But there were problems. For one, the process of relocating and integrating all those farmers and homesteaders into the new industrial centres meant that an incalculable amount of wisdom, built from centuries of living close to the land, would no longer need to be passed on to the next generation. Imagine the hard-won knowledge of the country farmer or village carpenter, the understanding of how to make all his needed items from trees grown on his land and raising crops or hunting to sustain his family, now cast aside. Although the loss is conspicuous from this side of history, the exchange did not initially appear quite so problematic. Victorian optimism proclaimed that technology would soon be moving humanity away from toil and into far greater comfort, ease, and equality. The telegraph, for example, would gather ‘all mankind upon one great plane, where they can see everything that is done, and hear everything that is said, and judge of every policy that is pursued at the very moment those events take place,’ according to Britain’s Prime Minister in 1889. The unstoppable river of progress was moving society forward, and antiquated knowledge of the land would no longer be necessary.
A separation or divorce from the natural world was the result. The households and communities that once procured their food and building materials from the soil beneath their feet now watched these ‘raw materials’ rumble in by rail or road to feed the factories. The railway infrastructure made possible the levelling of vast areas of forest with new equipment that allowed for more efficient removal than ever before, and at a much greater scale: By the end of the 19th century, more than 500 million acres of American woods had been cut – an area considerably larger than the state of Alaska. The landscape was left deeply scarred and susceptible to further erosion.
Industrial models of food production led to other previously unimaginable outcomes, such as the extinction of the passenger pigeon, once the most numerous species of bird in the world. John James Audubon observed in 1823 a single flock flying overhead, a mile wide, that blotted out the sun and took three whole days to pass by. As an abundance not to go unexploited, flocks numbering in the millions were netted or gassed, quickly gutted, and stuffed into barrels to be brought by rail to the major shipping hubs, and pigeon became the cheapest meat in America. This industry absolutely devastated the species – the last passenger pigeon died in captivity in 1914.
By the end of the 19th century, more than 500 million acres of American woods had been cut.
And at the turn of the 20th century, goods were moving farther and faster than ever. But as shipping and freight technology was exponentially improved, further consequences were around the corner. In 1904, a pathogen called Cryphonectria parasitica was inadvertently introduced to this country through either a load of imported Asian lumber or a shipment of Japanese chestnuts meant for the commercial market. This blight spread with deadly efficiency: within just a few decades, four billion American chestnut trees were gone. The species that once accounted for 1 in 4 trees of the Appalachians, whose sweet nuts were a primary forest food source for humans and animals alike, and whose wood comprised countless home and barn frames as well as an abundance of furniture, was essentially gone. ‘There has never been a tree like it,’ wrote author Bill Bryson. ‘Rising a hundred feet from the forest floor, its soaring boughs spread out in a canopy of incomparable lushness, an acre of leaves per tree, a million or so in all. Though only half the height of the tallest eastern pines, the chestnut had a weight and a mass and symmetry that put it in another league.’ Many examples stood 50 feet before the first branch and 12 or more feet in diameter. The loss of this species was incalculable.
A Shift to Conservation
Clearly, political leaders had to act. The decimation of species and forest needed to be throttled or all would be lost. First, particularly unique places such as Hot Springs, Arkansas; Yellowstone (located primarily in Wyoming); and Yosemite, California were set aside to be protected in a pristine condition. Yellowstone became the world’s first National Park in 1872, with differing degrees of protection assigned to other locations. Then, several acts of Congress (including the Forest Reserve Act of 1891) culminated in the formation of a new agency, the U.S. Forest Service, a division of the Department of Agriculture. This agency was tasked with the gargantuan responsibility of overseeing the health and use of hundreds of millions of acres of forest land. Rather than wanton and wholesale cut-and-run operations, corporations would have to operate in a more restrained manner under the authority of the Forest Service. For the first time, the land was to be protected from the destructive capabilities of industry.
Several other policies penned in the early 20th century further sought to insulate the natural world from destructive human activity. One of these, the Weeks Act of 1911, gave power to the Department of Agriculture to purchase land in order to protect important watersheds – more than six million acres of woodlands across the nation were secured under this act. Another provision of the bill marked an important shift in the approach official U.S. policy took in dealing with forest fires. Because the forests were now being managed scientifically for economic value, any outbreak of wildfire was seen as detrimental to the health and value of the system. After all, many millions of board-feet were going up in flames every fire season. The previous year, 1910, had been particularly bad, with over three million acres burned. The Weeks Act led to new collaboration of state and federal agencies for fire suppression – with suppression being the primary strategy. Any fire, anywhere, was to be located and contained with whatever resources were necessary. Fire towers were raised and roads cut throughout the national forests – lots of roads. In fact, today the Forest Service oversees nearly ten times the road mileage of the interstate highway system, the primary uses being lumber extraction and fire prevention, with recreation occupying the bottom of the list.
