Doctor Science kindly reposted one of my articles over at Daily Kos, and there are more sympathetic and interested commenters there than I would have guessed, or hoped. It seems the campaign to inspire people to preserve desert wildlands has made some headway in the last couple of years.
And yet there are still the expected people who insist on holding to the notion that deserts are worthless by definition:
Deserts are called deserts for a reason - their ecosystems are marginal.
Or even better:
Last summer, I drove across the country[.]
After I got west of the Mississippi River, I found myself for much of the time driving through wasteland. An occasional ranch here and there, but not much else for miles and miles and miles and miles.
The land didn’t appear to be “usable” for anything - not even recreation. It was, frankly, quite ugly.
… There’s a whole lotta empty out there. Until you drive it, you don’t have an appreciation for just how much land is unused and unusable.
That last, of course, brought to mind Ed Abbey’s fabled quote from Desert Solitaire:
In the first place you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe.
… as well as a line from Terry Tempest Williams’ Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, that I had coincidentally found and posted as a Facebook status update just yesterday:
These wildlands are alive. When one of us says, ‘Look, there’s nothing out there,’ what we are really saying is ‘I cannot see.’
But really, I think the most appropriate response — if I’m to sling quotes rather than write my own words — is this passage of Williams’ from a few pages later in Red. The words — as well as the epigram above — come originally from testimony Williams gave to Congress on a bill affecting wilderness in Southern Utah.
Mr. Chairman, if you know wilderness in the way you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. We are talking about the body of the beloved, not real estate. We must ask ourselves as Americans, “Can we really survive the worship of our own destructiveness?” We do not exist in isolation. Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life-forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.
Senate Bill 884 falls desperately short of these ideals.
Who can say how much nature can be destroyed without consequence? Who can say how much land can be used for extractive purposes until it is rendered barren forever? And who can say what the human spirit will be crying out for one hundred years from now? Two hundred years from now?
We fool ourselves if we can gauge the worth of a piece of land by driving past it — or by discussing it via internet from the comfort of our desk chairs. We fool ourselves if we think our welfare is not irrevocably tied to that of the tortoise, the bighorn, the Mojave milkweed.
But beyond that, even if we could live without the desert wildernesses we’d so blithely pave to generate the power to run our blowdryers, there are those of us who would fight the destruction of that desert. It is the body of our beloved. You could live without your sweetheart, your mother, your sons and daughters. The world would go on were they to be tortured, held captive or enslaved. But would you? Would you engage in cost-benefit calculations over the commercial value of your loved ones’ skin and sinew, tell yourself that there were plenty of people left in the world to love?
When some people say the desert is “ugly,” I think they are really saying that it’s too challenging, too wild,—too frightening—for comfort. My late grandmother was one of those people. She would look at my dad’s color slides of the mesa country of New Mexico or the Sonoran desert in Arizona and comment on the bare rocks. She preferred a nice, green farm in Missouri. A nice, tame landscape. A “usable” landscape, in the words of the comment above.
Maska:
When some people say the desert is “ugly,” I think they are really saying that it’s too challenging, too wild,—too frightening—for comfort
I disagree, I think this is very rarely the case. I think they’re usually saying that it just isn’t *green* enough. Green landscapes can be plenty wild and challenging—forests aren’t necessarily tame—but they’re very thickly coated with life.
I live in NJ, and every spring when the grass and leaves come back my eyes feel *happy* again, just looking at the green. If you’re used to seeing green, green, green everywhere you look, a desert landscape *can* seem very ugly, painted in brown and gray and rust instead of a billion shades of green and pulsing life.
Chris you are doing exactly what needs to be done regarding people and their ignorant views of the desert. Through your eyes we can see just how beautiful the desert is and the emotions it can invoke. I’m guessing you’ve changed more than one persons opinion about desert aesthetics and ecology.
Humans often confuse a sparse habitat with no habitat. As you know part of the real beauty of any extreme condition habitat is the animals that have evolved and adapted to living there. These wonderful creatures hold secrets that we can only discover by close observation and imagination.
I for one thank you for your efforts. My eyes are wide open.
Bill:www.wildramblings.com
Maybe those who can’t see the beauty of the dessert need to sit at sunrise in total silence and feel the power of the land. It left its mark on me forever.
Nothing prepared me for the wild joy I felt when I saw the desert for the first time when I was 14. I was on a car trip with my family. We camped, we looked, we listened. I’ve lived in the green places of the northeast all my life, but that sun and sky burrowed into a little hole in my head and never left. We can’t live without it if we’re really going to live.
Doc Sci’, if there are a billion shades of green, there must be at least some millions of shades of NOT green, right? Some of the best color is the subtle stuff, and deserts—from my favorite Great Basin to the Mojave and Sonoran and the rest—possess a remarkable, if mostly muted, palette.
Living in Denver, I too rejoice in spring greenery after winter’s brown. But I rejoice more when I go deep into the desert to appreciate its hidden life and unexpected color.
The desert is not a place to go to be constantly entertained. It is a quiet place to sit and think, to look at stars and ponder one’s existence among nature. It’s a place to spend time, not a place to rush through. Even just camping out, one notices that the light is always changing in its subtle colors. There IS green there, but you must look for it. The ocotillo, for instance, has tiny round green leaves on its tall stick branches after the winter/spring rains. Then fire-red flowers at the tips which may even be seen from the highway. Desert holly with its tiny soft grayish white leaves and tiny dark red berries. That’s the point of the desert, you must actually be looking to see its beauty. If you are lucky enough to spend any length of time in the desert, you will eventually see all sorts of mankind wandering through it; some kooky, some interesting, some from foreign countries; all interesting.
When cities move into the desert, it’s an entirely different story. I used to live in El Centro and Brawley in the Imperial Valley. Before they started growing cotton, it was the salad bowl of the west. But people still needed their lawns and to have them in 125 deg. heat of summer required lawns to be one inch below the surrounding concrete so it could be flooded to give it enough water to survive. Now that’s insanity!