Call of the Wild: Is Nature Dialing 911?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 19, 2004

Byline: John Elvin, INSIGHT

Call of the Wild: Is Nature Dialing 911?

This is the time of year when many of us reflect back on people, events and issues that have given meaning to our lives. I've got plenty to reflect on in those areas, having spent a lifetime covering political intrigue, cultural controversies, junk science and a lot of just plain weird stuff. But of the thousands of news articles and features, the one that continues to stalk me was written a couple of years back for Insight titled "The Wildlands Project: Wild-Eyed in the Wilderness" [April 23, 2001].

It's an unfortunate truth of the news business that, as in the infantry, you have to keep moving. You move in and out of issues and events, in and out of the lives of authorities, critics, perpetrators and victims, ever in motion because the mandate is to report "what's new." No sooner have I created a fat file folder on one topic than it's time to pitch that and get along to the next. But for a couple of years now, this "Wildlands Project" folder has been near at hand. It's chock-full of notes, newsletters, clips and printouts on a project that hopes to revert a good chunk of America back to a wild state.

I guess the story haunts me because, more often than not in my life, I've been fairly wild-eyed in the wilderness myself. I've lived, worked or spent a chunk of time in a good many of this nation's far-out nooks and crannies. I'm writing this from a location that had 7 feet of snow at this time last year, a remote cabin at the top of the mountain literally, the end of the road. From here on into the 9,375 square-mile Adirondack Park it's snowmobiles or, my preference, snowshoes.

The phone here is a little more reliable than the electricity, both of which go out whenever the wind kicks up. Joe, with his old truck that sounds like a cavalry charge, comes to plow me out now and then. Kevin down at the sawmill drops off a load of well-seasoned wood. Less and less frequently I travel the 15 or 20 miles to shop. If something breaks, I fix it or it stays broke.

Interestingly, by some reports it could be said that today the wild is coming to the cities. I wrote recently in this column about a family in a suburban community in Colorado wherein Dad woke up to crunching, tearing sounds outside his window. Having reconnoitered, he aroused the rest of the family to watch a cougar dismantling a deer in their yard [see nation in brief, Aug. 5-18, 2003, and Jan. 6-19, 2004]. The comment made by one family member was that the experience was similar to watching a nature program on television.

Isn't it actually the other way around? The nature program on television is "similar" to what they were watching in the yard, but that TV show is second-hand and filtered. Before their eyes unfolded the blood-and-guts story as old as appetite, and all they could think was that it was "just like on TV." I hate to break the news, but if you turn off that tube and hit the trail you actually could experience how nature feels to the touch and other senses. It's probably due to TV fantasies as much as anything else that a great many people today put their heads and hearts into saving the natural world. Some of these people do as much harm as good. When your heart is full of Bambi cartoon fantasies and your mind is full of abstract concepts "sustainability," "biodiversity" or "deep ecology" can you really see the trees for the forest?

Since the 1970s the notion of conservation has given way to a movement that in its extreme advocates extinction of mankind for the good of the planet. The folks I used to monitor for their radical ideas Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder, Dave Foreman are pretty tame by today's standards. You could even call them mavericks rather than radicals, kind of like me or kind of like some Insight readers I've heard from.

For instance, in one of his provocative essays on wilderness, Snyder seems to be speaking of the people I know who love the wild. They are not weird, orange-haired brats setting fires and shouting about ecotopia. They are, in his words, outdoor people of "a good-humored toughness that cheerfully tolerates discomfort." Abbey is another who was not so much a radical as just a plain old maverick, appalling his ecotopian admirers by urging everyone to join the National Rifle Association. Foreman, once an advocate of so-called "ecotage," now terms those who practice terror tactics "idiots." He identifies himself as a registered Republican and a "redneck."

Times change. I like to think we hear more from the radicals because, while they are jumping up and down in front of TV cameras, we mavericks are out there quietly experiencing the wild. Well, that goes for me anyway. If you happen to be flying over the north country and look down and see three dots crossing a frozen lake, that's me on snowshoes and Shadow, a big wolf of a dog, and Geronimo, a 20-pound Maine coon sort of cat. You want to talk ecotopia, come on down!

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