harkin uncomfortable. Forests don’t ever stop changing, he told me. Fires sweep through, rainfall patterns shift, climates change, and new species muscle their way into the mix. My conception of nature in equipoise seemed to be flatly wrong. Even in a well-protected environment, populations spike and crash. Trees still compete for sunlight and water. If one species can gain an edge on its fellows, perhaps through some evolutionary innovation in seed design, it will gradually transform the forest.
Daniel Botkin likes to use the example of Hutcheson Memorial Forest, in New Jersey, to illustrate the same point: In 1954, when an oil company helped Rutgers University buy these 65 acres of old-growth forest, the company announced its charity in advertisements, bragging:
“[N]ature has been working thousands of years to perfect this ‘climax’ community in which trees, plants, animals, and all the creatures of the forest have reached a state of harmonious balance with their environment. Left undisturbed, this stabilized society will continue to perpetuate itself century after century.”
But as scientists watched, sugar maples began to replace the dominant oaks and hickory, the once park-like woods grew crowded with shrubs, and exotic species like Norway maple and Japanese honeysuckle muscled their way into the mix. Life is forever moving. Edenic stasis is achieved only in death.
The third complication, and the coup de grace for my faith in natural dominion, was that humans contribute to nature’s dynamism even when they are trying hard to keep things stable. Botkin attributes the changes in Hutcheson Forest largely to fire suppression. When counting tree rings, ecologists found charred evidence of fires about once a decade before Europeans settled the area in 1701. After that, the fires stopped. It took 300 more years, but as the big oaks and hickories fell, up sprang a generation of trees that are more susceptible to fire. “We’re managing the forest,” Harkin said, “even if all we are doing is trying not to manage it.”
The forests of my youth were also being shaped by the human suppression of wildfires. Without periodic flames to clear them, needles and leaves will carpet the ground, thwarting ponderosa pine seeds. The sprouts dry up before they can reach the mineral soil. Incense cedar and white fir, on the other hand, can penetrate this duff layer. These trees form a darker, denser forest. Quieter too: Their groves tend to have more chickadees (which grow fat on cedar bark insects), but a lower overall diversity of songbirds. What I’d thought of as a climax forest was, in actuality, a human forest. Doubly so, because once established, this human forest held us hostage to the policy of fire suppression. Incense cedar is vulnerable to flames (it’s the fire-starter of choice for wood stoves in Nevada County), and the resinous needles of white fir provide a ladder by which mild ground fires may climb into canopy-engulfing infernos. If there is any doubt that fire-sensitive trees have us in a full nelson, consider that for every dollar it received in timber sales in 2010 the U.S. Forest Service spent $8.60 on fire suppression.
We now know that humans have shaped the landscape by lighting fires as well as suppressing them. The environment that Europeans discovered as they settled the Americas had been sculpted by Indians. In 1491—a colorful analysis of American history before Europeans—the writer Charles Mann showed that the land was not a sparsely populated wilderness. Most archeologists now agree that the Americas were densely peopled with civilizations that often used fire to shape the environment to their desires. “Rather than the thick, unbroken, monumental snarl of trees imagined by Thoreau, the great eastern forest was an ecological kaleidoscope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens, and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory and oak,” Mann wrote. “The first white settlers in Ohio found woodlands that resembled English parks—they could drive carriages through the trees.” Much of the Great Plains in the middle of the continent were, in fact, man-made pasture created by seasonal burns. Prairie fires killed trees and encouraged the growth of grasses, which in turn encouraged the growth of bison.
By using fire to create habitat for the animals they hunted, the Indians controlled—or at least acted upon—their environment. There was also, contrary to the conventional wisdom, widespread agriculture throughout the Americas. When a wave of microbes, advancing ahead of white settlers, demolished these civilizations—or, to put it in ecological terms, when invasive species displaced the apex predator—the animal populations they had managed boomed. “Suddenly deregulated, ecosystems shook and sloshed like a cup of tea in an earthquake,” Mann wrote. The passenger pigeons that blocked out the sun, the bison that shook the earth for hours on end, the profusion of shellfish in Cape Cod—all of which Europeans took as evidence of nature’s virgin bounty, might instead have been symptoms of a radically destabilized environment.
In the United States, the debate over what is natural has high stakes because in 2003 the federal government made it policy (through the Healthy Forest Restoration Act) to reduce “unnatural” conditions and recreate the forests that existed before the era of fire suppression. Logging companies like (and underwrite) science showing that the pre-Columbian forests were characterized by frequent, stand-replacing fires (much like clear-cuts). Environmentalists prefer to talk about the findings that show how much more old growth once existed.
To Harkin, the debates about how the forest looked a century ago seem about as pointless as the religious wars fought over the question of whether the Communion host is the literal or metaphoric flesh of Christ.
“If we return the forest to 1910 conditions is that natural?” he asked. “Why not 1210? Or 10 BC? What about after some happenstance ice-dam breakage sent a hundred million gallons of water flooding over everything, maybe that’s what we should be aiming for.”
Where is Eden to be found?
I abandoned the idea of natural dominion wistfully, I have to admit. The belief that nature is always driving toward paradise is comforting and, like the romantics, I was attracted to the notion that there is a higher power (be it the law of nature or God) that is inclined toward beauty and life. The idea had aligned with my childhood feeling that places like Yosemite, sheltered from humanity, were both wholesome and holy. It’s an old idea: 18th-century Christian philosopher Thomas Derham was convinced that nature’s order “is manifestly the work of a divine wisdom.” Long before that, Aristotle argued that nature wastes nothing and that its perfection implies a designer. The problem with this line of reasoning is that its advocates must explain away the imperfections that inevitably crop up in nature (or else accept them as proof that there is no designer). As a result, the blame for every annoyance and flaw must be foisted upon human interference. We’re the postlapsarian fall guys. After seeing enough examples of nature acting arbitrarily without the aid of humanity, I was prepared to consider an even older proposition: that humans must take dominion over the earth.
Harkin, by this point, had grudgingly accepted the inevitability of my phone calls, and he even seemed to take pleasure in making me his student. It became clear that he was extraordinarily well-read—keeping up to date on the academic literature—and keenly intelligent. But prying straight answers out of him was impossible. Whenever I posed some permutation of the question of how he thought we should be managing the forest, he would respond by asking, “Well, what do you want?” I came to hate this question, as he repeated it in nearly every conversation we had. I puzzled over several possible interpretations of this koan, one of which was simply the recognition that human desire tends to trump the facts on the ground. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with that, I reasoned. If nature can’t be trusted to behave rationally, the obvious alternative is to control it. Rational environmentalism seeks to save the earth with both eyes open, subordinating sentiment to the practical fulfillment of human needs. Leaving the company of the romantics and transcendentalists, I found myself among the Enlightenment philosophers.
The romantics had thought that nature was fundamentally mysterious and only accessible, as Emerson put it, “by untaught sallies of the spirit.” (Science, he maintained could explain less about the universe than could poetic reflection: “A dream may lead us deeper into the secrets of nature than a hundred concerted experiments.”) The rationalist project of the Enlightenment, on the other hand, was to do away with all this haziness and uncover clear, unequivocal rules by which nature could be governed. Even more importantly, these rules would govern people: Hard facts would put an end to politics, posturing, and demagoguery. There would be no need for endless debates, or war, once the nations were guided by science.
That has proved to be an elusive goal. In the centuries since Descartes, scientists have only found a few solid, argument-ending answers. And, in the complex morass of forest ecology, certainty is especially hard to come by. When I’d started talking to people at the Yuba Watershed Institute, I learned of one scientist who had attempted to bring this sort of clarity to the debate. In 2002, forestry professor William Libby had delivered a lecture in Nevada City that stood out as an example of how rationalism could cut through objections and ideologies. Talking about timber in my hometown is almost as perilous as talking about abortion politics. But Libby, undaunted and wielding the power of scientific certainty, set out to convince the environmentalists assembled before him to love clear-cutting.
