A friend gifted me the book The Hour of Land, by Terry Tempest Williams.
It's an impassioned work of unabashed love for the wild places, in this particular case the wild that has been bounded within the national park system of the United States. The book includes Williams' exposition of, ruminations on, and adoration for thirteen national parks, ranging from Gettysburg battlefield to the Gates of the Arctic, as well as her advocacy of, as she describes it;
"...a different kind of conversation so that our public lands are seen as out public commons, instead of the seedbed of rancor and violence."
Williams, as a writer, explodes off the page in bursts of passion, poetry, and enthusiasm. She very clearly inspired by these places, and the other untamed lands she describes. "Language and landscape are my inspiration." are her very first words, and through the pages her devotion to the preservation, not just of these delineated spaces but of all the unpaved, unlogged, unmined, unbuilt places, shines like a good deed in a weary world.
It is also a very, very sorrowful work.
Because Williams' invocation of "conversation" and "collaboration" as central, as essential, to the integration of these beloved wild places into the national imagination, the lives and works and beliefs of the people of the United States, is a painful reminder of the complete and utter popular failure of the "environmental movement" in the 20th Century United States.
In my lifetime I've seen three great public or popular movements fail.
Each one began with promise, with hopes of a better nation, dreams of a better people. Each one died in recrimination, dispute, and disunion, leaving the nation, instead, a more bitter, more divided, more impoverished, and more angry place.
Perhaps the most fraught and difficult of the three was also the most ambitious; civil rights.
The failure to truly re-found the United States as a nation of equal justice under law, to undo the centuries-long legacies of the "original sins" of the founding - genocide and slavery (and the racial hatred that underlay them both) - has left all the marks that the acts that sprang from those beliefs unchanged, and the damage and destruction they spawned as toxic and divisive as ever.
Or increasingly more so.
We the People are who we are because in many ways we are still the people our forefathers were. Their strengths are still our strengths...but their evasions, and cowardice, and wrongdoing are still deeply ingrained within us, too, and much of our present Troubles spring from the forehead of our past misdeeds.
That, frankly, is too fraught and difficult to encompass in a blog post. I want to return to it.
But not today.
The second was Occupy.
For perhaps four years - from the Great Recession of 2008 to the final desuetude and dispersal of the "Occupy Wall Street" and associated encampment/protests in 2011 - there seemed to be a genuine opportunity to really, seriously consider whether it was a good idea to return the United States to the economic, political, social, and moral ethos of the original Gilded Age.
I wrote several posts about the failure of that opportunity; here, here, here, here, and, finally, here.
I can't really describe the loss that this failure means any better than I did thirteen years ago:
"Occupy lost it's momentum and has already faded into insignificance.
Which in my opinion will be remembered as a tragedy. The Occupiers had one burning insight; that from the mildly benign oligarchy it had been from 1932 to the late 1970s the U.S. is rapidly becoming a predatory toxic oligarchy through the rapaciousness of its oligarchs. This insight was lost in the foolish cacophony of noise the Occupiers generated and the criminally negligent reportage of the courtier press. I believe that we will one day regret that we did not pay more attention to the rise of the modern aristos.
The result has been a continued slide back to the rampant inequality and social division of the Gilded Age, with the concurrent erosion of the sort of stodgy bourgeois middle-class attitude of the "rest" of the U.S. public as it sees it's decent-wage jobs, it's pensions, it's influence, and it's security ever more crammed down and eroded away. Combine that with the overwhelming sense that gold now makes the rules and that the reopening of government to massive inflows of cash has made individual voting almost meaningless and you get a public that seems to me daily more vulnerable to a demagogue, a "man on horseback" that promises to make those changes that they can't."
And, of course, now He Has Risen:
We've already talked way too much about the ignorant bastard.
This, then, is the third "great failure".
The inability of the American environmentalists - to lump everyone from John Muir through Edward Abbey and Teddy Roosevelt to Tempest Williams in a basket with that label - to convince the American public that the preservation, protection, and expansion of those parts of their own nation (let alone other people's nations, or parts of the world that aren't "nations" in the Westphalian meaning of the term) which aren't already paved, built-over, drilled, mined, logged, farmed, or in other ways "no longer truly wild" is important. A critical public good. An imperative that should be among the first and most important considerations of any and every piece of public business.
