When I was a kid my family lived in British Columbia, Canada, for three years. We moved into a log house a mile off a small paved highway and 10 miles from the town of Vanderhoof. The town – and the house – were surrounded by 200 miles of pine forest in every direction. I went to an elementary school on the Stoney Creek Indian Reservation with Indian kids and some immigrant kids from Portugal. The teachers were nuns from Ireland; the priest was a 5-foot-tall Mick named O’Riley.
Our two-room house was without electricity or running water and had a wood stove for heating and cooking. The house’s logs were chinked with a paste made of sawdust, flour, and water. Packrats gnawed the chinks from dark to daybreak. The hand-dug well froze over in the winter. One of my jobs was to climb into the well and break through the ice for buckets of water. There was no TV, no radio, no newspaper.
The house was on the western slope of the Rockies. Wolves howled all night. On the rare mornings it didn’t rain – this was the Pacific Northwest – the sun crawled over the mountains like the headlight of a tired Buick. Black bears, moose and deer walked beside us on the mile-long rut leading to the highway. Mobs of kite-sized mosquitoes carried knives and forks. Ticks played Deliverance on homemade banjos.
It’s possible this Canadian sojourn contributes to my ambivalence toward Nature, and toward those advocates of the natural world who unconditionally celebrate its beauty, purity, and calm. As they rapturously wax on about its many glories, I nod genially, but also know that fundamentally, Nature is one big lunch counter requiring negotiation.
Managing that lunch counter, especially in light of population growth, integration of alternative energy sources into our homes and communities, and solving the imminent crisis of our water shortage will require both rigor and compromise – and a shared commitment to the Greater Good. That commitment rejects both “not in my backyard” Puritans and “anything for a buck” deregulators.
If we fail to achieve the Greater Good, then mankind – you and me – are just items on Nature’s menu.
If the Greater Good wasn’t killed in Helsinki, then the pestcide lobbyist USDA chief, along with a host of ax wielding Trumpian anti-environmentalists, can finish it off. And the Greater Good, like its honest American trustees, has no health care.
Dan: That is good writing…!!
—Gary Adamson