California, Libby explained, imports 80 percent of its wood rather than growing its own, which spurs logging around the world, some of it illegally cut from the jungles of Southeast Asia, where the last orangutans take shelter. After crunching the numbers he pronounced that, for every 1,000 acres of national forest in California taken out of lumber production, 10 species go extinct on the other side of the world. Then he asked everyone who wished to reduce logging in California to stand and take responsibility for these extinctions. “This is what America is about,” Libby said. “We have freedom, we have responsibility, and if we’re causing damage somewhere, we want to take responsibility for it.” There were cries of disbelieving outrage, but Libby wasn’t done.
“California has the most productive forestland in the world,” he insisted. And if the environmentalists of California turned their public lands into scientifically managed tree plantations, they might double the timber harvested on each acre, relieving the pressure to log the rainforests. What’s more, he explained, clear-cutting was good for the environment—it enhances biodiversity when large patches of forest in various stages of growth provide several different types of habitat, each with its own set of plants and animals. There are other frequently cited benefits to clear-cutting as well: The land yields more water since there are no trees to soak up rainfall and catch snow; destructive fires are rarer; and—of course—clear-cutting supports the local economy. Those were the facts, Libby told the angry crowd. They didn’t have to like them, but they were still facts.
Though determined to accept reality, no matter how harsh, I didn’t like those facts. I hated the idea of turning something I thought of as beautiful (a forest), into something I thought of as ugly (industrial farmland), but I also knew that I might have to readjust my romantic aesthetics. When I saw what people from earlier times had to say about natural beauty, I was shocked to discover that they often turned my rubric of beauty upside down. Before they were beautiful, forests were feared refuges for bandits and wild animals. The vestigial association between trees and danger lingers in the word savage, which was derived from silva (a wood). Before the 18th century, nature was not magnificent, but grotesque and lacking in symmetry, becoming beautiful only once it was tamed. “[Man] cuts down the thistle and bramble, and he multiplies the vine and the rose,” wrote George Leclerc, sometimes called the father of natural history, in the 18th century. “View those melancholy deserts where man has never resided. Over-run with briars, thorns, and trees which are deformed, broken and corrupted.” When the Mayflower first dropped anchor at Cape Cod, William Bradford saw not a pristine garden, but “a hideous & desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts & wild men.” I had assumed that an appreciation for natural splendor was timeless. But it made some sense that wilderness could not be beautiful unless it was controlled, at least in part: It’s hard to appreciate the beauty of a wolf as it pursues you. Could it be that my preference for nature’s beauty was not based on some universal truth, but simply a prejudice of my era?
While in Nevada City, I went looking for a clear-cut, to see if I could learn to find beauty in its rational order. When I spotted a likely-looking dirt road branching off the highway, I parked and walked into the woods. After passing through a strip of pines I reached the clearing. Here was a truly melancholy desert: Rows of weeping stumps extended across a ragged gap in the forest that sloped steeply into a ravine. Torn limbs tangled so thickly on the ground that I quickly abandoned my plan to walk across. It was like a battlefield—the carnage left by two armies of trees. I wasn’t having much luck finding the beauty in this blasted landscape, but I could see its logic. Clear the land and it allows machines to move freely, simplifying the logistics of transporting logs. Plant a new crop of optimally spaced pines and they will grow quickly in the full sunlight, without competition. They will all be ready for harvest at the same time.
I suspect that even those 17th-century forest fearers would have found the clear-cut ugly. Aesthetics are intricately wedded to meaning: Danger is ugly, goodness is beautiful. And a field of stumps feels menacing. Individual trees, moreover, were always beloved—even when forests were not—because they gave shade, shelter, and fruit. To Alexander Pope, writing at a time when woods were dangerous, a tree was nonetheless nobler “than a prince in his coronation robes,” and to Walter Blithe (in 1653) a tree was “a thing of delight.” It’s much easier to find beauty in something that’s hospitable to humanity. In this sense the clear-cut was almost objectively ugly: It was a landscape utterly opposed to comfort and the sustenance of human life. Even foresters who see dollar signs in the stumps have said they find such remnants unappealing.
Perhaps clear-cuts are beautiful to the machines whose needs they are designed to serve, but the only humanly aesthetic argument I could muster in favor of clear-cutting was Libby’s: By doing everything possible to maximize the timber production on this land, other land might be devoted entirely to pleasure and wildlife. I accepted this proposition reluctantly, aware that this reasoning could be extended to justify all sorts of ugliness: strip mining, factory farming, Soviet-style apartment blocks. It turns environmentalism into an echo of Union general William Tecumseh Sherman’s total war (the idea that “War is Hell,” as he put it, and the more hellish it is made, the more quickly it can be ended). Cities must be burned, beauty destroyed, cruelty doled out, to preserve the larger ecological union. If California wanted to supply all its own lumber, Libby had estimated that 20 percent of its land area (only 28 percent of which is forested) would have to become a tree plantation, and when he considered future population growth, he said, “I get a little grim.” But accepting the clear-cut had the advantage of shielding me from Libby’s charges of hypocrisy and myopia. As someone who lives in a wooden house and makes his living selling words printed on paper, I couldn’t very well condemn this particular timber harvest unless I had another source of wood in mind. There are alternatives, like hemp or bamboo, but large-scale replacement would require similar plantations of these crops and chemically intensive processing. Analyses tend to show that timber is among the greenest of building materials. Better to accept this particular blight than to push other—fragile or pristine land—into production. At this terrible expense, I could enlist nature in the rational, ordered service of humankind. It might not be pretty, I figured, but at least it was real. Or real-ish. As soon as I began poking around the guts of this line of reasoning, I found that—like the idea of nature’s law—there were wobbly assumptions hidden beneath its surface.
When I began researching Libby’s facts, their initial persuasiveness slowly wore down until they began to look not like indisputable truths, but those soft romantic things we call values. Don Harkin told me, sure, clear-cutting can turn a forest into a patchwork of different habitats that could improve biodiversity. But it would also threaten those rarer species that had already been driven to the brink by habitat fragmentation, while encouraging those that thrive on human disturbance. And although it’s true that land produces more water after a clear-cut, on steep terrain it’s usually the worst sort of water: the kind that comes all at once when it’s least wanted (and carries a lot of soil off with it).
As for forest fires, it seems that either an overgrown forest or a poorly managed plantation can set the stage for catastrophic infernos. The details quickly become complicated, but it isn’t a simple fact that uniform forests of same-aged trees are safer.
Libby’s explanation of extinction trade-offs drew some perplexed sighs from environmental-policy experts and foresters as well: California imports most of its lumber from the Pacific Northwest, not Southeast Asia. This demand creates competition for softwood building materials—a fairly different market from rainforest hardwoods. If we really wanted to preserve forest habitat, some said, it would make more sense to reduce consumption rather than spur production.
While most experts agreed that it made sense to grow timber in places where it was efficient, I was becoming less enthusiastic about turning the Sierra Nevada into an industrial timber plantation, once the shine of scientific certainty wore off. It’s important to remember, a biologist reminded me, that scientists are just people, each subtly influenced by a set of assumptions and beliefs, each guided by a unique assortment of ambitions, passions, and incentives. Most science is plastic enough that it can be influenced, consciously or otherwise, by the desires of the experimenter. Several surveys of peer-reviewed articles have showed that those studies done with the support of an interested party were more likely to produce a result favorable to that party. The facts researchers produce are constructed in part from observation of reality and in part from the forces that constrain that observation.
There are many facts, of course, that are bolstered, rather than eroded, by scrutiny. Most of the foresters I talked to agreed that if you simply want to maximize production, a plantation system is the best way to do it. When I asked Don Harkin about this, he responded with the kind of Jesuitical complication that I was learning to expect from him.
“Well,” he drawled, “that depends what you mean by ‘production.’ Usually that refers to timber, but it could be game, for instance. Or, for national parks, it’s production of public support—but that can be tricky because the public isn’t one single entity. Some people want grizzly bears in their parks and some people don’t want to get chewed on. Tricky.”
