Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.
—WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS (1965)
The ancient animals are still available—jaguars, turtles, the night flight of bats. The mountains—the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta—are still full of life, one of the world’s most biologically diverse ranges, eighteen hundred species of flowers, seventy species of bats, fifty species of frogs, and lizards, tortoises, caimans. More than six hundred species of birds migrate through or live here, many found nowhere else on Earth. “And if there is an earthly paradise in these Indian lands, this seems to be it,” wrote the Spanish friar Pedro Simón in 1627. “It is completely crowned by high peaks.… From all its ridges flow streams of golden waters that tumble like crystal snakes from the high peaks deep down into the valley.”
The two Arhuaco Indians, Wilfrido and Atty, indigenous Colombians dressed in white cotton robes and—on Wilfrido—the white cap honoring their snowcapped-peak home, have come down from this heaven to meet with me in the Museo del Oro Tairona–Casa de la Aduana (the Museum of Gold) on the grounds of their ancestors in the seaside city of Santa Marta. Founded by the Spanish in 1525, the city was built atop the ancient home of the Tairona, the people who lived here from roughly AD 900 to 1600, and the Nahuange, who lived here in the seven centuries before that. As we view a display of pottery found beneath the museum during its remodeling, Wilfrido says, “Maybe if they dug more they would have found more of our things.”
As in countless other places the history here is one of “discovery” and destruction fueled by a lust for gold and other spoils. The arrival of the Spanish meant the beginning of the end for the Tairona, who fought the invaders until the turn of the century. When in 1600 the Spanish finally defeated the Indians, they sentenced sixty indigenous leaders to death, burned entire villages, and chopped the body of the Indian chieftain Cuchacique into pieces and placed the mess on display.
And yet, from blood and ashes arose the culture represented before me. Wilfrido, forty-something, and Atty, barely into her twenties, speak their own language to each other and Spanish to me and my hosts. The Arhuaco are one of four tribes that descended from the survivors of the 1600 destruction who fled into the mountains above Santa Marta. Along with the Kogi, Wiwa, and Kankuamo, the Arhuaco share a determination to express to the rest of the world their connection with nature.
“They know me as Wilfrido, but that is a borrowed name,” he says. “I was born at dawn, and that is my name.” His long black hair falls tangled from beneath his white knit hat. He nods at Atty. “Her name is the name of a sacred site, a lake at the upper part of the mountain.” She stands barely five feet tall, with long black hair and canvas tennis shoes beneath her long white smock. Both carry hand-woven black-and-white bags. “The girls represent Mother Earth, and we represent trees,” Wilfrido continues. “Without them we cannot exist.”
For the Arhuaco, the Sierra Nevada range is peppered with more than 360,000 points that when connected form a “black line” that signifies the heart of the world. Understanding these points is the job of their “spiritual fathers,” the Mamus. Wilfrido is studying to become a Mamu, a rigorous years-long initiation into a deeply intimate relationship with nature. For the Arhuaco, writes the ethnologist Wade Davis, “every element of nature is imbued with higher significance, so that even the most modest of creatures can be seen as a teacher, and every feature of the world mirrors the whole.”
“For us all things are sacred,” Wilfrido explains. “Everything that our eyes see, that we can visualize, is sacred. Natural things. Of everything that is sacred, there are some points that are more sacred, that are of paramount importance. It is in those sacred points that the natural laws are written. The indigenous person in the Sierra Nevada, especially the Mamus, we know those ancestral laws, from the rules of the trees, of the animals, the water, the snow, the sea. A Mamu learns from the Mother Earth, from the trees, from the river, from the mountains. That is the university where the Mamu learns.”
There are no holidays in their society, no religious calendar. Their experience of time exists only in relation to what is happening in nature. “Our festivities are when the rain comes, when there are a lot of animals, when the plants start flowering, and the flowers will come, and the bees will come and the small animals will start sucking the nectar from the flowers. When there is equilibrium between the snow and the sea, when there is harmony between what is down here and what is up there. When there is harmony between the cold and the heat. When the life and death understand each other. When day and night are harmonized.”