The Rise of ‘Leave No Trace’
With clear-cut mountain ranges and untold acres of erosion in the rearview mirror, a large-scale shift in understanding began to take root. Modern people began to think of our relationship to nature as inherently exploitative, rather than one of symbiotic stewardship. This ‘humanity-as-pestilence’ philosophy resonated deeply with the public psyche where people were most disconnected from direct involvement in the natural world.
To redress the new sense of urban discontent, the post-WWII era became one of recreation, where Americans escaped the hubbub, stress, and grime of the city to go back to nature for a few weeks in the summertime. The Park Service and Forest Service were quick to respond, adding more paved roads (with scenic turnouts) and graded campsites to pitch a tent (or park an Airstream). But as these civilised excursionists made their way back into the woods, they did not do so as thoughtful inhabitants seeking the necessities of life; it was more like an infestation of locusts. Wander through any National Park campground today and you’ll see what I mean – birch trees are peeled of their white bark as high as the tallest city dad can reach, lower branches are absent, having been broken off and burned in the myriad established fire rings, and the ground is pounded into sterile oblivion by the passage of countless lugged soles.
The policymakers in the Department of the Interior quickly recognized that these destructive tendencies had to be focused in small, carefully designed, resilient areas to preserve the broader landscape, so the vast majority of Park Service funds were allocated to building and maintaining public infrastructure. As long as most of the visitors to Yellowstone stayed on the roads or near the Old Faithful geyser, they wouldn’t harm the backcountry. In fact, the Park Service was so motivated by this kind of reasoning that, in 1965, they invited Walt Disney Productions to build a ski resort in Sequoia National Park in California. Visitors would have been able to enjoy the beauty of the area, breathe the fresh air, take pictures, and return home to the city without causing undue harm to the forest. For better or worse, that particular plan never came to fruition.
As increasing numbers of Americans went to the woods for recreation and breathing room, the need emerged for a new ethos for this nascent generation of wilderness wanderers. Dubbed ‘Leave No Trace,’ this ideology could be summarised by the oft-quoted bumper-sticker mottoes, ‘Pack it in, pack it out,’ and ‘Take only pictures, leave only footprints.’ It conveyed the idea that a human’s presence in the forest should be entirely passive, one of observer, rather than the intrusive, heavy camping style of the Roosevelt era, when trains of pack animals brought every imaginable modern comfort for an excursion in the backcountry. Considering the condition of the high-use areas and campgrounds of our national parks, it seems to me that this was undeniably a sound and necessary approach to the destructive implications of mass visitation. It’s important to understand, however, that the ‘Leave No Trace’ philosophy became necessary not because of a greater refinement or evolution of human self-awareness but because of an overall loss of knowledge and sense of place in the natural world. We restrict our involvement with the forest because we are no longer at home there; we don’t know how to be there, how to take care of it; we are, in fact, fearful of anything outside artificial surroundings. Now, rather than seeing the natural world as our home, we are told ‘stand back’ and ‘do not touch’ as if we were children in a museum.
The Museum Mentality
I vividly remember walking through the vast, echoing halls of The National Gallery of Art as a child, struck by two equally powerful concepts. First, that those paintings and sculptures on display were of great value. Their history, rarity, beauty and imposing presentation made this obvious. Even if I had never heard the names Rembrandt or Caravaggio, l knew their artistry was something special. Second, everything about the setting shouted that the works were unapproachable. It was OK to view them from a distance, but ropes and signs and museum attendants made it eminently clear that they were not to be closely interacted with in any way, shielded from human contact. When we encounter nature only through human-engineered interfaces (queuing on a paved nature trail or gazing out through the picture windows of the park visitor centre or car windshield), it is easy to perceive human use of nature as inherently destructive and unsavoury.
We no longer need to consider or feel the death of the animal that made that meal or the tree that yielded that wide, clear board.
It is the dissociation of product and process that creates this tension. If we apply the strictures of ‘Leave No Trace’ to woodworking, we encounter an interesting ethical quandary. Like the tenderhearted urbanite who is comfortable only with chicken from the supermarket, skinless, boneless, and wrapped in plastic, woodworkers who know nothing firsthand of the natural world find themselves estranged from their craft’s material substance. There are wood consumers who wince to think of actually chopping down a tree for lumber just as there are shoppers who find the idea of personally taking an animal’s life for food unconscionable. This is part and parcel of consumerism: We no longer need to consider or feel the death of the animal that made that meal or the tree that yielded that wide, clear board. But cookouts and blanket chests don’t come out of nowhere. More often than not, ‘Leave No Trace’ means that we are simply moving the ‘trace’ somewhere else, comfortably out of sight – whether lithium mine, slaughterhouse, or clearcut.
