I am pointing not just to bulldozers and chainsaws as the enemy, however, or even to those machines that we stare at and type our furious and desperate communications into at all hours, but to another machine that is certainly a culprit in the destruction of wildness: our own nagging, easily distracted, fearful, order-craving minds. You will recognize this as the pronouncement of a full-blown Thoreauvian envirotype, and I suppose to some extent it is. Let me change my tone a little and say this: everywhere we look, the wild is under assault. Yes, they are a good place to take selfies but, really, what else? Parks, according to this line of thinking, have lost their purpose. Parks are museums that preserve mere remnants of what Earth used to look like. Parks are where people drive in cars when they go on vacation. The message is clear: parks are not modern nature they are old school. Parks seem ready for a retirement home or even that next thing, the one that comes after.
Some modern environmentalists, in particular a group dubbed the ecomodernists, think it fitting that the Park Service is turning 100 this summer. They are what Wallace Stegner called, paraphrasing Lord James Bryce, “the best idea America ever had.”Īt the same time, there exists a sense that parks are, in this, the National Park Service’s centennial birthday summer of 2016, kind of fuddy-duddy. They mean the Wilderness Act, and David Brower and the Sierra Club battles, and the coffee-table books of beautiful places, and the great ecovictories of the 1960s and early ’70s. Parks mean Teddy Roosevelt, with a few bold strokes of the pen, taking millions of acres of land from the exploiters. To anyone even remotely aware of environmental history, the creation of our national parks is a cornerstone, a rallying cry, a grand achievement. A museum that held works of beauty from long ago, curated for the curious and the many. The metaphor can be carried further, much further, because that is exactly what Yellowstone felt like to me that day: a museum. Driving through the park, I was reminded not of other times in wild nature but of the van Gogh exhibit I saw in New York, standing four deep in a mob of people, craning my neck in an attempt to glimpse something beautiful.
Keeping Yosemite in mind, I think not of Muir’s ecstatic responses to the place but of my own single experience there, hustling with the take-a-number mob up to the base of Half Dome, jostling and body-checking as if fighting my way onto a New York subway.Īnd what of beautiful Yellowstone, our first national park, that stunning remote place of fire and ice? I remember being caught in wildlife traffic jams as my fellow tourists took selfies with the elk and bison. This is not Emerson’s transparent eyeball.
#DARK AND LIGHT TAMING WILDNESS TV#
I know this for a fact, because when I use the TV show as a teaching moment with my 12-year-old daughter, railing against all her texting and phoning and computing, and telling her she should get out in nature more, she rightly points out that the whole time I was out in nature, I was being filmed. The irony of this is the sort that is easy for a sixth-grader to comprehend. But of course it takes a lot of screens to get this point across. The idea of the show, put oversimply, is that nature is good and that screens-whether those of computer, camera, TV, or phone-are bad. Later still, when I see the drone footage on TV, I will realize for the first time that I have a significant bald spot. Later, in search of the perfect shot, the drone will crash into a tree and be rendered inoperable. Following instructions, I move closer to the edge of the mountain, striking a pose that is meant to say part world conqueror, part shaman.
#DARK AND LIGHT TAMING WILDNESS FULL#
Up above, a drone swoops over to capture the full grandeur of the moment. Off to my side, a young man named Jimmy, whose easygoing professionalism I’ve come to respect over the past 10 days of shooting, points a surprisingly heavy (I have tried to lift it) camera at my head to film me in profile. My facial muscles are responding not to the transporting magic of nature, however, but to another imperative: I need to look good for the camera.
I scrunch my eyebrows and squint a little, thinking this will add to my overall air of deep thoughtfulness.
I am standing on top of Bald Mountain in Sonoma Valley, staring profoundly off toward the far Pacific and the dying sun. Traffic in Yellowstone National Park (iStock/Getty Images)
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