Sorry, Dad: wilderness and government regulation

Harmonic convergences have ordained that I’m not done pondering wilderness yet.

For my recent post on “Mapping the geography of hope: our place in the wilderness,” I once again used a quotation without having read its source. My latest hit-and-run involved Wallace Stegner’s oft-repeated phrase “the geography of hope.” (That’s Stegner in the photo above.) I didn’t think I’d left the phrase gasping for the air of its original context, but this week I backtracked and read Stegner’s famous 1960 “Wilderness Letter,” which argued powerfully that the federal government should set aside sweeping tracts of wilderness to remain largely untouched by human hands. Since my post had expressed the modest hope that private landowners, especially responsible ranchers, could be full participants in, rather than obstacles to, wilderness preservation, I thought, “Oh, help and bother!”

Then my sister forwarded me a lovely email from her friend Karin Teague, who noted that “we as a species are SO far from understanding and practicing living harmoniously with the land, with all our technological toys and need for speed and basic greed, THANK GOODNESS we had visionary thinkers like John Muir and Aldo Leopold who advocated for wilderness protection, otherwise we would have lost forever so many extraordinary landscapes.” Help and BOTHER.

Finally came the news of Stewart Udall’s death. As Secretary of the Interior, Udall presided over the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, the act that Stegner’s letter helped bring into existence, the act by which the government protected millions of acres from our “need for speed and basic greed”—a piece of legislation that not only kept foundational landscapes untouched, but advanced the idea that such landscapes have been necessary to the formation of the American character. Alright already!

To move ahead, I need to move back first. I am the product of a politically mixed marriage (Democratic mother, Republican father), though I have generally landed on my mother’s side, or somewhat to her left, most of the time. But learning about the hoops that our friends who are small farmers, ranchers, and chefs must jump through in order to keep up with rules designed primarily for agribusiness, I’ve begun foaming at the mouth over government regulation, which pleases my father. Our Madroño adventure has taught me about the daunting bureaucratic gauntlet through which community-minded entrepreneurs must run, and it gets my dander, hackles, and dyspepsia up.

These producers often see their customers every day and consequently feel a profound personal connection and responsibility to them. But they’re forced to run the same maze of regulations as do the agribusiness giants who don’t know me from Adam. Agribusiness’s faceless relationships with its customers are driven by the bottom line, a much more tangible measure of success than the idealistic-sounding yardsticks of community or environmental well-being. But my farming and ranching friends, whom I see every week at market, know that we are intricately bound together at many levels, not merely at the bottom line. Our health—economic, environmental, familial, personal—is a package deal. None of us prospers unless we all do.

So, yes, I’ve learned to be skeptical of government regulation. And yet, and yet... government shapes not just the reality of America, but the idea of America as well. As much as I hate stupid regulations, I hate even more the possibility that, without some external restraints, our apparently insatiable appetites might destroy the very source of our richest symbols and concrete sense of liberty. 

In his Wilderness Letter, Stegner wrote, “Something will go out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves... [as] part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to the headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved—as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds—because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.”


Flying over West Texas not long ago, I noticed that parts of the Permian Basin have been carved up into thousands of—well, I’m not sure what. I saw a network of dirt roads leading to what looked like empty squares of bare earth, which I presume are somehow connected to the oil and gas industry.

I know, I know: it’s not as if the Permian Basin were the Garden of Eden before. So what have we lost by carving up this cussedly dry and famously inhospitable landscape? Back to Stegner: “Let me say something on the subject of the kind of wilderness worth preserving. Most of those areas contemplated are in the national forests and in high mountain country.… But for spiritual renewal, the recognition of identity, the birth of awe, other kinds will serve every bit as well. Perhaps because they are less friendly to life, more abstractly nonhuman, they will serve even better.”


Texans have traditionally prided themselves on their ability to subdue and conquer even the most unpromising land—to make it pay, whether through cotton or cattle or petroleum. One of the unfortunate effects of this pride has been to minimize the value of the land as it exists before being “improved.” We treat it like, well, dirt, and not like our patrimony. In such cases, it seems that government, as Udall and his allies saw, is the only answer to our apparently endless “need for speed and basic greed.” Until we demonstrate that we (both Texans and Americans) are able as a people to restrain ourselves from devouring what sustains us, I continue to support (wise) government intervention to save us from our grotesque appetites. There’s astonishingly little legislation that encourages us to feed our neighbors and the land that sustains us as we would have ourselves fed: with mutual respect and self-restraint. But I’ll support it when I see it and push for it when I don’t. (Sorry, Dad.)