And it is industrialisation that offers this kind of transfer of ethical responsibility. As we turn up our noses and hand over these distasteful tasks to industry, we relinquish our influence of the natural world to machinery whose destructive capabilities go far beyond what individuals or communities using simple tools could have ever achieved. It didn’t take long until forests were reduced to resources analysed as statistics, nothing more than numbers on a scale beyond comprehension. Consider, for example, that lumber and veneer logs taken in clearcutting operations are often tallied in millions of cubic metres, a volume nearly impossible to conceive of. But industry knows no bounds when there’s more stuff to be manufactured: ‘The clearcuts, the strip mines, the drained swamps, the oil spills, and so on are inevitable when we see Earth as a dead thing, insensate, an instrumental pile of resources.’1 This is the inevitable result of a disjointed, utilitarian view of the world.
Despite the grim telling of industrial devastation, the fact of the matter is that human beings have always altered their environment. It may have been to a much smaller, more harmonious degree – but we have altered it. There is no landscape or wilderness in habitable climates that has not been altered by mankind for millennia. Humans always leave a trace; it is part of who we are. These traces can be found almost anywhere without much effort – whether lithics and flakes from stone tools, clay pots, cellar holes, meandering earthworks, or ancient cliff dwellings. Though the artefacts left by our own generation will embarrassingly consist of ‘plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain,’2 leaving a trace is unavoidable. An ecosystem completely devoid of our influence would be incomplete – something like Yellowstone without the wolves or the Serengeti without its lions. But precisely because we recognize that humanity is the ‘hyperkeystone species’3 of earth, our influence must be tempered as it has been in centuries past. We need to be thoughtful and attentive in our aims and limited in our scope. What is needed is a renewed, ancient perspective.
Leave a Thoughtful Trace
When the first Europeans came to the shores of New England, they found themselves stepping off into woodlands of pristine and well-tended majesty. In his groundbreaking book 1491, author Charles C. Mann recounts, ‘To the west, maize hills marched across the sandy hillocks in parallel rows. Beyond the fields, a mile or more away from the sea, rose a forest of oak, chestnut, and hickory, open and park-like, the underbrush kept down by expert annual burning.’ Later he notes, ‘Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere. They annually burned undergrowth, cleared and replanted forests, built canals and raised fields, hunted bison and netted salmon, and grew maize and manioc. Native Americans had been managing their environments for thousands of years.’ The use of fire as a management tool was particularly common: the great prairies of the American Midwest were maintained through regular burning, as were the wild blueberry fields of New England. Often, large areas of forest undergrowth were burned during hunts to drive animals to an ambush location. Counter to the philosophy of the 1911 Weeks Act and later legislation which focused on suppression at all costs, these perennial prescribed burns opened the understory for wildlife and improved soil quality, controlled insect populations, and did away with accumulated debris and built-up ‘ladder fuels’ that today feed some of the worst wildfires occurring in the American West. Poet Gary Snyder, who wrote the 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning Turtle Island while living in California, laments in a poem titled ‘Control Burn’: ‘Fire is an old story. I would like, with a sense of helpful order, with respect for laws of nature, to help my land with a burn, a hot clean burn.’ Snyder, who once worked as a logger and fire lookout in Washington state, is no stranger to forest fires. But he recognized the great benefits of the ancient practice of regular, prescribed burns. While antithetical to ‘Leave No Trace’ and the nature-as-a-museum mentality, this practice characterised the landscape for millennia.
Fire has not been the only means of leaving a thoughtful human trace on the landscape, but it has been the most powerful. Simple technologies and tools – axes, adzes, horse-drawn implements – have long been employed in the felling of trees, the clearing of fields, and the building of homes, and their simplicity was a self-limiting factor in the scale of the alteration they could carry out on the land. In the recent past, this limit was seen as an obstacle to be overcome through the development of new means and machines, but having now done so, the exponential increase in the rate of our resource consumption should give us pause. The question of adjusting our lifestyles and technologies to slow or lessen our impact, rather than outsourcing it to distant countries or offsetting it through credits or some other political sleight-of-hand, is rarely discussed. I believe it is time to reconsider the value of those old ways. If we scaled our tools to humane limits, we might discover that our world is more enchanted than we have been led to believe.
Economist E.F. Schumacher called such an approach ‘appropriate technology.’ As in, how should we employ our tools and technologies in the most appropriate way, for us, for our children and for our neighbours? It may well be that an axe is a more appropriate tool for you than a tree harvester, the spinning wheel might make more sense than factory automation, or the tuned-up hand plane might just replace your thickness planer. As a personal choice, it means we actually do have the option of pulling a foot out of the web of industrialization and into quieter, more traditional means. As Schumacher wrote, ‘Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful.’
Notes
- Charles Eisenstein, ‘Initiation into a Living Planet,’ Charles Eisenstein (blog), September 2018, charleseisenstein.org/essays/initiation-into-a-living-planet/
- Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), 77.
- Ed Yong, ‘Humans: The Hyperkeystone Species,’ The Atlantic, June 21, 2016, theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/humans-the-hyperkeystone-species/487985/
Dark Mountain: Issue 25
Our Spring 2024 issue is an anthology of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork inspired by the struggle for land rights, and by the living land itself.
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