Romance of the Wild

Pictures of Yosemite's Half Dome, Sargent's painting of the Delaware Water Gap, and movies like Dances with Wolves ingnite in many of us a yearning for a time before drastic human interference in the natural world. Banner Marsh is for me a window on that Eden. It is not a primeval marsh. It was once a strip mine that was reclaimed to the tune of 15 million dollars by the Army Corps of Engineers over a period of 10 years. But now you can see clear water and lots of fish. The birds fly free. Deer, muskrats, beaver, and coyotes wander at will living off the bounty of nature in the midst of our developed world.

This proximity of nature to civilization started me thinking about how I took my best picture of a Red-tailed hawk.

Red-Tailed Hawk taken near Banner Marsh, February 2006

These hawks, which I see along the highway every time I make the 15 mile trip to Banner from my house, do not mind perching next to busy highways to watch for their next meal. You spot a white blob near the top of a tree, on a fence post, near Hoerr's nursury, or on top of a highway light fixture as you wiz by. But they are elusive to photograph. The only way to get close to them long enough for a shot is to use the car as a blind and take the picture through an open window. If you are lucky, you have about 5 seconds to push the shutter release before they fly away.

I have observed many times that birds do not feel threatened by many of the trappings of civilization, including cars, highways, and power lines, but they do fear humans, whom they see as predators. This made me wonder: are these birds "wild"? Are they "living in a natural state" as the dictionary defines "wild"?

The feeling I have for the wildness of the marsh is related to the emotions I have when thinking about saving the Artic Wildlife Refuge, managing our national parks well, restoring prairies, and all the other worthy Nature Conservancy type of projects. It is emotionally necessary for me to feel that there are places that have been spared excesses of human development-- sanctuaries, places to begin anew.

This may be part of our brain's wiring, akin to the natural aversion to snakes and spiders many of us have. Everyone I know finds a little thrill in being the first to dip a knife into the fresh surface of a new jar of peanut-butter. It's fun to make the first tracks on a sandy beach or snowy hill. Before the footprints you see a wild, pure expanse of sand or snow; after footprints are made it becomes part of the known world, explored territory, and mundane.

LEFT:Snipe on snow, Banner Marsh December 2005.

BELOW: Marbled Godwit, Point Reyes , California, August 2005

Perhaps to ancient nomadic peoples, being first to mar the landscape equated with opportunity: prolific pasture, ample game, fertile soil, little human excrement, less disease, renewed vigor for the clan, and nobody to argue about territory. The economic benefits made up for having to leave familiar haunts. Perhaps people willing to venture into the unexplored were more likely to thrive during the hundreds of thousands of years that humans survived as hunter-gatherers.

Or, it may be more a factor of our national culture. Taking a chance on unknown wilderness is as American as apple pie. The Pilgrims, Daniel Boone, fur-trappers, settlers on Conestoga wagons, ranchers, farmers, and railroad men were all in their own way besotted with the Manifest Destiny of taming a new, wild land.

The downside of this strategy of always moving on to greener pastures is that there is a lot of garbage left behind. For small groups of hunter-gatherers, this was not a big deal. Deserted camps healed themselves over time, or could be used again by newcomers in later seasons or years. But slash and burn farming is an extension of this principle that can seriously degrade soil because the land does not have time to heal before it is needed again. The urban American equivalent of slash and burn occurs when we desert the inner-city neighborhoods and shopping areas and build new ones in the suburbs, allowing city centers to decay at great social and economic cost.

Photo by Hibdon Hardwood, Inc.1410 N. Broadway, St. Louis, MO

So while the idea of moving on, finding a better place, getting away from it all by losing oneself in unspoiled nature may be a natural instinct or a cultural imperative, it is one we can no longer afford. There are simply too many of us humans. We need to sustain the viability of the places we have. We cannot afford the luxury of thinking that we have wild places where we can begin anew.

Consider this. There is no place on the planet that is unaffected by human habitation. We have explored all of the land masses, and much of the oceans. Seals in the artic have been found to develop cancers due to toxins dumped in the oceans thousands of miles away from their breeding grounds. Global warming affects all life. Over grazing has converted large tracts of range land into deserts in North Africa. Midwestern and western states consume the pure water of their aquifers at an alarming rate to support agriculture that will not be sustainable in the long term.

No, I need to think about Yosemite, the Artic Wildlife Refuge, and Banner marsh not as romantic wild sanctuaries, but as models of sustainable ecosystems. If we do not learn the details of stability from these places, we will destroy ourselves and much of the life on the planet. They are not places to which we can escape from the disaster of our excesses. Instead, they contain the blueprint for our survival.