Williams published this work in 2015, after nearly eight years of the Obama presidency, in a moment of what I'm sure felt like a triumph for environmentalism, but now feels like a high water mark, the socio-political equivalent of the copse of trees at the crest of Cemetery Ridge where the environment and its defenders found that the battle had not only not been won, but that they were not just going to lose but in many ways would be routed and destroyed.
Williams just can't see that coming.
Instead, Williams name-checks all the lineages that run through the literature and history of the United States environmentalism ("environmentally-concerned", or whatever you want to call people whose ideal is "let's not just fucking pave everything, okay?"); Muir and Abbey who we've already mentioned, Wallace Stegner, August Wilson, Rachel Carson, Wendell Berry, scientists like John Wesley Powell, politicians such as Roosevelt and Sally Jewell and Lady Bird Johnson and Barack Obama, wealthy philanthropists like John D. Rockefeller, as well as dozens of individual activists, public commentors, leaders of everything from native tribal groups to "monkey-wrenching" eco-warriors such as someone named Tim DeChristopher, who briefly gimmicked a BLM oil and gas lease auction in 2008.
She does this to try and center the wild places, and those who love and protect them, deep in the heart of the American story. The intent, clearly, is to make a case for the centrality of that, and them, and a rallying call for the public to join her. To start that "different kind of conversation" with the people she calls out from the other side. The Cliven Bundys, the Dick Cheneys, and the George W. Bushes.
Trump? Holy Hell did she not see that fat fucker coming.
The prose is beautiful, the descriptions lovingly crafted, the care and hope luminous...and all it does is kindle a bright light that shines past her, casting the immense and nearly complete shadow of failure of her cause to create a response, even the most tepid and cautious response, from the damned U.S. public.
Couple of things first, though.
Through the tales Williams' scholarship (or historical knowledge, or whatever you want to call it) or lack of same or, worse, evasion thereof, bugged the shit out if me. It's deeply uneven, sometimes lacking, and in several places it's apparently willful blindness is frankly unsettling.
The one that really jumps out at me is Williams' hagiography of the Rockefeller clan.
This crew is tongue-bathed twice - more than anyone mentioned outside of Abbey, perhaps - once for the old man, John "the public be damned" D's gift of the properties that became a large piece of Acadia National Park in Maine, the other for a similar donation of land by his son and grandson in an area near Yellowstone NP that became "Grand Teton NP".
The rapacious economic life of the plutocratic sonofabitch is never really dragged into the light, and the Gilded Age greed that piled up the cash that bankrolled him, his progeny, and their philanthropy isn't so much as mentioned during the discussion of, say, the carriage roads his wealth carved into Mt. Desert Island and that now are such a symbol of Acadia.
The other is the gloss sprayed over Cesar Chavez' rule of the UFW, eliding entirely the weird Syanon power games he demanded of his staff, as well as Chavez' personal inability to resist putting his chayote in women who worked for him.
That's a problem.
Because there aren't "heroes" in the fictional sense in real life. There's just people. Flawed ones who can do great science, or make great art. Kind, loving ones who can go to work and do horrific things to others they don't see as "us". To write a paean to Rockefeller, or Chavez, and fail to accept and acknowledge their darknesses?
At best that's poor writing.
But that failure pales beside the greater misunderstanding of how completely Williams, like so many of the other mid- and post-mid-century environmentalists, misunderstood how people are.
Which goes back to the genesis of this post, the oddball comment on the previous one, about how the real reason that the global "public" didn't and doesn't rise up in righteous anger at the plutocrats, oligarchs, corporations, and bureaucrats that have and are enabling anthropogenic climate change is because of some black-helicopter/conspiracy-theory brainwashing and/or propaganda and/or bribery and/or something else utterly bizarre and nefarious.
The wild lands? Why aren't all the Good People of Earth defending them? After all, these are, Williams insists, sacred spaces. Liminal. Transcendent. Deeply entwined in humanity, links between that humanity and every other living thing.
We the People - all people - need these wild, unbroken lands.
And that has been the "message" of environmentalism ever since I was a kid in school singing along with Woodsy the Owl.
Woodsy was one of the more public "faces" of what I understand is now often referred to as "the second US environmental movement", the rapid growth in the public presence of concern for what at the time (the Sixties and Seventies) felt like a cascade of horrific bad news about the poisoning of the soil, air, and water across the country.
That the industrialization of the United States had generated a hell of a lot of nasty shit is hardly surprising. That's what the mines and factories and farms did; took materials and made (or grew) other things from them, and then (since the people who owned and ran those factories and farms weren't in business to make the place nice if it cost them money to do that) dumped whatever shit they couldn't use or sell.
