In Defense of Wildness Part 1

I once discussed the Wild Sky Wilderness with my aunt's Texas relatives. Her brother-in-law wanted to dig for coal in the Cascades. I told him it would be over my dead body. I wish wild spaces didn't need a defense from our own rapaciousness, but they do.

On this Earth Day, Ed Abbey's ghost is haunting me and won't let me rest. What does it mean to defend the wilderness? And does the need to defend it somehow make it less wild? Are there still truly wild spaces left on this earth?

I plan on writing more on this later, after I have done my homework for the day. I found an essay I wrote for a class I took on environmental radicalism. It is my own passionate defense of Lesser Seattle, wild spaces, and small towns. I stumbled across an "accidental farm" on the Redmond-Fall City road, and it provided the inspiration for this essay. Your thoughts, as always, are welcomed.

The Accidental Farm

Some days, I want to be a member of the Earth Liberation Front. New housing developments are encroaching upon my favorite bike route – up Five Mile Road, around the foothills of the Blue Mountains, and back to Walla Walla via Russell Creek Road. The decadent, overbearing houses sit just before I reach Walla Walla, on a hill overlooking the trails of Rooks Park. I can see them from five miles away, hideous blots in a valley of farms. I wish to destroy them, ripping them apart board by board, piece by piece.

I want to be a one-woman wrecking crew, and save Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle, and Bellingham from merging into Pugetopolis. Urban growth already threatens the Cascade foothills. I can remember when Redmond was considered “the boonies” instead of being a ritzy Seattle suburb. The place where I used to ride horses is now covered with gaudy, overpriced houses. Rural, two-lane highways that used to wind through forest are now choked with cars.

I want to be like Emmett Watson, a cantankerous Seattle reporter who predicted many of the region’s growth problems. In the 1970s, Watson and a group of other Puget Sound locals founded Lesser Seattle in response to the work of Greater Seattle – a group of businessmen dedicated to publicly promoting the virtues of the Puget Sound region. Watson believed that Seattle would lose something of its character, if city boosters could not manage urban growth. He dedicated his Seattle Post-Intelligencer column to railing against California transplants, city leaders, and any big project (like the Kingdome) that threatened what he saw as Seattle’s character – a sleepy, literate, rain-drenched city that wanted to remain an unknown haven. All you Californians must leave Seattle, Watson wrote. It rains for nearly six months straight in winter. You won’t like it. Trust us. Go back.

Go back, and maybe the forest that used to cover my urban neighborhood would still exist. I used to play among the giant hemlocks and Douglas firs. Go back, and maybe we wouldn’t need two bridges across Lake Washington. Leave, and maybe we wouldn’t need to create the Wild Sky Wilderness in the Cascades, because it would all be wild. Just. Go. Back.

While I support the creation of the Wild Sky Wilderness, the need for it stems from a larger social issue regarding our current relations with the natural world. We control, we manage, and we use nature, and many in our society (like our current president) do not believe in preserving wild spaces because of their inherent value. For many, wilderness is a barrier, the repository of precious commodities that could be used if only they were unprotected.

Thoreau argued for the preservation of wild spaces long before the Wilderness Act. He noticed nineteenth century New England settlements pushing nature away, pushing wildness out in the drive to civilize. Thoreau, perhaps fearing the loss of natural spaces, wrote that the preservation of the world lay in wildness. Not wilderness. Over a century later, writers like Paul Shepard and Gary Snyder took this idea further, articulating the distinction between wildness and wilderness. According to Shepard, wilderness areas are becoming commodified parks, little biological islands of wildness in the midst of human civilization. Snyder did not believe that wildness was confined to wilderness and other protected areas, instead stating that the wild is all around us. All we have to do is look.

I wish we did not need the Wild Sky Wilderness. I like Snyder’s vision – human settlements integrated within wild spaces – because it allows space for a city to exist in balance with nature. Snyder feels that an ecological city is possible, and that there are degrees of wild. Even though I sympathize with Shepard’s view, and understand that in the creation of wilderness we are commodifying the wild, I think we need protected lands. It took a century before Thoreau’s wilderness idea became law. Revolutionizing the way we interact with the natural world will take time. I will risk the commodification of wilderness in order so that, one day, we may participate in and interact with it. This may happen sooner than planned, as the dwindling supply of oil and continuing rise of gas prices forces us to take a hard look at our lifestyle.

As for Emmett Watson and his defense of Seattle – I think we now need to defend the towns and natural areas surrounding the city from becoming the latest casualties of Pugetopolis. In order to know the wild, we must protect it – at least for a while. The suburbs and rural towns that daily become closer and closer to the Pugetopolis beast – they should write growth management plans, preserving a way of life from the forces of urbanization and change. We need to ensure that towns like North Bend and Fall City remain twenty miles away from the urban beast, and do not become suburbs like the former rural towns of Issaquah and Redmond.

Just outside Redmond exists a little hope. Over a large hill and past the upscale strip malls of the Redmond-Fall City Road, there is a farm. The fields are overgrown, and the buildings are in decay. It sits in the middle of a slough of planned housing developments, placed there almost accidentally, somehow forgotten in the drive for growth. Behind the farm is a forest. I do not know how far it stretches.

The Redmond-Fall City Road separates the farm from what will soon be suburban space. Our defense of the land surrounding Seattle should begin here. A group of concerned Puget Sound citizens, holding true to the principles of Lesser Seattle should post a sign that directly faces the gaudy new houses. “Go away,” it will read.

It rains for nearly six months straight in winter. You won’t like it. Trust us. Leave. Sincerely, the farm across the highway.