John Muir said, "One learns that the world, though made, is yet being made. . . . When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." [As quoted by Ken Burns in "The National Parks: America's Best Idea.]
It seems that humans, in particular those who deem themselves civilized, often consider themselves separate from nature. The poor and working class are sometimes viewed as essentially closer to nature, more vulgar and common. As noted by Burns, in Europe ordinary people are not entitled to fully experience grand lands, which are held by those of wealth and royal status, rather than by the populace in common.
In "civilized" societies, the rich have carved out playgrounds for themselves. For example, if one visits Moose, Wyoming, just south of Grand Teton National Park, that person could look in any direction and see lands currently or once owned by the Roosevelt family for their private recreation. Much of the land around Pinedale and Boulder, about 100 miles south, bordering the Jim Bridger Wilderness Area, is now owned by Japanese businessmen for their private retreats. Places we rode on horseback over open lands and grazing range is now private and fenced. Land that sold for $450 an acre in the late 1960s was made available for a thousand times that much 25 years later.
Had the National Park system not been created, the same thing would have happened to those places.
The lands that comprise the National Parks have been trod for thousands of years by humans, yet each person who comes upon a place discovers it for him/herself and it is new again. Newcomers sometimes name the place on their own terms, as though naming for the first time.
How separate are we from nature? The Bible that John Muir memorized painfully tells man to subdue the earth in one place and, in another, states that if man is silent in praising God, the rocks and stones would cry out. Muir listened to the rocks and stones and heard the waters sing.
He came to know non-human life that populated the places he valued.
How much of our DNA is actually different from those with two legs and wings, or four legs, or six, or eight? How much kinship do we share?
A couple days ago, I met her in my garage. Her eight legs were long and elegant and she curled them around her glistening bulb of a black abdomen as she tucked herself into the box housing the electric eye of my garage door opener. My dilemma was how to extract her without either of us being harmed. [A little over a year ago, one of her relatives bit me on the hand while I was depositing compost in the bin, and my husband and our neighbor went hunting. For defending her new home, she paid with her life.] I reasoned that, if the web was disturbed, she would emerge. The next time I saw her, a few hours later, she was poised on the garage wall. Reasonably docile for a black widow, she climbed into the proferred plastic jar. I put on the lid. Within 48 hours she was deposited in her new home in a place where where she would find plenty of food and a place to build a new web apart from humans.
Arachnids of all types are integral to the environment and dine on creatures that are capable of causing extensive harm, even to humans. It was my determination, however, that the widow's place was not in my garage, but in a more open space where she could potentially thrive.
Perhaps that is managing nature on a small scale. That management aids my sense of place and personal peace.
For Muir, Yosemite became a familiar landscape over time. For me, the desert in the west of Rio Rancho is becoming familiar. Kent Ryden stated, "A familiar landscape provides tangible reminders of the past, solid anchors for memory, and thus invites contemplation of the self who lived in that past, whose acts provided those memories. . . . Contemplation of place brings an awareness not only of time but of self and of the evolution of that self, evoking the simultaneous presence of past and present versions of one's identity and thereby illuminating the full chronological depth of that identity with a new and poignant clarity" (Mapping the Invisible Landscape 259).
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