Stewart M. Brandborg (1925-2018)
On Word Games and the Nature of Nature
(Note: This is an excerpt from my book-in-progress, "What's Bigger Than The Land: The Life and Times of Stewart M. Brandborg," which appears elsewhere in this blog. I repeat it here as a sort of an antidote--for myself if for no one else--against the word games people are playing in this interminable run-up to the 2020 elections, with handles like "democracy" and "socialism". I hold that they are not only peas in the same pod, but that if you didn't have the whole pod (the Land) you wouldn't have either pea.
People love word games, and we've been here before, with words like "wilderness" and even "nature". Annoyance, which seems to be my primary prompt for writing, motivated me to write the below in response to the techno-thinking a few years ago of our modern-day problem-solvers to the then-emerging land-based (if you will) existential threat, which I usually call "global warming" out of that above-mentioned, natural orneriness within my system. There were (and still are) the so-called "neo-greens", who would claim the post-modern mantle of environmentalism by arguing (quite articulately) that this new, sick world of ours is the new "nature", that noxious weeds are the new native plants, that since humans are part of nature, anything we do is "natural" ...(!?!) So just get over it. Let those mountain bikes rip into the last wild places not yet included within the wilderness system cuz, y'know, they're quiet. Enjoy the weird weather 'cuz nothing lasts forever anyway, but fix the whole thing if you insist, by throwing zillions of mirrors into the atmosphere and break out the sunscreen. Then, when the inevitable problems from such a hubristic act start falling down on our heads, just "fix" that, too. It's all good, cuz we're animals, just like the birds and the bees we have no problem engineering out of existence to suit our "natural" inclination to screw things up. Serendipitously, the song of the Neo-green (or neo-environmentalist as I prefer) is the same one you hear in the Bible, which is a whole 'nuther ornery blog I won't get into now! Suffice to say that belief is its central ingredient, and now everyone to the left of Atilla the Hun are fixating on the belief that "socialism" and "democracy" are somehow different and therefore, since we're such linear-thinking biomasses of cognitive proteins, incompatible.
I stuck to the tandem of "wilderness" vs "democracy" in the little thing below, but I think you can silently slip in the word "socialism", too, where you think it colors a sentence right, and come up with the same conclusion.
I did, and since I thought it was a fun exercise, I reprint it here.
"Wilderness? Wilderness!!!?" you'll hear them whine, more and more with a roll of a condescending eye about a thing within which their lives are less and less entwined, even those who now claim the mantle of Environmentalist. “That’s so Sixties!”
Well, it is just a word after all, and an expeditious one at that. But how about “democracy”? That’s just a word, too, but it describes a living organism, a land-based one, and wherever you find the Land you’ll find a different species of democracy native to that place. Here in North America, there was a vibrant form residing in human populations long before the Atlantic Ocean washed an equally-vibrant (albeit predatory) Greco-Roman form upon its shores, where they crossbred. We tend to forget that our cherished American democracy is a hybrid, a mix of the native and the non-native, a cut-bow trout swimming in the ever-more-sacred waters of an industrialized world on the very verge of polluting those waters to the last drop and then privatizing the toxic result. Then there will be no trout, no water, no democracy at all. We tend to forget that, far from being democracy’s creator, we are merely its host species, and that we neglect this symbiotic relationship at our peril.
I have allowed myself to become convinced that within the political template created by the early conservationists (many of whom self-identified as socialists) and the various other progressives to meld their depthless love of wild places with political realities, to get people to see the essential value of a mere word—Wilderness!--and to fight for it, are the same nuggets that could save the Land, and possibly us, from our accumulated foolishness. These stories and insights may be centered around the Northern Rockies, but it seems to me that the extreme and even violent politics we have seen here in Montana as well as throughout most of America’s rural landscapes for the last thirty years or so (the militia movement, the “Tea Party” phenomenon, the current trump presidency) are the universal metaphors for the illness--or lack of vision--that plagues us if you have the inclination to look. Old-time activism, the kind practiced in the mid-twentieth century by Big Brandy (Guy M. Brandborg, Bitterroot National Forest Supervisor, 1935-55) and his son, Stewart (Executive Director, Wilderness Society, 1964-76), is a pretty good recipe for fighting despair (our real enemy it seems to me) and maybe better than most given what we’re left to work with. It’s grounded and doesn’t put Jesus to sleep.
Ah, Jesus...we tend to kill our prophets, don't we? By boredom if not by other means, or at least ignore them if they're lucky, along with the core truth that burns at the heart of their misinterpreted reveries, the one about humility, about us being frogs in a slowly boiling pot of our own stew resulting in our misinterpreting that simple lesson. We beg our own set of questions, then, which are at heart not modern ones at all: Is it really about what the environment can do for us, or about how pretty we think things are? Or if some of us believe that sunsets are the eyes of God shining down to enlighten our path? Or if others believe that coal is the gift of that other god, the Old Testament one with the warped sense of humor? Is it even about belief at all? Is our task merely science, then? To measure “ecosystem services” so that they may be more easily parsed up and dealt out between the various human “partners” at the negotiation “tables”? Might there be a missing ingredient in our land-based debates we’re having these days? Might it be that humankind needs as much wild country (and its evolving, resident democracies) as we can possibly nurture for the simple sake of our continued survival on this planet? Might we need to save what’s left of our remaining wilderness, not as a matter of sentimentality, belief, or “ecosystem services”, but as a matter of fact?
Our times are nothing new, and it’s never been too hard to see the mountains past the hype. Either by intent or ignorance, most of us tend to miss the forest and the trees, and if you’ll indulge me a bit further I’ll re-iterate that what is usually lacking in our armchair discussions about the Land is that democracy, the main ingredient in any solution of epic human concern, needs vast swaths of relatively intact ecosystems to burn in and to rejuvenate, to evolve in and to survive, and that democracy is what is lacking in the Land.
It’s something to think about, anyway.
