Until I traveled to Holland
recently, I didn’t know how irreversibly American I am, perhaps not
precisely a patriot — the word comes from the Latin for
father — but certainly one deeply identified with my native
land.
In Amsterdam, people eyed me with pity, suspicion
or loathing as soon as I opened my mouth and spoke American
English, my only fluent language. At train stations, people sneered
“Bush, Bush” as I walked by, intending to shame me. It’s a
harrowing time to be a U.S. citizen afoot in the world, but there I
was, headed for a Dutch retreat center to help facilitate a program
based in nature.
When my colleagues and I explored the
retreat center’s surrounding “nature,” I noticed that the trees,
though sizable, grew in orchard-straight rows. We wandered off the
wide trails periodically and found, in every direction, another
well-traveled path no more than 100 yards away.
The
vegetation seemed familiar, similar to the Pacific Northwest where
I grew up, and my imagination supplied the missing elements:
massive rotting stumps, fallen timber nursing ferns and saplings,
the tracks and whisper of animals in the shadows. But there was
nothing rotting except last year’s leaves. No blowdown crisscrossed
the ground. In every direction there were buildings within a
half-hour walk.
Getting lost was impossible. True
solitude was impossible. As one who has lived in the American West
for a lifetime, I was unprepared for the abrupt, heart-piercing
realization that this was the state of the wild in Holland, if not
in most of Europe.
There were no stands of primeval
forest; there were no creatures larger than deer, none fiercer than
fox. Nothing of the original wild remained.
Nothing.
I couldn’t fathom how the Netherlanders could bear the
magnitude of this loss, but then, how could they adequately discern
it? Bears and wolves existed in the terrain of fairy tales, not in
recent history. All witnesses to the original wild died many
generations ago. What firsthand stories of formidable forests,
populated by captivating creatures, could a grandparent tell a
grandchild? Not even the wild ancestral memory remained, vanished
so long ago that its absence seems normal, not tragic.
And there, amidst that placid, planted forest, in a country where
people righteously, and perhaps rightfully, scorned the United
States, I felt a rush of unexpected gratitude for the land of my
origin — tremendous, shivering gratitude to be utterly formed
and informed by the still-wild terrain of the North American
continent.
Despite the best efforts of industry, the
momentum to preserve — even restore — wild American
habitat has not been defeated. Where I live, in the Greater
Yellowstone ecosystem, reintroduced gray wolves are multiplying;
grizzlies are expanding their range. Trumpeter swans were
resuscitated from the verge of extinction. Bison in Grand Teton
National Park now number in the hundreds instead of the few dozen
of two decades ago. Which is not to say that all these creatures,
and more, are no longer imperiled.
But unlike
Netherlanders, millions of Americans take pride or refuge in wild,
or nearly-wild, public land; millions have an affinity with wild
creatures that remain a living presence in the American landscape.
We have the weighty privilege of bearing witness to a wildness
whose very existence defies rapacious odds and ravenous human
history.
More than 125 years ago, Yellowstone became the
world’s first national park; 40 years ago, the Wilderness Act was
signed into law — two of many extraordinary moments in the
history of the human relationship with the wild. The damage human
beings have inflicted on natural systems is, of course,
incalculable, and even science-based “management” has produced
disasters.
But the stunning fact that Americans have
reserved habitat at all is evidence of an emerging ecological
vision. If the United States has a gift for the world, it’s not our
gift for the absurd consumer confidence index, not pre-emptive
invasion, not even a limping democracy. It is a dream of
collaboration with Earth, rooted in tundra, tangled forests,
hissing geysers, stone deserts. It is a vision as radically wild
now as it was in 1862, when Thoreau famously wrote: “In wildness is
the preservation of the world.”
Outside the United
States, “American” has become synonymous with “Bush,” but even as
Europeans scorned my citizenship, I could not disown my native
land. On the North American continent, enough wildness remains to
guide our fledgling discovery of how human purpose can be coherent
with natural systems — a vision no less necessary for our
common future than a dream of freedom.
Geneen
Marie Haugen is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). She lives in Kelly,
Wyoming, and her work appeared recently in the new anthology,
Going Alone: Women’s Adventures in the
Wild.
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