Forests yield many resources, and the notion of optimizing production of just one element while ignoring all others is regarded among many silviculturists as hopelessly outdated. The water that drains into the Yuba River from the forests of Nevada County is annually worth a minimum of $66 million in hydropower generation alone, which is more than the value of the watershed’s annual timber harvest has ever been. The ability of forests to soak up rainwater and release it slowly—thereby preventing floods, cleaning water, and recharging aquifers—is ignored by a perspective that focuses solely on wood. This calls into question the Sherman-esque proposition that some forests should be clear-cut so that others might remain pristine. Rather than optimizing land to yield either lumber or beauty, savvy public land managers now look for strategies to maximize a forest’s net production of wood, water, oxygen, wildlife habitat, and human pleasure.
One reason that plantation forestry so efficiently produces timber is that we have 250 years of science showing how to do it. Humanity, in other words, has invested the bulk of its forestry research resources in the study of clear-cutting. This is curious, given that the first major experiments in plantations (in what is now Germany and Poland) were disasters.
In the 1760s Prussian bureaucrats devised a mathematical model to predict the amount of wood (and ultimately of money) that would be produced by a forest each year. This form of scientific forestry also provided a valuable service: It allowed a single authority to exercise management from afar. By reducing the woodland to a number, a ruler might see his entire forest at a glance and make informed decisions about how much to cut in any given year.
The ambitions of this Prussian project, however, went far beyond mere approximation. Early scientists thought that they could deduce universal rules through abstract reasoning, which would make tree counting, and direct observation of the forest, obsolete. As Heinrich Cotta, one of the founders of Prussian forestry, proudly explained, the principles of his science were “determined mathematically” by applying logic to postulates, and not from “direct real measurement.” The on-the-ground reality, in other words, mattered less than the theory. Measurement was subordinated to abstraction.
Mathematician Johann Hossfeld wrote in the early 1800s that this approach to forestry was justified because nature “makes no leaps.” In other words, forests were uniform. Anyone who has walked in the woods will recognize the absurdity of this assumption, but it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rather than constructing a theory to accurately represent reality, the foresters shaped reality until it fit the theory. After years of management, the Prussian forests turned into pure stands of even-aged Norway spruce arranged in a checkerboard.
The results were initially good. Production jumped in the first generation. In the second generation, however, timber yields dropped 20 to 30 percent, and great swaths of trees withered. A new compound word consisting of two concepts that had not had been previously associated—forest and death (Wald and sterben)—appeared in the German language. The causes of Waldsterben are still debated, but at least two forces were at work. First, the “cleaning” of forests in the name of regimented order—though it allowed the spruce trees access to nutrients without competition from other plants—also removed the system for replenishing those nutrients. Second, the cutting of grand old trees destroyed the network of water drainage conduits provided by their deep roots, and trees in low-lying areas drowned.
There was no place in the mathematical models for root systems, water drainage, or symbiotic nutrient exchange among trees, shrubs, and fungi. But that was precisely the point. The goal of silviculture was to rise above the laborious trial-and-error forestry of peasants and join the Enlightenment sciences based on elegant formulae. After the 100 years that it took to grow the first successful crop of intensively managed spruce, and then to witness the sickly growth of the second generation, the technology was already locked in. It had spread to France, where Gifford Pinchot (father of the U.S. Forest Service) learned its methods and brought them to the Yale School of Forestry. German forestry science had become dominant around the world. Despite the Waldsterben, scientists opted to further alter the facts on the ground, employing empiricism to refine the model and better force forests to its order, rather than throwing out the model and seeking one that better fit the forests. They did this in part because they lacked a sophisticated alternative, and in part because the Enlightenment dream—that science could provide unchallengeable guidance on how to proceed—still lingered.
Simplifying the complexity of an ecosystem is attractive. Once you scrape the ground to bare soil, apply herbicide, plant in legible rows, fertilize, and spray for moths, you can expect a reasonably foreseeable outcome. Three centuries of silviculture research on this model has led to plantations that are far more productive than any natural forest. The way to make nature predictable is to strip it of variables, confounding factors, and contingency—all of which, unfortunately, are synonyms for life and (at least in the eyes of this beholder) beauty.
Even the most rigorous of plantation systems, Harkin reminded me, rely to some degree on the earth’s mysterious bounty. And yet there are still those who believe we are ready to cast free of nature’s patronage.
The most complete test of what happens when humans fully take over occurred in the early 1990s, in Oracle, Arizona. You may remember hearing about the Biosphere 2 experiment, in which eight people entered an airtight greenhouse to live for 2 years in an entirely man-made ecosystem. The idea was to provide a way to sustain life on a ruined planet, or in space. Futurists imagined similar greenhouses at the center of space stations: capsules of green converting starlight into oxygen as they slowly tumbled through the vacuum.
The result, however, was an ecological nightmare. The water turned acid and the atmosphere became so toxic that the team had to pump in oxygen from outside. Seventy-five percent of the vertebrate species inside went extinct, along with all of the pollinating insects. Morning glories formed tangled mats against the glass, ants swarmed, and—as always—cockroaches thrived. Throughout, the biospherians worked ferociously to eke calories from failing crops. They lost, on average, 18 percent of their bodyweight and turned orange from an imbalance of nutrients. They woke up choking from lack of oxygen and some may have suffered nerve damage from high levels of nitrous oxide. Their experience is captured in a chapter title of The Human Experiment, by biospherian Jane Poynter: “Starving, Suffocating, and Going Quite Mad.”
All this discomfort despite $150 million invested in technology to control 3 acres, along with an energy bill of $1 million each year: (This was a contradiction never adequately explained: The project required its own gas-power plant.) Extrapolating from the Biosphere 2 experiment, ecological engineer William Mitsch estimated that the cost of replacing nature with technology would be $10 billion per square kilometer each year. Ecologists reflecting on the project in the journal Science wrote: “The major retrospective conclusion that can be drawn is simple. At present there is no demonstrated alternative to maintaining the viability of Earth. No one yet knows how to engineer systems that provide humans with the life-supporting services that ecosystems produce for free.… Despite its mysteries and hazards, Earth remains the only known home that can support life.”
It’s awfully tempting to call on the power of science to trump debate, as Bill Libby had done when trying to get Nevada City environmentalists to embrace plantations. But, rather than cutting off debate, this only intensifies the vitriol as each side assembles its own raft of experts insisting that they have the Truth. The assertion of science as Truth compresses the nuances of evidence and counterevidence down to competing dogmas—it becomes a matter of faith that you can either accept or reject. Things get very black and white. The people who think that science can provide incontrovertible certainty are the same ones likely to say that science is worthless because it provides less than that.
In point of fact, scientific certainty is an oxymoron. Science derives its great power from humility. It encourages challenge—no question is off-limits, and no finding is too sacred for falsification. The expectation that science will establish indisputable truths is, in the end, antiscientific.
My experience with vaccine science had shown me that certainty isn’t essential: It’s possible to act on the basis of partial knowledge. But without absolute certainty you can’t force people to agree with you. Good science is useless without good culture and good politics. Moreover, convincing people is only half the battle. I was convinced, for example, by the evidence of the greenhouse effect, yet I still contributed to the burning of jet fuel by buying airplane tickets. My love of forests didn’t stop me from buying books. If I were a zealot I would have moved next door to a library and refused to travel. But I wasn’t a zealot. I was just a guy who hated watching others nullify years of my sacrifices with a single excursion in their private jet. In other words, I couldn’t stand being a sucker. Despite the clear economic incentive for humanity as a whole to sustain its home, there was no economic incentive for me, as an individual, to do the right thing: This misalignment of what’s good for an individual and what’s good for the commonwealth was precisely the problem Adam Smith had set out to solve with his invisible hand. Perhaps with a tune-up and a few replacement parts, that hand could be induced to shoo humanity away from the irrational destruction of its patrimony.
The business suit of free-market economics chafes in a dozen places when worn by a child of countercultural nature lovers, even one who finds himself rebelling against the rebels. I’m more interested in natural beauty and biodiversity than in the bottom line. The free-market fundamentalist’s claim that we can pollute without remorse—and trust the market to create a solution—struck me as blindly credulous. But I’d also read an essay that succinctly addressed these concerns and, at the same time, convinced me that, if I wanted to preserve the wild places I loved, I’d have to accept the sovereignty of either the market or of authoritarian government.
