A Tapestry of Dirt
The American tradition of quilt making came to this country on the same ships that brought the first colonial settlers. Crafted by generations of caretakers and storytellers, each quilt is in itself an act of prose, a narrative stitched together across time and space. The quilt doesn’t start as a warm and cozy heirloom but instead as a small and seemingly benign piece of material, a rag of sorts that has been imbued with the hopes and dreams of an American. In the hands of its maker, however, it quickly gains heft, importance, and utility as it’s stitched to other unique but decidedly similar scraps that would also seem useless if encountered by their lonesome. Together, however, they are woven into a monument, an artifact that transcends the physicality of its own being and enters into annals of a history that it alone belongs to. The same could be said about our public lands.
The systems through which our natural heritage is managed work together to not only maintain and nurture the cultural and ecological narratives that they are imbued with but also to craft the story of what they can and will become. In a transient mind, the visitor is made to feel free by their impermanence, the geo-political assemblage of institutionalized land management organizations, policies, and mandates pen a story that perpetuates a long-standing hierarchy of grandeur through which the gravity of the wildlands is felt. It is of course no accident that the national park system is our first line of defense in the battle against the pressures induced by the continual growth of industrial tourism, it is instead by design. Our national parks are designed to be enjoyed, their sole purpose is to encapsulate and protect specific enclaves of cultural and ecological significance. They are made to be relatively safe, simplistic, and accessible so that they can cater to a variety of visitors with different needs, goals, and values. In a national park, the visitor experience relies as much on the paved roads, historic lodges, shuttles, gift shops, and other amenities as it does on the vistas, flora, and fauna that make up its ecology.
In a 1985 essay that she wrote in response to The New Topographics, titled Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men, Deborah Bright writes:
“In the American consciousness, then, the western landscape has become a complex construct. It is the locus of the visually spectacular, culled from the total sum of geographic possibilities, and marketed for tourist consumption. For liberal conservationists, it represents the romantic dream of a pure, unsullied wilderness where communion with Nature can transpire without technological mediation, a dream that has been effectively engineered out of most modern experiences. Once considered the essential ingredient in character formation, Nature has become commodified; its benefits can be bought and sold in the form of camping fees, trail passes, and vacation packages at wilderness resorts.”
Nobody will let us forget that Wallace Stegner called national parks “The best idea we ever had.” Less harped upon, however, is the full quote… “The best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” Sure, the institutionalized protection of our nation’s dirt, sea, and sky is an idea that I resonate with to the core of every atom from which I’m made, but are our national parks really only an embodiment of that?
Our national parks are, indeed, reflections of us but not at our best, not even kind of.
Terry Tempest Williams writes that, “By definition, our national parks in all their particularity and peculiarity show us as much about ourselves as the landscapes they honor and protect; They can be seen as holograms of an America born of shadow and light; dimensional; full of contradictions and complexities. Our dreams, our generosities, our cruelties and crimes are absorbed into these parks like water.”
National parks are as much stewarded for their legacy as they are for their wildness, and their most iconic attractions end up on license plates and on every type of souvenir you can think of, available in every gift shop, hotel lobby, and gas station, for more than a hundred miles in every direction. In many cases this legacy is at least in part fictitious, an exclusionary narrative that frees our romantic notions of wildness from some of their darker histories. The establishment of our national parks was also the dismantling of indigenous ancestral homelands as we murdered, evicted, and/or dissuaded indigenous folks in order to be able to call our public lands wild. The footprint of a national park goes far beyond its borders in the hearts and minds of past, present, and prospective visitors the world over, a towering monolith that all other land designations are forced to fall in line behind.
For many Americans, especially those who call major metropolitan areas home, the optics surrounding our reverence for the national park system have effectively cemented our perception of public lands into what Rebecca Solnit calls the virgin-whore dichotomy. Within this, collective perception of the value of various designations of public land drives public sentiment as to what we are willing to allow in the wild. On one hand, our national parks, the virgin wilderness, meant to be protected at all cost in order to maintain our idea of them as pure and unadulterated. The rest of our public land designations, on the other hand, are managed with conservation in mind but are mandated to do so for multiple uses, including extraction. If our national parks are the virgin, then everything else is the whore, subject to continual defiling by the power-hungry men at the head of most tables.
On December 28, 2016, President Barack Obama signed an order that established permanent protection for 1.3 million acres of land in southern Utah. The proclamation of this land as Bears Ears National Monument was a massive victory for the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition which was comprised of the Ute Indian Tribe of Utah, Ute Mountain Ute, Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni, all of whom identify with the area as being their ancestral homeland. Permanent is a dirty word when it comes to public land, and as such, less than a year later, President Donald Trump dismantled his predecessor's action, shrinking the monument by more than 85%. Can you imagine Donald Trump trying to shrink one of our national parks? Even the most imaginative soul can’t, even for a moment, imagine any president getting away with slicing through Yosemite or Yellowstone. For even the most deviant among us, there is still hallowed ground, even if it is just the result of how a land designation tickles at our bones.
What is public land? Roughly 28% of the 2.28 billion acres that constitute The United States of America is public land, the lion’s share of which is managed by four federal agencies. The National Park Service, the organization that Americans are most familiar with, actually manages the least amount of public land, with 79.9 million acres managed to conserve land and resources and make them available for public use. From there, in order of smallest to largest, in terms of acres managed, we have The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) with 89.2 million acres for the conservation and protection of animals and plants, the Forest Service (FS) with 192.9 million acres, and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) with 244.4 million acres. The BLM and the FS both manage their lands for multiple-use and sustained-yield which means that, among other things, both organizations are mandated to facilitate and manage the extraction of natural resources from public lands. These land designations and the way that they interact with one another paint a picture of not only our public lands but also of the moral infrastructure in place to manage them. In American Zion, Betsy Gaines Quammen writes that “The best part of the West is that we share it-- in all its fraught majesty. And this affords opportunity for further insights into how this land is variously construed. Somewhere between 280 and 560 generations of Indigenous people have been young and grown old here on the western landscape. Today, 327 million Americans participate in its proprietorship.” This idea of our shared stake in public lands is at the core of my inquiry.
What if there were only two designations… That which was wild and that which was not? In an earlier iteration of human civilization, this was just how things were. When we were a less advanced species, we were still in the process of learning how to protect ourselves in the land that we could not tame. We had no dominion over the natural world nor did we necessarily want it, but we also didn’t have the information necessary to make qualified decisions about the long-term ecological health of our land. Indigenous cultures around the world developed systems in which they lived balanced lives in sync with their local ecologies but they looked to the past for evidence of their sustainability. They honored tradition and legacy, knowing that if countless generations could exist in this way without observable degradation to the land then the continuation of their lifestyle was surely sustainable.
What would the modern world look like without different land designations?
How would we make decisions about what could be done in the wild if it wasn’t as simple as changing what we call it and relying on a predetermined set of guidelines for how it would then be managed.
How would we feel about the wild if our public lands weren’t subjected to the current naming scheme?
What if every stretch of dirt was simply part of a vast network of spaces designated as being wild… The American wildlands