Into the nearest hole in the ground. Or lake. Or river. Of, well, fuck, in some poor sonofabitch's backyard if there was nowhere else.
The fun that all the things that the factories and mines and farms gave to Americans meant that they (mostly) ignored all the toxic shit that was in the country all around them.
But the 1960s the bill for all this started to come due.
Rivers caught fire. Toxic air started choking people. Toxic soil, or toxic substances barely covered with soil (Love Canal says hi!) started poisoning people. Drill rigs blew out and vomited crude all over pretty beaches where rich people liked to play.
And, finally, all this nasty shit made people - ranging from the poor powerless schlubs who'd had to live in this toxic stew to the wealthy and powerful and politically connected - begin to worry.
The first "Earth Day" was April, 1970.
The rest of the Seventies were a big time for "environmental" legislation and action in the U.S., which included introducing kids like me to Woodsy and his tree-hugging pals. That's how I remember the "environmental movement"; a singing dancing cartoon character who told me that I needed to pack my trash out of the woods and recycle my pop cans.
What was going on around me while I was too young to understand it was a mad-minute-decade of environmental actions by the federal government.
The Clean Air Act had been passed a decade earlier (1963). But in the Seventies we got:
The Clean Water Act (1972)
Establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1970)
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976)
Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (1980)
Establishment of human health and safety rules and organizations like OHSA (1970)
Endangered Species Act (1973)
Safe Drinking Water Act (1974)
Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (1977)
And then in January 1980 all that effectively came to a halt, because...
...yeah. That fucking guy.
Reagan's election meant the beginning of a now-forty-plus-year era when all the powers that hated the limits and restrictions and costs that required them to not buy, borrow, steal, or shit all over the non-paved (and much of the developed!) parts of the U.S. were back in the saddle with the Hollywood cowboy.
It's instructive to note that the bespectacled little gonif behind Reagan is the poster boy for the GOP's rape-the-Earth-First religion; James Watt, Ronbo's Secretary of the Interior, who saw his job as shoveling as much of the Interior to his and Ronnie's and every GOP cracker's pals as fast as he could.
(Oh, here's a funny paleoGOP/Watt anecdote. His greedy ass got canned because in September 1983 he stood up in front of the business boys of the US Chamber of Commerce and said "I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent." That, in 1983, would get you fired. In 2026? Fuck, you'd probably bag a Presidential Medal of Freedom...)
So after 1980 the environment and environmentalism was on the outside, fighting a defensive battle. When Democrats would get power the wild land partisans would push back...only to lose ground again when the GOP got back in.
From that point the only way to prevent that would have been for the goddamn U.S. public to have been so thoroughly Woodsy-fied that any public attempt to reduce or evade environmental protections would have produced a massive electoral disaster for the authors.
That didn't, and hasn't, happened.
Why?
Here's my theory.
First, on "the environment" the public in general is now, and was, very much as the current voting patterns define it, and that set the task the environmental movement needed to accomplish. About a third is okay with environmental rules and law, anywhere from hardcore Earth First to "well, I'm driving a Prius and I recycle, so yay. me, right?".
Another third is some form of "drill, baby, drill", ranging from the practical users-of-land-for-commercial-gain - everyone from workaday miners to ranchers to real estate developers - through the politically "conservative/Wise Use" types through to the pure wingnut "solar-is-for-pussies" and Bundyesque public-land-thievery goofballs.
And there's some remnant lump in the middle, that's too ignorant to understand and too lazy and/or stupid to learn about the issues.
Meaning that to make environmentalism partisan-voting-proof you'd need to assemble and sustain a solid block of both the left and middle thirds, and probably need to peel off some of the more reasonable of the land-users.
Second, the mainstream U.S. environmental movement didn't succeed in doing that. Largely, I think for several reasons.
One is that the public at large wasn't, and isn't, emotionally (or economically, or politically) invested in the preservation, let alone expansion, of the wild lands. We as a society, and most people as individuals, live in towns and cities. To even get to those wild places, like the national parks treasured by Williams, takes time, effort, and money that many Americans don't have, or don't prefer to spend on a day gazing at or hiking Yosemite Valley as opposed to, say, hitting the rides at Disneyland.