Foremost among the Arhuacos’ belief is that their care for and attention to nature in the Sierra will guarantee the health of nature elsewhere—that their spiritual work and their way of life are responsible for maintaining Earth’s ecological balance. “Every morning, every time you see the sun, every time you see the moon, every time you see the stars, you have to feel grateful to the gods,” Wilfrido explains. “Every time you have the opportunity of drinking water of a natural source, not from a pipe, of looking at the snow, of sharing with an animal, you have to thank those gods and you have to feel grateful for that.”
“We have,” he offers with a smile, “a very deep connection with the earth.”
Listening to Wilfrido, I’m reminded of Joanna Eede writing in National Geographic about her experience of sitting with a member of a previously “uncontacted tribe” in Brazil. “Our grandparents lived here,” he told her. “I am part of the land. Without the land, we have no life. This place is my home.” Eede was humbled “to imagine how strong the sense of belonging to a place a people must feel after 10, 20, or even 55,000 years rooted to one part of the Earth.” She quotes Davi Kopenawa, a spokesman of the Yanomami people in Brazil, saying, “It is hard to describe how connected my people are to nature. You can’t uproot us and put us in another land; we don’t exist away from the forest.” It’s a thought, Eede wrote, echoed in a Cherokee statement: “We cannot separate our place on the Earth from our lives on the Earth, nor from our vision and our meaning as a people.”
I don’t mean to suggest that any of us in the modern industrialized world can instantly achieve a “very deep connection with the earth.” But we ought not to think it impossible for a human being to have such a connection.
“I want to talk about the gold,” Wilfrido says as we face a display case featuring dozens of small gold figures—jaguars, turtles, bats. “These pieces here were a sacred representation. We do not think about the commercial representation of gold. It was just a way of representing a figure, while at the same time paying spiritual tax—as you pay the light, the Internet, the phone—to the gods of those animals. For that reason, when the Spanish came, we were giving away the gold. It doesn’t have a commercial value to us.”
To say gold has a commercial value in our world is obvious understatement. It is rare, yes, and beautiful, but also just a mineral mined from the ground. Yet this mineral has driven us mad. Maybe the most powerful discussion of this madness for gold—for material wealth—is The Rediscovery of North America, a slim book by the American author Barry Lopez. Lopez takes us back to the moment Christopher Columbus “discovered” America, describing how Columbus stole from the sailor who first saw land the promised prize for doing so, and how “what followed for decades upon this discovery were the acts of criminals—murder, rape, theft, vandalism, child molestation, acts of cruelty, torture, and humiliation.”
It’s hard, I think, to comprehend the viciousness of the Spanish toward the indigenous peoples they found—the dismemberment, beheading, and rape, of how they “cut off the legs of children who ran from them. They poured people full of boiling soap. They made bets as to who, with one sweep of his sword, could cut a person in half. They used nursing infants for dog food.” We have seen this kind of unimaginable cruelty in our own time from the Nazis, most notably, but also from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, from ISIS, from an ever-growing list. The tragic power of Lopez’s book comes from his connecting of the Spaniards’ vicious acts spawned by “a ruthless, angry search for wealth” with an approach to the world that is alive and well today. Nothing has changed, he argues, in our attitude toward the natural world or toward those people whom we see as “other” than us. We still approach the natural world with, as he puts it, “the assumption that one is due wealth,” and no amount of riches is ever enough. We hunger for more, even as the Earth shows in countless ways that this approach cannot continue.
Yet perhaps even more powerful is his positive nod toward the future, his offering a vision for how we might go forward.
This violent corruption needn’t define us. Looking back on the Spanish incursion, we can take the measure of the horror and assert that we will not be bound by it. We can say, yes, this happened, and we are ashamed. We repudiate the greed. We recognize and condemn the evil. And we see how the harm has been perpetuated. But, five hundred years later, we intend to mean something else in the world.