This essay is a classic: Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons,” published by Science in 1968. Hardin made his case with an imaginary scenario—a village commons for cattle. If the grass were overgrazed, the field would become a mud patch, and everyone would lose what had been a free resource. For any individual cowherd, however, it made sense to use the pasture as much as possible—to get the grass before anyone else. The benefits to the cowherd increased linearly as he brought in more cows, while the costs for overgrazing were shared by all. The upshot: Whenever there is competition for a shared resource, legitimate self-interest will destroy the commonwealth.
“Therein is the tragedy,” Hardin wrote. “Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
The commons, of course, is a metaphor for clean air, fresh water, fish stocks, and all the shared resources we refer to as nature. Saving the commons with appeals to conscience inevitably fails, Hardin argued, because scolding (“If you don’t do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acting like a responsible citizen”) is always accompanied by a contradictory economic message (“If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons”). This perfectly captures the impasse I experience whenever I waver between buying an organic head of lettuce or a conventional one for half the price; whenever I hesitate over the option to buy carbon offsets to cancel out the pollution of a flight.
Hardin’s essay cut through my moralizing with the clarity of a geometric proof. Rational decisions made by individuals in their own interest cause society to act irrationally, quod erat demonstrandum. We have, therefore, only two choices: Do away with the commons, or do away with freedom. Hardin preferred the latter—the kind of coercive government control that Thomas Hobbes describes in Leviathan. The former, the idea of selling off the air, water, and right to reproduce, Hardin wrote, was “too horrifying to contemplate.” I wasn’t sure if I agreed. Much had changed between the time Hardin wrote that paper and when I read it. Most prominently, several big experiments in totalitarianism had broken down, or opened up, and revealed how catastrophically centralized control of nature can fail. Under Soviet control millions starved in Ukraine, and in China centralized land management during the Great Leap Forward led to the largest famine in history. (Hardin also proposed population control, whether through forced sterilization or some variation of China’s one-child rule. This seems slightly more humane.)
When I called my forester-philosopher, Don Harkin, to ask about this choice between the free market and Leviathan, he reminded me that during the gold rush the government had set up a textbook demonstration of the tragedy of the commons. Back then, the country’s frontier resources were divvied up according to a national policy of, as Harkin put it, “It’s yours if you can grab it.” The resulting mud floods in downstream agricultural towns provoked an outcry for government regulation and prompted some of the first environmental laws. After allowing unrestricted access to the commons, the state had opted to restrict freedom, but in doing so it generated a set of problems that have dogged land administrators ever since. People interested in exploiting resources on a large scale set out to manipulate the rules and the regulators, while those who could profit by small-scale exploitation simply continued illicitly. The law of “It’s yours if you can grab it” always applies to some extent, no matter the form of governance, and those who consider grabbing make calculated decisions about how much opposition they are likely to meet. Doing away with the commons—that is, turning the land into private property—can solve some of these problems. Harkin, who had grown up amid similar frontier lawlessness on a ranch near the Clark Fork River in Montana, had regularly participated in vigilante sorties to establish the cost of appropriating his property.
“The old man would tell one brother to get the Krag,” Harkin said. “And he’d say, ‘Don, you better take the Winchester. And Doug, I guess you’re going to have to take the shotgun.’ And we’d take a little ride to find out what really happened to those calves that had gone missing.”
When owners live on their land they are in a position to both police it and to see how different management techniques work in relation to its various idiosyncrasies. And after learning what centralized authority in Prussia had done to forests, I began to lean toward privatization of the commons, rather than Leviathan. How could Washington make good decisions about managing land around Nevada City, where every acre demanded a unique strategy? Whatever the faults of the market, at least it allowed individuals who understood the complex facts on the ground to exercise local knowledge. So, I asked: If Garrett Hardin had not been too horrified to contemplate market solutions, what would he have found?
The quarrel I (and many environmentalists) have with free markets is their failure to assign value to beauty and health. These qualities are outside of the market—externalities. But these external commons could be brought in from the cold if we began paying for those $10 billion worth of services that William Mitsch calculated are provided by each square kilometer of land. This notion of bringing ecosystem services into the market is popular around Nevada City: Landowners know that, once it reaches the cities, the water that comes from their forests sells for as much as $500 per acre-foot (the amount of water needed to cover 1 acre to the depth of 1 foot), but they don’t see a cent for maintaining a landscape that soaks up rain during the spring flood season and releases the water in the summer when it’s needed.
My father spends considerable time maintaining the steep strip of land where he lives, and as a result his woods work year-round, slowing rainfall so that it can seep into the ground, pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, creating oxygen, holding the topsoil in place, and providing habitat to creatures like the black bear that plundered birdseed from his garage in 2009. Dad thinks it would only be fair if he were reimbursed for his stewardship. Imagine for a moment a world in which this actually happened, a world in which we all paid people like my father for the air, water, and erosion control they provide. Instead of simply weighing the value of his standing timber against his own romantic feelings of duty to the land, Dad could maximize the common good by maximizing his profits. After looking over the going rates, he might see that he should allow his water production to fall a little bit while taking advantage of the increased value of wood by logging—some of this wood would be sold cheaply for burning, while some would receive an atmospheric-services premium for locking up carbon in two-by-fours. Downstream, I would see the ripple effect in my increased water bill. To compensate, I might work with my landlord to build rain catchments on the roof, which would provide me with free water. Afterward, the city would pay my landlord for absorbing rain when storms threatened to overwhelm the water-treatment plant and flush raw sewage into the ocean. Fishermen, in turn, would pay the city for the right to cast their nets in the newly pollution-free habitat along the coastline. And all of these decisions would be made purely out of self-interest. Privatize the commons and greed becomes not only good, but green. The invisible hand would rescue the environment in order to rescue the goods and services nature provides.
Of course there are problems. It’s very tricky to measure how much oxygen and water Dad’s land is producing at any given moment, and just as tricky to calculate how much I am consuming. Making these estimates would require an army of auditors, each of whom would have to operate under assumptions that would make the Prussian bureaucrats blush. The dilemmas would pile up to absurd heights: Who should be billed for the value a tree brings for providing dappled shade, for slowing raindrops, for offering twigs and branches suitable for nesting? Exactly how many dollars and cents for the song of a ruby-crowned kinglet?
Ecosystem economics is afflicted by that ultimate cause of market failure: lack of information. There are so many natural services that we don’t fully understand—not to mention those we have not discovered—that it would be impossible to provide the market with the information it would need to operate efficiently. When a fisherman hauls a tuna out of the water, how does he determine whose habitat it came from? Would every minnow have to be equipped with a LoJack? And the fish food—the plankton, diatoms, and other microscopic wigglers—those would require tracking devices as well. The more we struggle to maintain the construct of private property, the more easily nature makes a mockery of it.
There are ethical problems on top of the logistical ones: Presumably, these auditors would be backed up by a police force to hunt down illegal polluters and those caught stealing. What would happen when the enforcers collared people too poor to legally breathe? Leviathan lurks in the alleys of free-market utopia.
During one conversation with Harkin, I asked him to explain how he would estimate the value of a tree near his house. He gamely walked me through the techniques, but then added: “So we could check this tree and find out it’s worth $6,500, right? Okay, next we might also want to measure the age and dimensions of your three female cousins and find their value, if I sold them on the white slaver’s market, what I could get for that.” He let the point sink in. “Why is the baby Jesus any more important than a Douglas fir tree?”
I’d hoped to find not only economic half measures for improving the environment, but economic certainty—the kind of muscular philosophy that would sweep away objections and force change. But Harkin was right; it did seem like a problem that in my free-market utopia there would be no difference between Jesus and a tree. I could hope that the market would correctly assess the value of each, but history suggests that Jesus’s relative value as Messiah, versus a sort of decorative overlay to complement the joining of two timbers, is utterly subjective.
