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Conservation (meaning preservation) of wilderness is probably impossible. It is not enough to place a restriction in a deed. Inevitably it takes litigation to enforce deed restrictions and litigation may come too late or fail anyway. It is not enough for the government or a private organization to designate land as “wilderness” or “preserved” or a species as “protected.” Without continuing public support, such designations can be removed. Public support comes from people who cherish wilderness and wild creatures. Most often those who cherish wilderness spend time in wilderness, with its wild creatures. As Aldo Leopold wrote, “to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”
We protect bighorn sheep, like those grazing high on a canyon wall in the photograph above. To protect them we must stay away from them, but if we stay away, we cannot see them. If we cannot see them, we will forget that we cherish them.
A marsh is the native land of the crane. In Aldo Leopold’s writing, the crane is to the marsh what the bighorn sheep are to the desert – the symbol of wilderness. He called the crane, “wildness incarnate.”
Aldo Leopold cherished the crane. By promoting restoration and preservation of marshlands, he was their benefactor.
Here in the desert of southern California we cherish the bighorn sheep. To see one is to see a unicorn – so mysterious, beautiful and rare. Seeing bighorn sheep in the wild makes a person want to be their benefactor.
In one of the most beautiful passages in A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wrote, “Some day, perhaps in the very process of our benefactions, perhaps in the fullness of geologic time, the last crane will trumpet his farewell and spiral skyward from the great marsh. High out of the clouds will fall the sound of hunting horns, the baying of the phantom pack, the tinkle of little bells, and then a silence never to be broken, unless perchance in some far pasture of the Milky Way.”
Darwin wrote that he “sometimes felt much difficulty in understanding” why species have some traits that seem unnecessary for their survival. Unimportant organs were an example of such traits. Even more difficult to understand than unnecessary organs was beauty, superfluous beauty. Some naturalists in Darwin’s time questioned the adequacy of natural selection to explain the origin of the species because it did not seem able to account for beauty. Darwin wrote, “They believe that very many structures have been created for beauty in the eyes of man, or for mere variety.” Darwin considered their argument that beauty had its own reason, a separate reason from the preservation of life, to be a serious problem for his own argument that natural selection accounts for the origin of the species. The stakes in this dispute were high. They still are. In his words, “This doctrine, if true, would be absolutely fatal to my theory.”
Darwin argued that unnecessary organs and traits that are merely beautiful were once necessary for the survival of progenitors and had been inherited by the descendent species even though they were no longer necessary for survival. He argued that natural selection would have eliminated these traits if they caused harm to the descendent species, but would not necessarily have eliminated them if they caused no harm.
A final conclusion about such things seems beyond the reach of science.
Much remains at stake here. Beauty remains potentially fatal to Darwin’s argument. If beauty is superfluous to survival, and yet exists, then perhaps God not natural selection was, after all, responsible for the origin of the species.
In his autobiography, Darwin wrote of “the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capability of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.” He wrote, “I feel compelled to look at a first cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a theist.”
He added that these words express, as best as he could remember, what he believed when he wrote the Origin of the Species, but after that time this belief in the possibility of an intelligent first cause had fluctuated and had gradually become weaker.
Darwin explained that although his belief in the possibility of an intelligent first cause had become weaker, so had his doubts about his ability to reach any conclusions about this. His skepticism about the truth of the claims of faith battled with his skepticism that the immense and wonderful universe and the capabilities of humanity could be fully explained by his own arguments about inherited variations and natural selection. It appears from his autobiography that he examined and re-examined the possibility that life began according to the design of an intelligent mind and never reached a final conclusion.
Today, some people embrace the idea that Darwin presented in The Origin of the species – that natural selection working slowly and gradually on inherited variations in traits accounts completely for the origin of the individual species. Others do not.
Some people believe an intelligent mind stands behind the design of nature. Others believe that chance and necessity have shaped nature.
Some people hold strong convictions about these matters. Others, like Darwin, do not.