For Lopez, this “something else” begins with “looking upon the land not as its possessor but as a companion… to cultivate intimacy, as one would with a human being.” We would, he writes, “have to memorize and remember the land, walk it, eat from its soils and from the animals that ate its plants. We would have to know its winds, inhale its airs, observe the sequence of its flowers in the spring and the range of its birds.”
We would, in other words, have to learn to approach the world in a way similar to that of the Arhuaco, similar to that of indigenous peoples around the world, similar even to that of those Western traditions and thinkers that have sought to direct us toward a different relationship with the earth than the one we’ve been trained to accept.
Kathleen Dean Moore, author and professor emeritus of philosophy at Oregon State University, is well versed in these traditions, Western and beyond. In books such as Riverwalking, Wild Comfort, and The Pine Island Paradox, she uses personal stories and experiences as starting points for her reflections on our relationship with the natural world. She is especially interested in action, in what we can and should do, and why.
In “What It Means to Love a Place,” from The Pine Island Paradox, Moore takes a rowboat into the early morning fog of the Alaskan bay her family visits every summer to consider the question her title implies. She actually makes two lists, one for what it means to love a place, the other for what it means to love a person. And to her surprise, the lists are the same. The list goes from one to ten, and the first nine come easily, beginning with “To want to be near it, physically,” and “To want to know everything about it.” Her list includes fear of loss, determination to provide protection, and desire: “To want the best for it.” And then she stops, feeling there is something missing but not knowing what.
Then she writes, “Loving isn’t just a state of being, it’s a way of acting in the world. Love isn’t a sort of bliss, it’s a kind of work.” Number ten, she writes in her notebook, is “To love a person or a place is to take responsibility for its well-being.”
A week later, I stand in another Sierra Nevada, this time amid the Mariposa Grove in California’s Yosemite National Park. Here some five hundred mature giant sequoia trees, the largest organisms in the world, face a decidedly uncertain future, threatened by our warming of the planet. The deep brown trunks rise from pine-needled floor like the resting hooves of some enormous animals. Some bases are cracked, some hollow, some almost black, fading upwards into a red-brown trunk. They are like trees made for some larger planet, set here during creation and forgotten. And yet they are ours, the limbs on the largest like trees themselves, growing horizontally, curving up or down or both, like an eight-armed acrobat in some circus show. From a distance, the people at their feet are like ants with cell phones and hoodies, some with cigarettes, the smoke curling into mist.
It’s hard, maybe impossible, to fathom the trees’ age. John Muir reported that “the age of one that was felled in the Calaveras Grove, for the sake of having its stump for a dancing-floor, was about 1300 years, and its diameter, measured across the stump, 24 feet inside the bark.” He reasoned that “unless destroyed by man, they live on indefinitely until burned, smashed by lightning, or cast down by storms,” and that he “never saw a Big Tree that had died a natural death; barring accidents they seem to be immortal.” Another time he spent all day figuring the age of one that had been cut down, crawling on hands and knees to count “with the aid of a pocket-lens.” He eventually counted four thousand rings, “which showed that this tree was in its prime, swaying in the Sierra winds, when Christ walked the earth.”
I am joined in Mariposa Grove by Gus Smith, a Park Service fire ecologist. Gus gained Internet fame in 2013, when he was featured in two short films about that summer’s Rim Fire, California’s worst forest fire ever, a fire that burned more than 250,000 acres, including 100,000 within Yosemite National Park. I’d heard that in some places the fire burned so hot it essentially “killed” the ground, and indeed of the acres burned, more than 40 percent burned at “high intensity,” meaning that not only was all the vegetation killed but all the microbiota in the top inches of soil were killed as well. This kind of destruction, says Gus, is something we almost certainly will see more of in the future.
“All the predictions are that we will have bigger fires,” he says. “The fire season is getting longer, fires are getting hotter, and they’re burning more intensely.” So intensely, it turns out, that they are stumping the computer models firefighters use to fight them. “These fires,” says one California official, “are actually exceeding what our models will even predict.”
When the fires come—hotter and fiercer and more frequently—Gus doesn’t have the option of evacuating. “My job is to drive back up the hill and deal with it,” he says.