Many people vaguely like the idea of scenic mountains and forests. But the connection is pretty vague for most of us. We don't live there and, frankly, most people find true wilderness kind of scary. Even the manicured "wilderness" of the national parks can seem inhospitable to a society that thinks of food as something that comes from the Safeway and shelter as a two-story townhouse.
Park Service studies suggest that something like 95% of visitors to Yellowstone never wander more than a half-mile or so from their car or RV.
But even many of us who do make that escape don't share the emotional level of commitment needed to push preservation of the environment to the front of the political business line. As a geologist, as a birder, as a GI, I've spent many, many days in the "outdoors", ranging from backlots to truly wild places. Many of the things I do, much of what I love, depends on keeping those places as unaffected by human civilization as possible.
And yet, I don't feel any of the "magic" that Williams describes and that is a large part of similar nature writing. To me the "outdoors" is a combined living room, kitchen, playroom, bedroom, and toilet. It's just a place; a beautiful place I love to visit...but that transcendent joy, that sense of living in those places? I don't feel it. That isn't a good lever to move me, and, I assume, many of those like me. Show me real, practical, everyday benefits? Sure! But pulling the "emotion" string? No.
That makes "wilderness" as a political good a hard sell. Because...
The other is that, like Williams, many of the most impassioned and visible defenders of the wild land are deeply invested in those places, and don't seem to understand precisely how difficult a sell that is to those who are not. The tone of The Hour of Land feels as though Williams believes that just by describing these places, their beauty and power, the readers will be energized to fight for them, to, let's not kid ourselves, make some kinds of sacrifice for them, and that's the really big ask.
Truly preserving the wild lands, the endangered species, means that industrial civilization has to take, or be forced to take, a step back. Everything from CAFE standards to hydropower dams to stuff as silly as paper-versus-plastic drinking straws means that someone, sometime, will have to be forced or encouraged (or a bit of both) to relinquish some thing or activity they want or want to do.
The reality of that makes it simple for anti-environmentalists like Reagan and Watt and the Bushes and Trump to sell that uncommitted third-of-the-public that "those whacky tree-huggers" want to take your plastic straws, hamburgers, coal-roller, airplane travel, snowmobiles...whatever they can sell as something that would be limited by solar power or roadless areas or transgender...okay, well, whatever the "Left" finds appealing.
And, since as noted above, few outside the hardcore enviro faction have that deep emotional connection for the "wild places", whether it's Bears Ears or the local park, that's a damn difficult hill to fight on.
(And here I note that a huge part of the 2026 problem - compared to 1970 - is that environmentalism is hindered by its own success.
In 1970 many Americans knew of some sort of revolting, dangerous, dirty, generally-fucked-up mess made by business or farming or industry. Rivers were on fire, for fuck's sake! The LA basin was a choking cloud of "smog" as tailpipe gases and industrial emissions combined to make breathing difficult.
Now? When was the last time you saw anything like that? The legacy of the environmental regulations of the Sixties and Seventies means that in the Twenties We the People just don't think of "environmental protection rules" as things that keep our air breathable and water drinkable.
So we, as a society, as a nation, aren't particularly arsed to defend them when somebody who can make a buck fucking up the air, water, or soil comes around with a bagful of cash to buy some government.)
And here we are.
The current crop of fascist and Nazi-adjacent MAGAts is exceptionally vile on "the environment"...but as a matter of degree, not of basic beliefs. As we've discussed, the notion that the world around us is here for humans to grab whatever we can however we can, regardless of how fucked up that leaves whatever the grabbers leave behind them has been a fairly broad "conservative" ideal since...well, since at least the days of John D. Rockefeller and Drew Carnegie and Companies, if not all the way back to 1492.
I mean...the white folks that arrived in the hemisphere weren't here to set up drum circles and meditate on the beauty of nature, right?
In the words of the song...
Is there any way out of this?
Sure.
Is it quick, or simple, or easy, or cheap, or painless?
No.
And, if the past forty-odd years have taught us anything, it's damn deadly difficult to get humans in a group to do anything important if it's long, complex, difficult, expensive, and punitive...even when they're not a mob of greedy bastard.
So...yeah. There are days when, even though I'm not utterly hopeless, I just feel like...
...we are soooooooooooo fucked.
1 comment:
Damn Chief, you can write!
Keep clicking those keys.
One other Jesus-gonzo thing attributed to James Watt is that he said, "After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back".
Appealing but he never did actually say that - he did remark to Congress that "my responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns" which is not quite the same thing.
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