I walk daily with my four-month-old Labrador retriever puppy on the Tolt Hill pipeline nature trail, which runs behind my home in the Fallbrooke housing development in unincorporated Woodinville, Washington. The pleasant, tree-lined trail is twenty yards wide and is bordered by houses, undeveloped tracts of land, and horse pastures. An enormous pipe is buried beneath the trail that transports water from the Cascade foothills and delivers it to water treatment plants in Seattle before it is dispersed through water mains to one million-plus inhabitants in the Seattle metropolitan area. Occasionally, I see wildlife such as red-tailed hawks, bald eagles, white-tailed deer, tadpoles, bullfrogs, snakes, raccoons, and porcupines. As the Redmond Ridge and Blakely Ridge developments south of my neighborhood grow into master planned developments of more than 4,000 homes, I see more wildlife run loose in the neighborhood, reminding me that it is not just the flora that is affected by destruction of wilderness, but also the fauna. We humans compete with the wildlife for habitat on this planet. My neighborhood was constructed four years ago. Prior to then, it was a mix of undeveloped land with second- and third-growth cedar and Douglas fir alongside farms and horse pastures. The homes in my subdivision rest on acre-size lots and water retention basins dot the neighborhood; the basins regulate the flow of copious amounts of rainfall. Most lots retain second- and third-growth evergreens, as well as maple and alder trees, and are "improved" with cultivated gardens and lawns. None of the land in my neighborhood qualifies as "wilderness," and as author Carolyn Merchant describes it in her contribution to the 1996 book Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, the area that I live in is a manifestation of the "American Heroic Recovery Narrative." After arriving in North America, European settlers followed the "mythic heroic narrative" in taming the wilderness, clearing areas for planting crops, raising domesticated animals, and civilizing the "wild savages" — the American Indian. Like a post-European settler, I live in an area that is no longer wilderness and is "developed" and "improved" for mankind. My choice of words such as "developed" and "improved" are telling of the lexicon used to describe the changes that humanity has wrought on nature. I use words such as "developed" contrasted with "undeveloped" and "improved" contrasted with "unimproved." These words unveil the human viewpoint or lens through which I see nature. Take for example the word "improved." Land that has been cleared and built upon is somehow better; it is improved. Land that is still wild is undeveloped, as though it contains potential energy, awaiting a human hand to shape the land into something useful. My lexicon is not unlike Merchant’s when she refers to the language of European settlers of America. Merchant quotes such words as "improving," "redeem," and "civilization" from the 18th and 19th centuries, words that settlers used to describe their changes to the wild landscape. European settlers described the condition of the wilderness as "unjustly neglected" and "abused." The wilderness that I experience in my neighborhood appears in the form of animals. Two weeks ago on one of my daily walks, I saw a coyote in one of the nearby horse pastures. He paced among clumps of short grass and horse droppings. I immediately recalled that the last time I had seen a coyote was three years ago in the previous housing development I lived in north of Redmond. That time, the coyote stood at the end of a small nature trail on a sidewalk in the middle of the day. He quickly disappeared. This time, however, we stood and watched each other for about ten minutes. He walked back and forth, a football field’s length from my puppy and me. The puppy finally noticed the coyote, but she wisely maintained the spacing between herself and the coyote, between domesticity and wildness. We finally left, leaving the coyote in his pasture. After walking a few paces, I turned around and saw the coyote lie down in the afternoon sunshine. Further up the trail, I heard the knock-knock of a woodpecker in a dead alder tree. It was a pileated woodpecker with a distinctive red crest, but its beak was not pecking the tree trunk, even though I heard a chipping sound. Below the first woodpecker a few feet was another pileated woodpecker. Its beak tapped wood. I watched several minutes while the pair chipped away flecks of dead wood, searching for insects. Merchant describes the efforts of the European settlers of America as "subdu[ing] the ‘wilderness.’ " I appreciate that I live comfortably on the coattails of the European settlers’ work. Yet, part of me longs for a more cooperative relationship with nature, even as many acres continue transforming from "undeveloped" to "developed" to meet humankind’s wants. What if I re-imagine my definition of nature? Nature might include domesticated animals, post-old-growth timber, cultivated gardens, farmland, horse and cow pastures, skyscrapers, and humans. This re-imagining lessens the guilt I feel when I contemplate what humans have done to wilderness. However, my re-imagining nature does little to repair the relationship between humans and nature. As in any intimate relationship, humans need to work on give and take, mutual respect, honor, and compassion. Mother Nature provides humans with intermittent reminders as to who is in charge. The 6.8 earthquake that recently rattled the region and the impending summer drought are two good examples. And who can forget hurricanes, tornadoes, windstorms, floods, and avalanches? Global warming is another means for Mother Nature to communicate her displeasure to humans for consuming her natural resources without replenishing. If power plants and automobiles continue to dump millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and rainforests continue to vanish, humans are unlikely to survive the effects of the likely rise in global temperature. This may be "catastrophic" to humans, but to Mother Nature, this catastrophe is a means of replenishing the earth. After all, the earth is four billion-plus years old; humans are just a blink in geological time. We have lived on Earth for a measly tens of thousands of years. As noted earlier, the "heroic narrative" that the European settlers brought with them to America is still used by "civilized" nations to justify the development of wilderness and consumer goods. The work justified by our heroic narrative is puny compared to Mother Nature’s work over four billion years. Mother Nature reveals her own narrative through "natural disasters" and dwindling natural resources. Her narrative contains two messages. One: Don’t forget, humans, I’m in charge. And her other message: If "developed" countries continue charging down the path of consuming nonrenewable sources of energy, producing consumer goods, and "improving" wilderness by making it disappear, I will take back my home and kick you out. Humans need to find ways to honor Mother Nature with ritual and ceremony and to live in harmony with her as "civilizations" respectfully take only what is needed and replenish whenever possible. Otherwise, I imagine that the end result of our destruction of wilderness will be the eradication of the human race. Tom is a graduate student in mythological studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California. He is a freelance writer, essayist, and poet. |