“Have you ever been in a situation where you were afraid?”
“Oh, yeah,” he nods. “And I watched a tanker pilot die this summer. It was just brutal. I was a mile away, and I saw the belly of this plane, and I saw the sunlight hit his wing, and then I saw the other wing kind of parallel with it—in a way it shouldn’t be, and I was thinking, what am I seeing? And then a big black cloud of smoke and fire. I was in tears.”
And death, of course, so much death among creatures that cannot move fast enough to escape—all the animals, reptiles, insects for whom the ground is home. And death among the firefighters too, as in the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire that left nineteen “hotshot” firefighters killed.
“It’s usually heat in the lungs,” Gus explains. “When you inhale the heat, it’s basically like a burn. And burns weep. So the insides of your lungs weep and you suffocate, you drown.”
We walk in silence, on a day of rain and few visitors, the ground soft, soggy, the giant trees standing as they have for centuries. We stop by the Grizzly Giant, the hugest-fattest-thickest tree you can imagine—or, rather, even huger-fatter-thicker than you can imagine. I often think about how nothing I ever see in movies or science fiction or television matches the beautiful design of what we already have in nature, from the small—like the stained-glass wings of a dragonfly—to these enormous trees. They are so enormous, in fact, that I’m finding I cannot fit them into my camera’s frame. Every photo I have taken is of a tree’s base or, looking skyward, the crown. The Grizzly Giant, the Bachelor and Three Graces—even when I back away a hundred feet I still can’t hold them.
There is only one place where these enormous beautiful trees grow, and that is right here in this Sierra Nevada, several dozen small groves scattered along a narrow 870-mile band on the west side of the range between 5,000 and 8,000 feet. That’s it. Nowhere else on Earth. They have evolved to grow in this particular ground.
It doesn’t seem possible that these enormous trees could disappear. There are little ones everywhere around the grove, gatherings of small sequoias, spindly fluorescent bluish-green, just starting out in life—and the giants have been here for so very long. But the drought currently strangling California may keep the small trees from developing the robust root system they need. Worse yet, ecologists say that if the drought continues, in a century most of the giant trees could be gone. It turns out that these and other giant trees, some of the oldest living beings in the world, are among the first organisms to feel the pressure of climate change. “We are talking about the loss of the biggest living organisms on the planet, organisms that play a key role in regulating and enriching our world,” says Australian scientist Bill Laurance. “A world where a child can’t stare up in wonder at a giant cathedral-like crown is a very real possibility.”
Unfortunately, the California sequoias aren’t the only big trees in danger. Recent studies indicate that around the world the biggest, oldest trees are in danger from higher temperatures and drier conditions. The journal Science found “rising death rates among trees 100 to 300 years old across a wide range of global landscapes.” Craig Allen, a top USGS tree expert, confirms that “globally no major forest type is immune to episodes of drought- and heat-induced mortality,” and that it’s happening “from the Amazon to Alberta and everywhere in between.”
How strange it is to walk among these giant trees and try to imagine them gone. Then to think that it’s our choice to burn fossil fuels like the fracked oil and gas I saw being produced in Appalachia that might have a hand in the erasing. To love these trees that take your breath away is easy. But to then, as Kathleen Moore writes, take responsibility for their well-being? At some quick point the threat feels overwhelming, the task beyond our control. To turn away feels like an understandable reaction. And yet, here we are in this still-beautiful world that with its every sensory gift asks only that we respond.
Miles Silman, a Wake Forest University biologist who has worked in the Peruvian Amazon for more than a decade and seen the unrelenting change brought to that wildest of grounds by climate and population growth, knows this dilemma well. A man with an ever-present smile, Miles is passionate about his science, but he’s equally passionate about his role as father to three grade-school-age children. He knows that the world they inherit will be dramatically different from the one we know now. He recently returned from South Africa, where he experienced a new kind of zoo, a national park enclosed by fences, with the animals contained and where there’s no longer natural migration. Instead, “every lion’s branded—it’s been caught—and then they ship them from park to park,” he tells me. “So they don’t have migration corridors anymore, they have FedEx.”