A fog of depression set in once I’d decided that neither the market, nor submission to nature, nor mastery over it, could be counted upon to protect the landscapes I loved. Around this time I came across a similarly gloomy paper by the famous English ecologist Robert May, who presented three arguments for the preservation of biodiversity that roughly correlated with the three categories I’ve sketched out here. May said species might be shielded from extinction by the technological rationalist because they could provide medicines and materials, by the capitalist because they provide ecosystem services, and by the Romantic because it’s ethically the right thing to do. The problem, May wrote, is that, “no one of these three arguments is necessarily compelling”:
First, it seems likely to me that tomorrow’s Biotechnological Revolution will design its new medicines, new materials, and other new products from the molecules up, based on our increasing understanding of the molecular machinery of life. Second, I fear that we may be clever enough to create a world that is grievously biologically impoverished, but nevertheless sustainable—the hateful world of the cult movie Bladerunner. And although I find the third, ethical argument totally compelling, I wonder what force it would have if I were dirt poor, struggling to feed my children. These are uncomfortable admissions.
At first, the ideologies of the rationalist, the romantic, and the free marketeer had seemed irreconcilably opposed, but as I worked through them I saw that I was attracted to each for its similarities. All were employed as a means to bypass the messiness of debate. All exalted transcendent laws beyond human reproach. Each had its supernatural force—Mother Nature, Scientific Certainty, The Invisible Hand—which supposedly would put the world aright if allowed the freedom to operate. Each spawned fundamentalists, convinced of the rectitude of their own path.
For me, the best argument against this trinity of faiths was their failure to slow environmental degradation. The attempts to make certainty—whether divined from nature, Cartesian logic, or the market—put an end to partisan bickering had, instead, only intensified the debate. Still, I was afraid that without a bulwark of inarguable certainty, people would simply pave nature. Would it be possible to address problems like climate change without invoking higher laws?
There is one other credo beyond the three that I (and May) found lacking—one that has to do with relationships, humility, and compromise. This approach would incorporate economics, science, and a passion for nature, without invoking their capitalized deities to circumvent politics. But this alternative for defining humanity’s place in nature is so vague in its dimensions, and so dependent on context, that at first I found it intellectually unsatisfying and impossible to defend as a single world-changing philosophy. This fourth strategy abandons any pretense at certainty and, instead, relies on the political process in all its messy, exasperating disorder. I only began to take this idea seriously after I decided to take Harkin’s initial advice and spend some more time in the woods. I requested an audience with Harkin and, somewhat to my surprise, he agreed to meet me.
It was a gentle spring morning when I arrived at our rendezvous point: the whitewashed Columbia Schoolhouse on the San Juan Ridge. An orchestra of birds was tuning in the sunshine, and chickens quarreled on the farm across the road. Harkin rumbled up in a gray Mazda van, and we shook hands. Over the weeks when we’d spoken by telephone, I’d gained a wry affection for the man. He was startlingly smart, sly, erudite, and uniquely well-informed about the local ecology. In the mental picture I’d developed of Harkin he was a professorial hermit surrounded by books, bent and slightly unkempt, perhaps in a worn corduroy jacket. The man before me, however, looked less like a scholar than a hobo. The hand that gripped mine was hard as rawhide and dark with geologic layers of dirt and calluses. His eyes were a watery blue and his cheeks were clouded by a week’s worth of white bristles. An old Band-Aid clung to the ridge of his ear like the abandoned shell of some metamorphosed insect. He wore a red flannel shirt and blue jeans—though grime was worked so thoroughly into the fabric over his thighs that they had turned from blue to brown. Later that day, when a piece of hard candy slipped from his mouth onto the dirt road, he absently wiped it on those jeans before returning it to his lips. The aroma that accompanied Harkin’s person was, improbably, the clean Christmas-tree scent of sawdust.
“Pleasure to meet you in person,” he said. “You can relax completely. Whatever you want to know, we can talk about it.” When I began to respond, he interrupted. “One of the things you’ve got to know about old Don is that he did not use ear protection when working with a chainsaw. So you have to speak loud, and close.”
There was a jumble of dusty tools in the van, and a dog, which Harkin introduced as Meryl. He produced a battered plastic bag containing cookies, a chipped bowl, and half a grapefruit, then motioned for me to follow him to a picnic table nearby. What I wanted to know, I said (then repeated myself much more loudly), was whether he had a model for managing the land, since he’d convinced me of the inadequacy of all the ideas I’d brought to him.
He mashed a spoon into the grapefruit and slurped up the dangling pulp. Meryl observed, keen-eyed. A model, he said, is a difficult thing. It can provide a framework to organize findings, a scaffolding that allows knowledge to build up rather than simply spread out, but it can also become a trap. “If you don’t have a model, you are just like milk oozing across the table, but if you get stuck on it you’ll become dogmatic, like it’s a religion or something.” The forest is complex enough, he said, that firm models for how things work tend to have a short lifespan. In the end, he said, returning to his infuriating riddle, “It all depends on what you want.”
Harkin told me to follow him in my car, and we drove off into the woods. Occasionally, he’d stop to comment on geography (Spring Creek, Holden Creek, Bald Mountain), botany (bleeding heart, kitkitdizze, hazelnut), and geology (serpentine, decomposed granite, Franciscan melange—at this last name he groaned, as if it brought physical pain to permit something so highfalutin through his lips). I asked my questions with effort, approaching intimate proximity, then shouting into Harkin’s Band-Aid encrusted ear.
Our route took us through various governance systems: private property, state park land, and federal areas. To my eyes at least, there was no obvious winner. In some places the trees had been allowed to grow willy-nilly into impassable thickets (“that there would burn like gasoline”); others had been thinned, or the underbrush had been cleared by a masticator (a massive crushing and chipping machine). The most pleasant spot—shaded by maples, the leaves forming a glowing-green scrim between the sun and a brook—was a private mining claim on public land.
It was noon by the time we reached our destination. Harkin suggested we lunch before we started work, and offered me a worn glass bottle of what looked like motor oil.
“Taste it first,” he said. “I make it myself, so naturally it’s a little weird.”
This homebrew, he explained, was made by mixing a malt liquor called Pitbull with molasses, cayenne, and other spices, and then allowing it to ferment further. “During the summer you can’t let a bottle roll around under the seat of your car too long, or it’ll explode,” he said.
It was surprisingly pleasant, like a sweet version of Guinness, with a yeasty alcoholic kicker. We sat in the dappled shade and ate. The trees around us were conifers, 80 to 100 feet tall, and a waist-high regiment of madrone saplings rose throughout the grove. Madrone has shiny, magnolia-like leaves, and silky red bark that peels off in papery curls. I’d never before seen so many young madrones growing in such close proximity. This land had last been logged sometime in the 1880s, Harkin speculated, creating the even-aged stand of conifers. A few years earlier the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had conducted a controlled burn here, removing brush and small trees. The madrone had come up after that. Harkin’s plan for the day was to lay out a transect, a random swath of land which he would study in detail, to see if he could learn something about how the area responded to fire. With a compass and measuring tape we plotted the dimensions of the transect, pounding in metal stakes to mark the corners. He kept up a running commentary as we worked.
“One big question is, why are all these madrone coming up here? Now madrone is a stump-sprouting tree, which means it has a head start after a fire, but this is clearly more than a stump. It’s possible we are looking at an underground network of roots shooting up, but I don’t know that anyone has shown that in this species. It’s more what you’d expect to see with aspen.”
Clearly there were more questions than answers to be found in this forest. And the questions of consequence, such as how a plot of land might be kept from turning into a brush-choked firetrap, were the most difficult of all. You could clear by hand, Harkin said, or bring in a masticator, but both methods became prohibitively expensive over any large area. Controlled burns were even more costly. Herbicide spraying was cheaper, but often upsetting to people who live (and gather food) in the forest. Ideally, an ecologist would manipulate the species mix and density so as to cajole the growth toward an idyllic, open, park-like, fire-safe, and productive forest. But when I inquired (fortissimo voce) if Harkin knew of a way to achieve this, he shrugged: “That all depends on what you want.”
There are so many variables at play in any cubic foot of dirt that the development of vegetation there can seem almost random. Harkin ticked off a few: slope, water table, light and heat, geologic substrate, orientation toward the sun and prevailing winds, proximity of other species, depth of leaf litter, and the nutrients available in the soil. This last, alone, is infinitely variable: The matrix of dirt—roots, minerals, mycelium (the mushroom filaments throughout the earth), insects, decaying needles, and bacteria—is so elaborate, so rococo in its internal economy of mineral goods and chemical services, that most compounds synthesized there are utterly novel. One soil scientist has been quoted as saying, “It is possible that no two humus molecules are or ever have been alike.”