Darwin had an uncommonly fine mind and ability to closely observe the details of life. His inconclusiveness suggests that close observation and reason are ultimately not sufficient to answer the most basic questions about life – about the past and the future.
Some people assert that it does not matter that these questions have no answers. But it does. Our capability to look into the past and into the future matters. It matters to the decisions we make and it matters to our peace of mind.
One can turn to theology or philosophy for such answers, but if one does turn that way, one must choose a theology or philosophy- there are many of each. It is an uneasy choice. The existence of plural theologies and philosophies suggests that none of them has a convincing ability to reveal the past or the future.
The argument is before us now that humanity has damaged nature and may have assured its own destruction as well as that of all the rest of life. What shall we do? Science provides no conclusive guidance, nor does theology or philosophy.
Whether by intelligent design, or by chance and necessity, humanity is adrift in an immense and wonderful universe.
In “The Land,” Mary Austin wrote about the meaning of the expression “Lost Borders” to the native American people of California who taught her that expression. It referred to the difficulty of setting borders between the separate lands of the tribes in the washes and “inextricable disordered ranges” of mountains in the desert.
Mary Austin saw in the expression “lost borders” an association between borders and the laws by which men maintain order among themselves. The desert was a place without laws, without order. Beyond that association, she saw in the expression a metaphor for what happened to men who came in search of fortune in the desert, in California. She wrote, “Out there, then, where the law and landmarks fail together, the souls of little men fade out at the edges, leak from them as water from wooden pails warped asunder.” She continued, “Out there where the borders of conscience break down, where there is no convention, and behavior is of little account except as it gets you your desire, almost anything might happen; does happen, in fact …”
So much has changed since Mary Austin wrote those words: the desert she knew has been tamed and settled. All of California’s wild land, much of which is arid enough to be called desert, has been watered and tamed and settled. Physical borders extend throughout the desert now. The little men whose souls faded out at the edges changed the desert and their way has become the habit of the people who have settled in California. The physical desert that Mary Austin knew is no longer there, but California remains a place where souls fade out at the edges, where desire counts more than conscience.
Is it a bad thing for desire to count more than conscience? In the workings of evolution, in natural selection, doesn’t desire does count more than conscience? Is that not what ensures the survival of life? After all, what is a soul worth in a land of lost borders?
In Mary Austin’s estimation, a man’s soul was worth more than the fortune of minerals that a man might extract from the desert. To her, the desert was a place where higher desires were fulfilled – the desires of the soul. In Land of Little Rain, she wrote that the desert fulfilled desires for “deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion with the stars.”
A friend made of video of an encounter between condors and tourists along the Pacific coast near Big Sur. In the video condors are standing next to a guardrail at a turnout along Highway 1 watching people who had pulled their cars into the turnout to watch the condors. See the video at http://schwansongs.blogspot.com/
The birds have large numbered tags attached to their wings placed there by nonprofit organizations who are closely watching the condors hoping to see an increase the wild condor population.
The cars have only slightly larger numbered tags attached to their bumpers placed there by law so that the government can keep watch over and tax the driver population.
In the video other cars carrying tourists, all numbered, whiz by on the highway. Occasionally the condors leave the turnout, fly out over the ocean and then fly back over the highway buzzing the cars whizzing by.
Some of the tourists asked my friend, whose camera was set up on a tripod, if he was making a television commercial. That is not really an unusual question in California where so many people associate movies, television and consumption with a good life. To see someone making a television commercial is to see the wizard behind the curtain in the Land of Oz.
The Big Sur Chamber of Commerce has a web page with videos and other information about these condors at http://www.bigsurcalifornia.org/condors.html
In my friend’s video, a woman, who told my friend that she came from the nonprofit organization that releases and watches the birds, rushed up to the guard rail with a large squirt gun, about the size of a bazooka, and fired at the condors. She said she did not want the birds to get too friendly with the tourists. Maybe she believed her action was not violence, but mercy.