My question for Miles is, What keeps him going when it would be easy to lose hope about the future of a world he obviously loves? “One of the points that I have been making in my talks recently—and a lot of what I have to say to people is a brutal downer, there isn’t a whole lot of good news—is to remind people, after you’ve shown them all the things we are doing to the planet and all the things we will have to do to feed eleven billion people and keep from driving everything else extinct, is that things get better on the other side. You think about all the things we’re doing—increased temperature, disassembly of ecosystems, deforestation—all this is taking the world as we know it and passing it through a bottleneck. But the world doesn’t end in 2100. Eventually, the population will come down, temperature will come down, and all of the pressures that human consumption puts on the planet will go away. We’ll decarbonize the economy. Then the question is, What world are you left with?”
There have always been challenges in the world, Miles says, but the difference with the changes we are causing now is that, unlike events such as wars, in which the effects are mainly felt by humans, this time “We’re taking down the rest of the world with us. We’re taking out all the megafauna, and we’re going to take out, depending on how narrow the bottleneck is, up to half of the species on the planet. That’s different, because that doesn’t come back. We’ll come back, but the rest of it relies on what we take with us.”
And that, Miles says, is where the actions we take now matter. Anything we can do to keep that bottleneck wider will help shape the world we get on the other side. While right now humans are exceeding nature’s capacity, that won’t always be true. Eventually, fertility rates will begin to decline. By 2200 or 2300, for example, estimates are that the human population may well be back to seven billion people—or even far fewer than that.
Of course, just as we can’t know exactly how much carbon the Arctic’s thawing permafrost will release, we can’t know the exact number of our future population. But we know the direction we’re heading. According to the most recent UN projections, from 2015, “there is an 80% probability that the population of the world will be between 8.4 and 8.6 billion in 2030, between 9.4 and 10 billion in 2050, and between 10 and 12.5 billion in 2100.” In terms of population, the future numbers all depend on people’s behavior, Miles tells me. For example, once developing countries acquire Western levels of wealth, will they then adopt the very low Western birthrates? Already, at least, the world’s population growth rate is falling, and some studies predict the world’s population will fall as low as one billion in the year 2300.
Whatever the exact number, assuming that the human population does indeed fall below today’s level, “All of a sudden, things don’t look so bad anymore, right? They’re not so dire,” he says. “The question then is, What have we taken with us when we get back to that point? What can we bring through? On some level, you’re setting up the world as the ark, and the flood is what we’ve unleashed on ourselves. I like the thought of looking at the world as an ark,” Miles continues, “because at least it gives you agency.”
Here is where our purpose lies. There’s every reason to do everything we can right now to preserve and conserve the world’s natural wealth and beauty, because we know serious change is coming, right? “Yeah, it’s on us. It’s what we’re going through, but it’s still at the wide part. The question is, How narrow is it going to get before it broadens back out again?”
I am reminded of talking with Susan Natali about thawing permafrost, and her saying that at least it’s better to know. Denying the looming threats won’t mean they will disappear. But if Miles is right, at least we can get to work doing all we can to soften the blow.
How to do this? My sense is that there are countless ways. I am more convinced than ever that our literal and figurative separation from the ground beneath us—and the unlimited potential of sacred ground for connecting us to what matters—is key. I think of Norman Wirzba telling me, “Theoretically, at least, any place, any ground, is sacred because all ground, in some way or other, contributes to the life that’s happening above it, making it possible. There’s no reason that my raspberry patch isn’t also sacred ground. And to realize that that raspberry patch is sacred in some small way means that I now have to relate to it in different sorts of ways.”
But what if we have no raspberry patch, or any immediate access to anyplace—let alone a Treblinka or an Alaska—where we might feel the unmistakable sense of the sacred? What if, as Wirzba described, “our suburban life, urban life, automobile life, pavement life, all of that, puts the barricade between us and that sort of experience, and we can’t experience the places of our lives as sacred?”
What if we have nowhere we came from, or nowhere we want to return?