If each molecule of humus is new, never before seen on the face of the earth, how can we possibly presume to predict its behavior? Ideologies driven by faith in unchanging, universal truth are not suited to such rampant creativity. The forester who wants to work with nature’s disordered abundance must be an eternal student, listening carefully, tinkering, allowing the forest to lead, experimenting, ready to take advantage of the genius of the mistake. Of course Harkin didn’t say any of this to me—not in so many words. He was happy to point out where I had gone wrong, to discuss esoteric pieces of forestry science, to ruminate on philosophy, to gossip about national politics and local history, or wander tangentially from one subject to another, but he would never concede a direct answer. His deafness aided in these evasions even when I took care to enunciate loudly, and I started to suspect that he was deliberately mishearing the questions he did not want to answer. Throughout the day I probed with increasingly elliptical queries, hoping he would let something useful slip in his denials (his answers always seemed to start with “not exactly”). I came closest when I asked if it was simply impossible to manage a forest for wildlife, lumber, and people all at the same time.
“Impossible? No, that’s too pessimistic.” The forestry itself wasn’t a problem, he said, that management could be done. The problem was managing the people. Politics was the crux, not science. When I pushed him to explain further, Harkin grew irritable. “I’m not involved in the political leadership around here,” he snapped. “You’re pretty tight with the people running the Yuba Watershed Institute, right?”
I nodded.
“Well if you want to talk about politics, you should be talking to them.”
“But I don’t want to talk about politics,” I protested. “I’m here because I want to learn about the ecology. I mean, how would the forestry work if politics were no object?”
Harkin nodded sagely. “In that case …” He started speculatively—and I saw at once that I’d fallen into his favorite rhetorical trap, despite all my calculated bank-shot questions; he had managed to bring the conversation back, yet again, to the place we had started—“I guess I’d say that it all depends on what you want.”
My growing frustration with this answer stemmed not just from its repetition, but from the fact that it skipped lightly over my main concern. I’d set out in search of a fitting place for humankind in this landscape—for a way to mesh profitability, scientific forestry, and natural beauty. Harkin would tantalize me by suggesting that this was technically possible, but then refused to tell me how.
At the end of my day with Harkin, after we had finished laying out the transect, I asked him if we could take a core from one of the conifers to see how fast they were growing. He grumbled that this was an inaccurate technique, but he was happy to teach me how to use an increment borer. He pulled two slender rods from his backpack and affixed them to form a T. The bottom of the T was hollow, with screw threads spiraling up around the outside of the tube. We selected a tree, a big sugar pine, and took turns turning the top of the T. The screw bit into the wood, pulling the borer inward and cutting free a cylinder of tree flesh. The dowel that emerged was light and fragrant, its surface glistening with moisture. Harkin put a gnarled finger at the end and counted the rings backward from 2011, occasionally noting an expected congruence: “1977 is a small ring, that was a drought year.” We’d only taken half a foot, and Harkin slid it into a slit drinking straw for safekeeping; then, with a wad of pitch, he plugged the hole we’d made. Before we said our good-byes he handed this little rod to me.
“It’s not worth a damn until it’s dried and sanded,” he said, before hustling Meryl into his van and driving off.
After we had parted company, I flipped through my notes ruefully. They were mostly fragments—sometimes just a single word jotted down for later research—all as hopelessly jumbled as Harkin’s conversational peregrinations: warblers, sooty mold, 1872 mining law, ponderosa pine over grass in Arizona, “Native Americans didn’t have chainsaws and they didn’t have D8 cats,” Montpellier’s phytosociology, western gall rust, Bitterlick’s basal area, axins, Soviets say root grafting proves the solidarity of the working class, and, revealingly: “I think there is no answer; the only answer is to bring up the most I can and let people make of it what they will.”
It was only after struggling for weeks with this mess that I began to see I was being as obstinate as Harkin had been obscure: I wanted to erase the line between humanity and nature, and yet I insisted on maintaining a strict distinction between ecological feasibility and political feasibility. I’d wanted to subordinate politics to physical possibility, while Harkin had essentially responded: It’s all politics.
Could this possibly be true? There are certainly problems that politics can’t solve. A group of people working to build a perpetual motion machine will never succeed, no matter how robust their system of governance. Then again, our goals usually aren’t so specific. The proposed perpetual motion machine (or an environmental plan) is merely a means to an end—a means that can be scrapped or revised when it fails. Politics, done well, is the process of finding goals people can agree on, and then identifying the right ways to get there.
This definition of politics has in it the hopeful echo of Garrett Hardin’s despondent cry. In “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Hardin saw politics as a coercive force, a police state’s manacles needed to restrain humanity from exceeding nature’s limits. But as I learned about the politics governing the forests on the Ridge, it became clear that this grim picture could be upended: Good politics can expand nature’s bounty. When people find a common goal and focus their cumulative creativity on achieving it, they often find that nature is, as if in response, miraculously abundant. The solution to the political problem can be the solution to the ecological problem.
In 2009 Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for economics (the first woman to do so) for showing how to defuse the tragedy of the commons. Ostrom had found a crack in Hardin’s seemingly airtight logic. While he, in his abstract reasoning, had assumed that people would behave like rational actors, she observed that people behaved instead like people: creatures capable of making deals, earning trust, and holding one another accountable. Hardin had argued that the only alternatives to environmental destruction were privatization or coercion. Ostrom added a third option: cooperative management of the commons.
People all over the world manage common resources without summoning Leviathan. Dairy farmers in the Swiss Alps share high-meadow pastures, and these meadows are not overgrazed because the farmers also engage a shepherd who will report anyone trying to add more than his share of animals on the sly. In Japan there is a long tradition of collectively managed forests, by which villagers take turns being the regulatory “detective” to police the commons. In the Philippines, workers often give 2 months of hard labor each year to maintain commonly owned dams and canals—an obligation taken so seriously that a farmer’s land may be confiscated by the community if he misses too many work days. Cooperative management, however, isn’t something that only happens in faraway lands where people rely on archaic traditions. You can find well-managed commons anywhere equals work together: Law partners and doctors often share pools of secretaries, or assistants. Municipal water departments share aquifers. And under my nose, 2,000 acres of cooperatively managed forest had developed on the Ridge.
In 1989, Don Harkin had spotted a legal notice in the newspaper announcing a land swap, which would turn over public land on the Ridge to Sierra Pacific Industries in exchange for parcels elsewhere. Sierra Pacific is a timber corporation that rotates clear-cuts across its holdings. When Harkin informed his neighbors of these plans, they were alarmed. Whether they were artists who had moved to the Ridge for its beauty, or marijuana farmers who appreciated its isolation, just about everyone had a reason to fight the land swap.
It’s likely nothing would have come of these complaints if the man responsible for the land swap had not already had one run-in with the community on the Ridge. That man, Deane Swickard, field manager for the Bureau of Land Management, was no bookish bureaucrat, but a former Marine pilot who had returned from combat in Vietnam and then set records for the swiftness with which he rose in government service. A year earlier, he’d drawn the ire of Ridge residents with his plan to build a radio tower for the transmission of calls for backup when rangers confronted squatters or drug growers. The people on the Ridge had sent the BLM a wave of letters complaining, as Swickard remembered, “because the Buddhists chanted and the Indians sang there.”
“Well, I gotta say,” Swickard chuckled, “that kind of put me off. Chant and sing somewhere else because I’ve got a law enforcement problem here. To some extent they were a bunch of sandal-wearing, granola-chewing hippies. And my background is the Marine Corps. So you’ve got a little gap there.”
When Swickard had taken the job, however, he had pledged to himself that, rather than run things from his office, he would touch the land he governed and look the people he was dealing with in the eyes.
“So I chug on up to the San Juan Ridge,” Swickard said. “We meet up on Bald Mountain, and I’ve got this posse of people peppering me with questions. I expected some hostility, and it was a little hostile—it is not a trusting group of people up there, at least when it comes to the government. But they were also willing to listen.”
