If you ever get a chance to visit Chaco Canyon National Monument in New Mexico, you should take the time to just stand in the desert and listen. The silence in this place is physical; you can feel it surround you. This is a silence with depth and layers that are unbroken even by the wind, which moves through emptiness and speaks only in occasional sighs through the canyons. The air itself is very clear—the lack of humidity gives the cliffs and buttes sharp lines, and the colors of the earth, though muted, stand in stark relief to the blueness of the sky. Night comes gradually to this place. The height and dryness of the air allows the stars to appear before the sun has set—creating an odd contrast of light and darkness in which night is falling on one horizon while the sun reddens the other. Standing on the cliff tops you can see the sky deepen from blue to black. At night the only lights come from the stars and moon, and the faint smear of light that is the city of Albuquerque, fifty miles away. This small blemish on the horizon haunts my memory in some ways, like an eyelash in the eye, because I know that twenty years ago the night was perfectly dark.
In his book Cosmos, Carl Sagan quotes two amateur astronomers as saying, “We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” But my question is, if we do not fear the darkness, why do we constantly seek to keep it at bay with our streetlights and floodlamps? Emerson declares that if man would be alone, let him look at the stars. With the defeat of the night, we have also blocked out the stars. Do we fear isolation? Or is it the undeniable presence of uncontrollable forces or of decay that is present and necessary to natural processes? The stars, he continues, “separate between [one] and vulgar things.” Or are we merely arrogant?
These are issues that I often ponder. I realize this consciousness is atypical of many of my compatriots. However, the roots of my compulsive musings are not wholly random because I was subjected to much similar thinking from an early age. Having grown up in a region where civilization and development were slow in coming, and where trees outnumber cornstalks and coal mines corn silos, we had ample opportunity to reflect on man’s relationship to nature. My parents are two well-educated, biologically trained individuals with an almost obsessive need to be outdoors. They met, so the story goes, in a graduate school class when my mother asked my father for his pocketknife to scrape moss from a tree trunk. It was love amongst the bryophytes. They spent several years trekking all over the U.S. on vacations to national forests and monuments and deserts and mountains, and my arrival on the scene did not cease their wanderings. Though I did restrict the locale. There are numerous pictures of one of my parents standing on some wooded ridge with the peak of my red hat sticking up over their shoulder.
Once I was old enough to scramble along the trails by my own power, my father began taking me to work with him. In those days, he was a state biologist, and by the time I started kindergarten, I had been all over the state hiking, trapping, caving, camping, and generally running as a feral child. School was a change in routine, though on nice days, either one or both of my parents would take my brothers and I out of school and on what they called “forced marches.” This usually involved a long hike through the woods or prairie or swamp of their choice, the only stipulation being a rule against talking too much. For a long time, I would bask more in the glory of the day off and extra parental attention than in the natural wonders around me. Consequently, I listened minimally to what my parents tried to teach us about the environment we were exploring, something I rue to this day as I struggle through my biology major. My usual idea of communing with nature at first involved what we could fit up my brothers’ noses, and who could run the fastest down the trails. Now that I’m older, I am beginning to understand my parents’ fascination with the natural world. Some people turn to drugs, others to exercise, still others to religion to find refuge and strength. My family hiked.
Nature exists as a system that is changing, and is to a point independent of us. It has depth and permanence and an intricate balance that will outlive memory. The gift my parents tried to give us through forced marches, the wilderness treks, the camping trips, and the teachings is a sense of finding solace in nature that extends beyond its physical presence. I do not mean being a “transparent eyeball” as in Emerson’s estimation, but being part of a greater presence of which I am a small part.
Aldo Leopold writes that recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind. This is an interesting statement, for instead of fostering a need to change the world around us to fit our peculiar needs, it challenges us to turn inward. The fault, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is no longer in the stars, but in ourselves. Development implies an improvement. If we build roads into wild places and build hotels and run sewer lines and electricity and cable into them so we can enjoy an escape from life, a “re-creation,” we have somewhat defeated the purpose. Does technical, scientific, or recreational development necessarily imply cultural development? Or are we still merely making the tools that separate us from lower primates?
In the John Prine song “Paradise,” he describes the gradual destruction of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, where “they dug for the coal ’til the land was forsaken/then wrote it all down as the progress of man.” “Progress” has come to mean a building of power and control with the connections to an improvement of the collective condition fairly ambiguous. We seek to dominate rather than balance, and as a result, systematically destroy the origins of our “progress”. Wild places seem to offer by their very presence of interdependence a slight to the progress of humanity. Our thirst for wealth and advancement has made us unable to accept that we are not gods of the earth. We are uncomfortable with those things we cannot control or understand. This does not only apply to our relationship with nature, but also with each other. Evidenced in the Jim Crow laws of the South, the perseverance of neo-nazi groups, and the decimation of native cultures during settlement, we find ourselves unable to cope with the diversity that, in the end, is the foundation for the stability of the natural world.
My father always said that man’s condition becomes more and more deteriorated as he becomes farther removed from a respect of the land. I have grown to agree with him. It seems to make sense that if you are always surrounded by the temporary, by the manmade, you are trapped in a world with little depth and a sterile mortality, for there is nothing outside of yourself and those things of your own contrivance. In nature there are cycles of life and death that do not signal endings or beginnings, but rather a vitality and timelessness that is something greater than the sum of its parts. More than this, I believe that the health and very soul of a nation can be indicated in its treatment of the land. If we are unable to raise ourselves above a wanton destruction of resources for personal gain with little regard for those effected by it, or those who will come after, how can we expect to respect or be respected? How can we as a society say that education and the futures of our children are important if we give little thought to the environment we leave them in? How can we raise a cry against human rights atrocities in the third world if we turn a blind eye to the conditions for our own children? Or for those who must live in polluted watersheds or next to Superfund sites, or in the shadow of the municipal dump? How can we set an example of development if ours is so based in destruction and degradation?
Are we arrogant? Yes, I think so. Do we fear the darkness? I think so, because in it we see that we are not as powerful as we hoped. The sun will rise and set regardless of our presence, and darkness is always present. We have created an isolation that leads us to fear the world that created us. Are we hopeless? I hope not, because the intellect and creativity and ingenuity of the human mind are beautiful things. I am not saying we should chuck it all and go back to nature. The natural world is a harsh, brutal and impartial place, and we as sentient beings could not fit in. Rather, I argue that “development” and “progress” should be holistic, an improvement of the mind and soul as well as the body. Thoreau once said that in wilderness can be found the salvation of the world. It forces us to turn outside of ourselves and seek a social consciousness that extends beyond “individual rights” to human rights, and a greater reconciliation with the world around us. Perhaps then we can accept the darkness, because we will no longer fear the night.