Recap: A nonprofit organization releases and monitors condors at Big Sur, a tourist spot. The condors help attract more tourists and promote business at Big Sur. Tourists see a man with a camera on a tripod and stop their cars to ask the man if he is making a television commercial. A woman fires a water bazooka at the birds.
In another world, maybe she would have aimed at the tourists.
They did not stay long – these clouds. They formed in only a few minutes out of clear sky and they left the way they came. I examined them for a while with my camera, but I was examining the snow covering the branches of trees on the ridge of a distant mountain and my back was turned away from them – the clouds – when they left.
It was on a mild day in January that they came – and left.
In The End of Nature, Bill McKibben wrote: I love winter best now, but I try not to love it too much, for fear of the January perhaps not so distant when the snow will fall as warm rain. There is no future in loving nature.”
If we could manage nature we would – clouds, rain, wind, and snow – when they come and when they go. We would, if we could, manage the genes too – especially the genes – human selection would replace natural selection. We are certainly trying to do that now. With such control, imagine the future – no more misery, no more death.
He is right, Bill McKibben is, there is no future in loving nature. That is why we seek control, not love. We see a future in control.
And from the perspective of nature: Is there any future in loving such humanity?
At the end of the chapter on Instinct in Origin of the Species Darwin wrote:
“… to my imagination it is far more satisfactory to look at such instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers, ants making slaves, — the larvae of ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars, not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.”
Darwin was arguing here with other naturalists, not with theologians, but the argument represents theodicy as well as science. Natural selection exonerates the good creator from the problem of evil in life – the apparent cruelty of life is actually good because it leads to the advancement of all organic beings.
Imagine the implications for the beatitudes: Blessed are the strong for they will inherit life. And the meek shall perish.
A paragraph in the introduction to The Origin of the Species summarizes Darwin’s argument about evolution. It says:
“Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgement of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained — namely, that each species has been independently created — is erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.”
Darwin’s argument in The Origin of the Species was scientific, not theological. He presented his argument to other naturalists, not to theologians. At the same time, Darwin’s argument is not irrelevant to theology. It has led some people to reject their previous faith in God, others to reject Darwin’s argument because they consider it incompatible with the Bible or theology, and others to partially accept Darwin’s argument, to adjust their theology to accommodate evolution, or both.
Full acceptance of Darwin’s argument is generally associated with rejection of belief in God, or at least with the belief that God is superfluous, even though Darwin himself may have believed in God in a limited way. Darwin seemed to suggest that God may have created the first life form (or forms), but then let natural selection modify them. In that view, God was necessary to start life, but was superfluous in the evolution of later species.
Some people believe as Darwin suggested. Others have found alternative ways to believe in God and evolution. For example, some believe that God not only created the first life, but has continuously intervened in the otherwise natural evolutionary process and some believe that God placed a soul in humanity when the first humans evolved. Of course, these beliefs, including Darwin’s suggestion, are not scientific because the scientific method applies only to the discovery and understanding of natural laws, not to the discovery and understanding of the ways of God. When Darwin wrote that natural selection was not the exclusive means of modification, he was referring to other natural means and not to modification by God.
Robinson Jeffers’ poem, The Excesses of God, begins with the question:
“Is it not by his high superfluousness we know our God?”
This poem and others by Jeffers do not suggest that God is superfluous. The poem suggests that we can know God through the superfluous, unnecessary beauty of the world and life. Darwin, on the other hand, did not see beauty as superfluous. Darwin argued in The Origin of the Species that the beauty we behold in nature, like we see in flowers and hear in the songs of birds, is the product of natural selection, rooted ultimately in necessity, in the struggle to survive, and in nothing more. Held up against Darwin’s writing, Jeffers’ poem is ironic, for in evolutionary biology, as in science generally, it is God, not beauty, that is superfluous.
In the poem, Jeffers also wrote:
“There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness … “
When Darwin peered into heart of things he did not see the great humaneness and extravagant kindness. He saw an often brutal struggle for survival and the indifferent law of natural selection.
