Wild spaces.
Natural landscapes.
Intact ecosystems.
Wilderness.
Native lands.
Clean water.
Pure air.
Life.
What do those words mean to you? YOU—not some preconceived connotations they might carry, but in their rawest form—what do they mean to you, and only to you?
Can you conceptualize or comprehend or begin to think beyond the concrete and steel we’re all surrounded by in this so-called place of civilization – a rather small dot in a vast universe?
Control. We think we’re running it all. That we can have an impact.
If we were to vanish today, the earth would go on… swallow us up; disperse our bodies into the soil, water, rock, and air. We would become what we are currently destined to destroy.
But we do have an impact – just not the one we think we have.
We continue about our days doing what we’re doing because we’ve always done it that way… the way of our parents, grandparents, and the generations prior…
“And they turned out ok!”
What is wrong with one more mine? One more pipeline? One more dam? One more clearcut?
For my comfort… enjoyment… pleasure… needs…
We move around non-native plants and animals from one environment to another like chess pieces… We eliminate an entire species just because it doesn’t fit into our ideology.
“What is wrong with…?”
“But I want…”
“Because I like to…”
Our ethics have been boiled down to entitlement, rights, and freedoms.
And so it continues. And soon we’ll see the irreversible consequences of our actions. By then, it will be too late. How free will we be then? How free will our children be? When freedom becomes not something dictated by humans, but by the earth itself… When the earth suddenly revolts against us. What will we tell our children and our children’s children and their children in our final days when that small piece of joy and comfort we thought would last forever, was only for a moment… A gain at the expense of what?
But now, it’s lost. And those we love will pay the price for our selfishness.
In a place, we now call Island Park, Idaho, within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the indigenous people of the Shoshone-Bannock, Eastern Shoshone, and Cheyenne Nations resided here, understood and practiced these basic ideas and principles. Sadly, this wisdom and lifestyle did not save them from the thieves and murderers who invaded these lands – their home.
Today, we continue to discard these values. We sell land that isn’t ours to people who build massive, unsustainable houses, yet never live in them. We draw arbitrary lines and govern one side completely differently than the other. We pollute with our motors and drive wild creatures into confined corners of their environments simply through our overreaching presence. Then we kill them in the masses for not following our made-up rules.
We call it beauty.
Yet, we treat it so ugly.
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