Swickard was impressed by the tenor of the conversation—these were not simply narrowly focused environmentalists. He didn’t know then that one of those people was Gary Snyder, an internationally recognized poet, often thought of as one of the elder deans of environmental thinking. Snyder’s presence had drawn many of the other residents to the Ridge—eccentric, scientifically minded, freethinking people.
“These people were genuine,” Swickard said. “They were interesting, bright people that I could learn from.”
The residents were concerned, it became clear, about how the tower would look. He offered a compromise: The BLM would check to see if there were any other feasible locations, and set up a model so that people could see exactly how intrusive it would be. The Ridge residents agreed. And after they saw the model they gave the plan their approval.
“There was a little spark of communication and trust there,” Swickard said. “I thought: ‘This might be an interesting place to try out some bigger ideas.’ ”
He got his chance when residents assembled against his land swap. Swickard told them that if they wanted to contribute to land management decisions they had to organize and offer solutions rather then simply try to stop everything he wanted to do. He promised that if the locals could come up with a cooperative management plan he would enforce it, and cancel the land swap. Len Brackett, who lived down a fire road from Harkin, knew enough about bureaucracies to see that Swickard was sticking his neck out.
“Isn’t this a little risky for you?” he asked.
“I’m not afraid of trying anything that makes sense,” Swickard said. “As long as it’s consistent with law and policy, I’ll do it. C’mon, there are no bullets flying here, we’re just talking. Where’s the risk?”
And so a motley group of Ridge-dwellers assembled in Snyder’s barn and drew up an initial document outlining their mission. It read, in part: “The guiding principle of the partnership is that of a cooperative stewardship of the land to ensure that existing resource values are not lost or reduced, but sustained and enhanced for the long-term benefit of not only local residents, but the American people as a whole.”
Figuring out how to do that was maddeningly difficult. One resident objected to plans for thinning the forest on the grounds that it might make his illicit crops more visible to agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Others were simply suspicious of any government representative and any change. “There were people who pretty much hated our guts,” said Bob Erickson, a furniture maker who found himself devoting more and more time to this enterprise. Representatives of every ideology chimed in. There were those who believed the forest should not be touched; those who wanted to manage it according to strict scientific principles; those who wanted to utilize the power of commerce; and those who recoiled at the mention of money. The hours spent reconciling these differences were frustrating for Swickard, who had no budget to pursue the project and had to squeeze in meetings around the gaps in his schedule.
“I remember at one point this woman was in tears,” Swickard said. “She was shaking, and literally crying, begging me not to kill the manzanita. ‘Well lady, we’re going to clear brush so that this whole place doesn’t burn. So yeah, some things are going to die.’ ”
Despite the raw emotions, the meetings made progress. People found that it was impossible to cleave to their abstract convictions when they were talking about something so tangible, so readily observable in their backyards. They could all see what worked and what failed, and this provided a check on ideologically driven debates. As they talked, the rednecks and hippies got to know each other and became less guarded. Compromise became conceivable. Curiosity replaced militant certainty.
When public land administrators produce a management plan they usually conduct thorough environmental assessments but, because there was no money, Swickard suggested that the residents begin surveying the land themselves. The community ably took up the task.
“One of the things this has taught me is to trust the intellectual power of communities,” Swickard said. “I had 30 absolutely great employees, but they all went to land-grant colleges and read the same textbooks and had pretty much the same ideas. But in a community a couple of hundred people will come out with totally different points of view. One guy was a dentist, but he’d spent 30 years watching how things worked in his backyard. On the Ridge we got this top-flight birder, a guy from the Yale School of Forestry [Harkin], and Erickson who has ideas from working with wood. We used Gary Snyder as our scribe to take notes. And all of a sudden you’ve got a hundred minds working with you, rather than being cynical and suspicious. You get fresh ideas.”
One of the most audacious of these fresh ideas came from Len Brackett, a builder of traditional Japanese houses, who suggested that instead of managing the forest like a plantation—to quickly produce cheap lumber—they manage the land to produce the high-value wood that timber-framers like him need. These woodworkers look for timbers that are fine grained, free of knots, and large enough to form the center beam of a barn. That kind of wood only comes from old trees. This idea fit with something Swickard had been pondering for years. Industrial clear-cuts may make sense in some situations, he said, “but it doesn’t make so much sense when you are doing it in someone’s backyard. It’s a pretty violent assault on the landscape. It doesn’t look good, and it doesn’t feel good.”
If Brackett’s idea was implemented with care, it might be possible to reap profits from timber while maintaining the aesthetics and the wildlife habitat of the land. In 1996, six long years after the first discussions began, the community finished its management plan. It was crafted to achieve four goals: more big trees, fewer big fires, diversity of wildlife, and soil conservation. This meant they’d do some selective logging for fire protection, while allowing most trees the decades they needed to get big. Eventually, they’d start selling this high-value timber at a sustainable rate. As Swickard had promised, the BLM adopted the plan.
This could have been an opportunity for the locals to appropriate resources that belong to the country as a whole. But, instead of pillaging the woods, these residents adopted them. They named the land the ’Inimim Forest, after the native term for ponderosa pine, and began cataloging wildlife sightings, noting the trees that housed pileated woodpeckers, and conducting formal frog counts and bird-banding projects. They also began policing themselves. Once, while I was talking with Erickson, we heard the coughing roar of a chainsaw starting up. He swore under his breath and dashed off into the BLM forest near his house. Moments later, the chainsaw hiccupped and died. Locals had been illegally cutting wood from the public land for years—now it’s hard to get away with it. Once the community began managing the forest, they also began to take pride in it, and enforce the rules they’d set.
Formerly murderous tensions—between factions, and toward the administrators caught in the middle—eased. “The BLM could have a lot of trouble up here,” Don Harkin told me. “Instead, they have no trouble at all.” This peaceful accord was remarkable, given that—in the “Timber Wars” of the 1990s—loggers and environmentalists were trying (sometimes successfully) to kill each other with tree spikes and car bombs.
In the years after the residents began managing the land, more creatures seemed to show up in the woods. At a time when biologists were warning that the number of yellow-legged frogs had fallen to dangerously low levels, this species was increasing around the ’Inimim. Members of the Yuba Watershed Institute sighted mountain lions. Spotted owls established nests on adjoining parcels. It’s too early, however, to tell whether the forest can be profitable as well as beautiful. By definition, old-growth forestry takes a long time. The BLM has sold more than $90,000 worth of timber from the land, but this logging consisted only of small thinning projects, and the receipts came nowhere close to covering the costs of management.
There are older forests, however, that provide proof of concept. Arcata, a coastal California town near the Oregon border, owns and manages 2,000 acres of redwood forest, which provides a view for many east-facing windows, and trails for hiking and mountain biking. When I suggested to Arcata Environmental Services manager, Mark Andre, that the only real way to make money in forestry is through intensive plantations, he scoffed. For years, the Arcata Community Forest has stoked the city’s treasury with profits. “The bigger the trees, the less expensive it is to get them out of the forest,” he said (it’s cheaper to build one road to one big tree than to build 10 roads to a lot of little trees). “So we have bigger margins. And when you are thinking about the long term, you have more options as the market goes up or down—as opposed to an even-aged plantation forest where you pretty much have to cut everything at once.” Though truckloads of redwood come out of the forest every year, the city manages the land so that the total board feet standing in the trees has always increased.
Len Brackett, the Japanese-style builder, was hopeful that the ’Inimim could achieve something similar. He’d taken cores from some of the big sugar pines near his house and found that the trees are adding about 2 inches in diameter every 5 years. A younger tree grows faster (and this provides the usual argument for cutting at 60 to 80 years), but because these old trees were easily 8 feet around and 200 feet tall, each inch added to the radius constituted a tremendous volume of wood. Brackett performed some rough calculations and estimated that each tree was growing 300 board feet of wood a year. More importantly, because the trees were tall with few branches for the first 100 feet, the lumber would be what carpenters call “clear” wood: gentle, even-grained, unlikely to warp or crack—the kind of golden wood that sells for over $5 a board foot.