God is superfluous and at the heart of things the principle upon which life is founded and ordered is neither humane nor kind: these are the common implications of full acceptance of Darwin’s argument.
Darwin’s argument has proven so productive for the scientific understanding of life that today his argument is considered fact. I wish it were not so.
At the end of The Origin of the Species, after completing his argument, in the final sentence of his book, about his argument that life evolved through natural selection Darwin wrote:
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”
Here in the last sentence of the book are the words Darwin used that suggest that the first life forms had a creator, even if later forms evolved without God’s guidance and care. It is paradoxical, of course, to include Biblical expression in a scientific essay. Darwin had drawn expression from Genesis 2:7 which says, “God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”
Is Darwin really suggesting that God made the first life forms but that their descendent species evolved through natural selection without God’s guidance and care? I don’t think so – he never argued in favor of the idea of creation in the book, not in any context – he argued against the idea that species were independently created and he argued for the idea of natural selection. Or, are these words rhetorical piety employed to persuade readers who believe in God to consider his argument favorably? It is possible. Or, in his heart did Darwin simply wish, as humans do, for wishful things, for things high and superfluous? I suspect he did.
In Origin of the Species, in Chapter 6, in the paragraph immediately before the summary, Charles Darwin wrote:
“It may be difficult, but we ought to admire the savage instinctive hatred of the queen-bee, which urges her instantly to destroy the young queens her daughters as soon as born, or to perish herself in the combat; for undoubtedly this is for the good of the community; and maternal love or maternal hatred, though the latter fortunately is most rare, is all the same to the inexorable principle of natural selection.”
It is not just difficult; it is impossible. I don’t want to admire “savage instinctive hatred” or to see its justification in the “good of the community.” I refuse.
If maternal love and maternal hatred are “all the same” to the principle upon which life is founded and organized, then the universe is a horrible place to live.
A hundred years ago, one could see the desert of the southwest as it was before the reclamation began.
John C. Van Dyke saw it as it was at the end of the nineteenth century, before twentieth century Americans set out “reclaim” the vast desolation, the wasteland, which is the way the natural desert appeared to their progressive minds. They reclaimed the desert from its state of desolation for humanity’s agricultural, commercial and residential use.
Van Dyke could see that the reclamation was about to begin and did not like what he saw. In his book, The Desert, he lamented the coming change. The reclamation happened, of course, just as he feared it would. His sense of loss was the same as Edward Abbey would write about seventy years later after the reclamation had progressed, the same sense of loss, the same grief, that is found in almost all nature writing since the reclamation of the desolation began.
Grief often finds a reason for hope. In Van Dyke’s writing, as in much other nature writing, that hope is paradoxical. It is the hope that someday when the species humanity dies, the desert will be restored, will come back and be as it was. It is a hope bound up with a belief that we are part of nature, but, at the same time, bound up with a feeling that we are a bad part of nature. It is bound up with the belief that humanity like all other individual species seen in the fossils will perish completely, but that the natural process that made humanity and all the other species will go on. It is bound up with the belief that humanity, in its quest for progress, in its quest for its own eternal life without suffering, is destroying life.
I wish I could have seen the desert as it was, before the reclamation. I wish it would come back restored and that I could see it then.
Here is an excerpt from the end of Chapter 3 of Van Dyke’s book, The Desert, the chapter titled “The Bottom of the Bowl.” The Bottom of the Bowl refers to the Salton Basin in the Lower Colorado Desert in Southern California.
“When the locust swarm has passed, the flowers and grasses will return to the valley; when man is gone, the sand and the heat will come back to the desert. The desolation of the kingdom will live again, and down in the Bottom of the Bowl the opalescent mirage will waver skyward on wings of light, serene in its solitude, though no human eye sees nor human tongue speaks its loveliness.”
In nature writing it seems, as in Christian writing, so much depends on a vision of a second coming.
Lost Borders 
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