I felt this
sentiment many times during my two decades as a Pennsylvanian.
And it
recurred earlier this decade while holding down a homestead in Vermont.
(Actually, it was a condo).
I first
experienced this feeling as a youthful hiker, camper and angler in New Mexico. Then
the Gregory family moved to Idaho, which is blessed to have big, wide-ranging
public lands.
And then came
the three years that then-Air Force Capt. Alan Gregory spent in far upstate New
York State and took hike after hike in the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park, more
than half of which is now owned by New Yorkers.
I write
about the gift that such public land offers Americans. It’s a legacy for our
children and grandchildren.
To find and
experience it, just take a walk into and across a wild place; a place that
Nature still holds onto despite all that the boosters of using up “natural
resources” have done to break it, pave it, pollute it, and build on it.
Walking into
the woods on public land brings with it the means of experiencing the kind of
solitude and grace and sense of belonging that only a natural landscape can offer.
For me in
Pennsylvania, there were hikes along Nescopeck Creek in what became Nescopeck
State Park. And the three-mile loop hike on public land atop the high ground
overlooking the Lehigh River and Jim Thorpe across the valley below.
The hike in
Hickory Run State Park to a cliff overlooking that river was also special.
Exploring nature there once yielded the discovery of a nest in progress of
Cedar Waxwings.
Across the country,
though, opportunities nowadays to see and feel the land as it was shaped by
Wild Nature are increasingly hard to come by. All Americans – once the booster
hat of “development” is tossed aside – know this.
That thought was amplified many times for me
while living in Pennsylvania. In one instance (there were many case-studies), a
butterfly census took me to the remnants of a Pocono cranberry bog, fragmented
and degraded when subdivided into housing lots. The ecological heart of that
natural place was forsaken to make way for a cluster of trophy homes and
McMansions.
(I forget
the name of the development, but it’s not far from Long Pond).
These
thoughts came rushing back as I stood on public land (our public land!) in
southeastern Oregon earlier this June.
Conservationist
and friend Dave Foreman calls it the Big Outside. You know you have reached the
Big Outside when you stand still for a moment and see only Wild Nature – the
flora and fauna that Nature put there – for as far as your eyes, binoculars and
telephoto lens can see.
My watching
post was next to a U.S. Bureau of Land Management sign bearing the words “your
public lands.” Less than a yard away was a grand-daddy Big Sagebrush, a
characteristic native plant of the Great Basin Desert. Thousands and thousands
more dotted the landscape all the way off to the horizon.
And the
crowning touch to that viewscape: No sign anywhere of a human activity. Just
Wild Nature
Lay people
ask this rhetorical question whenever the topic of the public owning natural
land comes to the fore: “But what good is it?”
There are a
host of “good things” that come with public land: Open space, hunting and
fishing, a good quality of life and sense of community, clean water and air, and
the chance to reconnect with Wild Nature in this era of growth for the sake of
growth and “progress.”
But this
notion comes first: Because that land is part of the foundation for all the
life – flora and fauna – we share the planet with.
The more
natural land held in public ownership, the better for Wild Nature.
And the
better for our natural heritage.
