If You Unbuild It, Will They Go Away?

By Hillary Rosner, 6-25-05

The Denver Post reported Friday that parts of Colorado's St. Vrain State Park might be "sliced by a slab of roadway" to help divert traffic from a clogged stretch of I-25. Proponents of the road, in Weld County, say the fast-growing area needs an alternative to the interstate, that it will improve traffic flow, and that a new 2000-home development north of the park will only increase the congestion. On the other side, opponents argue that traffic on the road, which would cut a mile-long swath through the park, will disturb sensitive terrain, including the breeding and nesting grounds of heron. They say the road—which would carry 15,000 cars a day by 2025--will destroy a last oasis of wildlife and wetlands in an area increasingly defined by sprawl.

Reading the story, with its accompanying photos of nesting herons and the river that the new road would cross, made me wonder which direction we're headed. Will natural areas always lose out to growth? Are we moving toward a time when wild places are increasingly revered and valued, or a time when development always proceeds no matter the price?

In his new introduction to the fourth edition (2001) of Wilderness and the American Mind--the 1967 classic--Roderick Nash makes the case for the former. "American wilderness appreciation and preservation," Nash writes, "must be understood as recent, revolutionary, and still incomplete. Rather than being discouraged at the lingering public distrust of what relatively little wild country remains, contemporary wilderness advocates might remember that in terms of history, they are riding a very recent intellectual wave."

Followers of Nash's hopeful school of thought tend to see contemporary anti-conservation or anti-environment decisions—whether raising allowable arsenic levels in water or permitting oil drilling in the wilderness—as simply small steps backward in what is otherwise a forward-moving front. Building a highway through a state park is a holdover, an attempt to cling to a more exploitative past, and the tide of public opinion will soon come in and sweep that past out to sea. In this context, small parts may be sacrificed but the larger whole will ultimately survive.

I'm a fan of Nash; I envy his optimism. But his vision for the future hinges on humans' willingness to put limits on growth, to make conscious decisions to radically alter their way of life out of respect for our planetary cohabitants, animal and vegetable. "As the new frontier opens before us," Nash writes in the book's new epilogue, "it's time for new frontiersmen who understand that what really needs to be conquered is not nature but ourselves." If only…

I want to believe—but I'm not sure where these "new frontiersmen" will emerge from in a world where for every new hybrid in the Whole Foods parking lot, there's a Hummer with a bumper sticker that reads: " Earth First: We'll mine the other planets later." While it's true that concern for the environment and respect for wilderness still seem to be growing among Americans, it's also true that these values are always low down on the priority list. It's not that people don’t like the idea of the Arctic National Wildlfe Refuge; it's that it's so very far away, and in the meantime they want to drive to Whole Foods and fly around the world on vacation and live in spacious centrally air-conditioned homes. And there aren't very many people who consider caribou migration routes when making daily decisions—although it's exactly the aggregate of all our daily decisions that lead to policy decisions like opening massive wilderness areas to oil drilling.

Nash writes—again, in the 2001 epilogue--of a utopian vision called "Island Civilization," in which future human civilizations occupy "several hundred concentrated 'habitats,'" and evacuate the remainder of the planet. "The rest of the planet, indeed almost all of it, would be left alone, uncontrolled, and wild," Nash explains. "Instead of islands of wildness (or parks) in a civilized matrix, it is civilization that is contained."

How can you convince people to unlive where they live? How do you not just stop but reverse the sprawl that leads to road construction across state parks, as in Weld County? Not just stop building new subdivisions, but tear down the ones that already exist? And who, exactly, gets to remain where they are? In the future, might the government be able to use eminent domain—the subject of a landmark Supreme Court decision last week—to remove people from vast areas of the country in order to return those areas to wilderness?

This July, I'm heading to Iceland to visit a vast wilderness area, a highland region of canyons and waterfalls and lichen fields, that's about to be flooded; dams on two glacial rivers will power an aluminum smelter owned by Alcoa. There's something incredibly bittersweet about this sort of "see it before it's gone" journey. It can inspire you to protect what's still left, but it can also leave you despondent over the loss. What would Nash say about the Iceland project? Is there a way to give it a hopeful spin?

"By definition we don't dominate wilderness," Nash writes, "and so it suggests the importance of sharing, which was, after all, the basis of the ethic of fair play that we did not learn very well in kindergarten."

I might as well confess now that I come from the things-are-bad-and-getting-worse-and-please-can-I-just-hide-under-the-covers-for-a-while-longer camp. I'm the one who ruins the Pacific Northwest vacation by constantly exclaiming, as we cruise the beautiful winding roads of the Oregon coast, "Oh my God! Look at those clear cuts!" But I'm open to being persuaded.

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By Hillary Rosner, 6-25-05 | add comment | email story | print story