“Three-hundred board-feet of clear sugar pine timber,” he told me, marveling. “That’s the equivalent to $1,500 a year, just from one tree.”
Being in possession of a sugar-pine core myself, I decided to drive out to Len Brackett’s house. It’s an elegant structure with a slate roof and sliding rice-paper walls, held together by joinery rather than nails. The air indoors is perfumed by cedar oils. Brackett, who had finished his day’s work, asked if I’d have a drink with him. He juiced a lemon and made a pair of whiskey sours. We sat on his deck, looking over the creek, and sipped.
My measurement of the sugar pine core put its growth at 1.8 inches in diameter every 5 years—just a little less than his trees had been growing. But I wondered if it was reasonable to expect more people to buy wood at $5 a board foot. Brackett nodded. Most builders would blanch at that price when cheap lumber sells for less than 30 cents a board foot. But, he’d, it wasn’t always logical to build with cheap materials. He’d been convinced of the value of high-quality wood during his apprenticeship in Japan. One of the buildings he’d worked on was part of the Daitoku-ji, a famous temple in Kyoto that had been built in the 13th century.
“We were replacing the roof, and the wooden roof-structure underneath—all made of local pine—was in perfect condition. It had been built around the time they were starting up the Crusades. I’m sure it was expensive, but if you look at the cost over however many generations that is, it makes some sense.”
“When it comes to forest sustainability,” Brackett said, “one thing I would suggest is that you build houses that last a long time and that are so beautiful that no one would ever want to tear them down.”
During the last half of the 20th century, the United States took the opposite tack. After World War II it became federal policy to provide cheap lumber as part of the effort to put veterans in their own homes. When the U.S. Forest Service began to manage its lands more intensively, it didn’t bring in much money (most—often all—of the profits were sucked up to pay for foresters, bureaucracy, and fire control) but that wasn’t the point. The point was cheap timber for cheap houses. By flooding the markets for lumber and housing, the government drove down prices and spurred a new kind of sprawling growth. Levittowns sprang up around the country.
This history, which I considered while sipping a second potent cocktail, cast the imperative for ultra-efficient logging in a different light. It’s true that, if we want wood, we need to cut down trees. But the number of trees required to serve the market, and the land-management strategies demanded by those numbers, all depend—as Harkin says—on what we want. Suburban sprawl and ticky-tacky McMansions require quickly growing trees, and the small-diameter mills that generate two-by-fours and chipboard. They demand, in other words, a style of forest management that efficiently produces low-cost, low-quality lumber. The wood does not need to be perfectly straight or free of knots, it just needs to hold up a roof. The ugliness and uniformity of an even-aged plantation is mirrored in unlovely cookie-cutter developments. Ugliness begets ugliness.
When I said goodbye to Brackett he asked if I was sober enough to drive, and I insisted I was. But I caught myself swaying on the path back to the car, and I decided it would be wise to pause for a moment to think before descending the twisting dirt road back to Nevada City. I was feeling physically clumsy, but mentally lucid. There, in Brackett’s driveway, I was filled with an unfamiliar sense of optimism. What lifted me (with a little assistance from Jack Daniels) was the notion that beauty begets beauty: Beautiful homes could yield beautiful forests, not just the other way around. Instead of a zero-sum game in which any additions to civilization’s side of the ledger must be subtracted from nature’s account, here was a glimpse of land that was growing healthier and more beautiful under the influence of civilization. The ’Inimim Forest was small, but its significance—at least to me—was huge. It was the first concrete example I had seen in which the landscape I’d come to love as a child was both thriving and supporting people. I’d grown up in a world of environmental absolutes: Yosemite Valley and the Central Valley, old growth and clear-cuts, nature trails and strip malls. Under the old system of environmental thought, land was either virgin and therefore sacred, or corrupted and therefore fit for exploitation. As Michael Pollan once put it, “This old idea may have taught us how to worship nature, but it didn’t tell us how to live with her. It told us more than we needed to know about virginity and rape, and almost nothing about marriage.”
On the Ridge I’d witnessed a richer form of relations—this was not just détente between civilization and wilderness, but something that looked a lot like matrimony. For someone who had seen nothing but the ecological equivalents of prostitution and unrequited love, the possibility of loving family relations struck like a thunderbolt.
As a metaphor for the human relationship to the land, marriage acknowledges the failure of tyrannical dominion by either partner: There is no single solution for a marriage, but a million tiny solutions that must be improvised and refined. As a result there are always mistakes: the misplaced word that causes an argument, the controlled burn that licks up into the canopy. Such missteps can be revelatory, and ultimately can improve the relationship, but only if there is someone not blinded by theory who is paying attention. A marriage creates a community of two, while a marriage of people and the land creates something larger: This, wrote Gary Snyder, scribe of the ’Inimim Forest, is the real definition of a commons. Both land and culture depend upon this union of human and nonhuman:
There will be no “tragedy of the commons” greater than this: if we do not recover the commons—regain personal, local, community, and peoples’ involvement in sharing (in being) the web of the wild world—that world will keep slipping away … And, it is clear, the loss of a local commons heralds the end of self-sufficiency and signals the doom of the vernacular culture of the region.
When the question is not how to manage something far away, but how to shape the neighborhood, it’s easier for people to put aside their abstract ideas about what is natural. It’s easier for people to give up absolute allegiance to Mother Nature, or Scientific Certainty, or The Invisible Hand. And when people let go of these abstractions, it can free them up to combine their love of nature with good science and pragmatic economic incentives to devise a system that works with the realities on the ground.
I’d resisted this idea because, to be blunt, I didn’t trust people. We seemed too venal, too cruel, and ultimately too stupid to solve such large problems. But abandoning the search for some universal straitjacket to make people behave, and instead giving them the keys to the asylum, has advantages. Sure, humans turn mean when they think they might be cheated, and cold when faced with a problem beyond their ken, but more frequently they are generous, hospitable beyond all reason. Humans, at their best, are noble, patient, and humble. My teenage-activist self would have objected by asserting that, even at its best, humanity would eventually collapse under its own weight: No matter how clever the forestry scheme, it would be overwhelmed as population rose, would it not? I had to admit that the situation seemed desperate: If it took 6 years for a small group of neighbors to solve a local problem, how long would it take the earth’s billions to ever find solutions for quandaries that are global in scope? But the ’Inimim had kindled a small flame of hope that could not be stifled.
I took this hope back with me to San Francisco. There was a forest around me that I’d never acknowledged, and I resolved to get to know the trees as I knew them in Nevada City. I found there were carob trees a block from my house. I registered the change of brilliant yellow flowers to purple seed pods in the Bailey’s acacia. I noted when the plums blossomed and when the gingkos turned yellow. I noticed for the first time how afflicted with thrips the myoporum trees were, their malformed leaves swelling into clubs around the infections. I began to perceive a new layer of activity around me. And I began to see where I might fit in.
In cities, it’s the streets, rather than the woods, that are the commons, and I began to take an interest in how they were managed. The discussions weren’t so different from the land-management talks in Nevada City—rather than arguing about trees people argued about cars and bikes. I did my best to steer clear of the endless policy discussions and the vitriolic online debates, but eventually I broke down and started going to planning meetings, and occasionally volunteering. I began to find dozens of little ’Inimim Forests—places where small groups of patient people had improved the land by working together, like the timed lights that allow bicyclists to coast through one green after another on Valencia Street. These efforts were designed to make San Francisco more hospitable, but they have also improved the larger commons. As a result, the city has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 14.5 percent below 1990 levels. The work is slow and frustrating. But that’s the nature of tinkering. It can take decades (if not centuries) of attention to work out a political accord that allows civilization to fit comfortably within nature. When more people pitch in, however, it speeds things up.
Before the word politics implied holy war between immovable certainties, it had a meaning associated with the relations of neighbors. The word originally comes, not from notions of scheming and domination, but from the Greek terms for citizen and city: It concerns the tangible question of how best to live together. The ’Inimim Forest was a humble experiment, one that has not yet even fully proven itself. Still, it’s enough to provide hope of a polis that includes the wild, and a wilderness that includes humanity. It’s modest enough that it just might work.