Stegner quotes Sherwood Anderson as saying that the wild nature of the prairie has the capacity to “take the shrillness out of” us. Maybe I need to go spend the night under the vast West Texas sky to lose some of my own shrillness. But I’ve quoted Sherwood Anderson without ever having read anything by him, so at least I know what my next blog topic will probably be.

—Heather

What we’re reading

Heather: Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming
Martin: George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action

Wings over Luckenbach: Jacob Brodbeck and the limits of history

This week, for spring break, we flew to Colorado to ski and to visit Heather’s sister Isa and brother John and their families. As I sat on the plane, gazing out the window at the green and brown patchwork unfurling far below us, I was reminded of one of my favorite Hill Country legends, this one involving the mysterious Jacob Brodbeck.

A German-born schoolteacher who arrived in Texas in 1847, Brodbeck became the second teacher at Fredericksburg’s Vereins Kirche, married one of his former students, and eventually fathered twelve children. But he is best remembered for his claim to be the first human to fly successfully in a heavier-than-air machine almost forty years before Orville and Wilbur Wright’s famous flight at Kitty Hawk, a claim that has never been proved—or, for that matter, disproved.

Brodbeck was an inveterate tinkerer; while living in Germany he had attempted to build a self-winding clock, and in 1869 he supposedly built an ice-making machine, no mean feat in those days before the Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity to the Hill Country. Apparently he worked on his “air-ship” for some twenty years.

In 1858 Brodbeck and his wife left Fredericksburg and moved to Luckenbach, where he became the second teacher at the three-year-old Luckenbach School. Five years later they moved to San Antonio, where he became a school inspector. Brodbeck built a working scale model of his craft, powered by coiled springs, which caused a minor sensation when he showed it at county fairs and other gatherings. He succeeded in convincing several investors, including the distinguished Dr. Ferdinand Herff of San Antonio, to bankroll the construction of a full-size version, promising to repay them within six months, after selling the patent rights to his creation.

At length, he completed that full-size version and prepared for his inaugural attempt. And this is where things get really fuzzy. One account says Brodbeck’s first flight took place in San Antonio’s San Pedro Park, and in fact a bust of him was later placed there; another says the flight took place in 1868. But the most commonly accepted version of events is that on September 20, 1865, in a field about three miles east of Luckenbach, Brodbeck and his craft travelled some 100 feet at a height of about twelve feet, but the springs unwound completely before he could rewind them and craft and pilot crashed to the ground. While Brodbeck escaped serious injury, his air-ship was destroyed.

For some reason, his backers (who had presumably given up on getting their money back) refused to fund the construction of a replacement, so Brodbeck took his show on the road, travelling the country in an attempt to raise the necessary scratch. (No word on what his wife thought of this – or, indeed, of the whole air-ship scheme.) His papers and plans were stolen in Michigan, though, or perhaps in Washington DC—again, accounts vary—and a discouraged Brodbeck returned to Texas and, apparently, gave up his dream of powered flight. He lived out his remaining years on a farm near Luckenbach and died in 1910, a little more than six years after the Wright brothers’ sensational flight at Kitty Hawk. I wonder how he greeted the news of their achievement.

I am myself becoming a bit of a nervous flyer—basically, I agree with George Winters, who said, “If God had really intended men to fly, he’d make it easier to get to the airport”—and I’ve never been bitten by the aviation bug. But a fairly substantial literature celebrates the glory and beauty of flight, and those who fly—Icarus, Lindbergh, Earhart, Saint-Exupéry, the astronauts—retain a lofty (ha ha!) position in our collective imagination. Perhaps flight is simply the most obvious metaphor for transcendence, a persistent human craving.

In the absence of his own words, I wonder why Brodbeck became so obsessed with the idea of flight. Perhaps, after being the second teacher in both Fredericksburg and Luckenbach, he was simply determined to be first in something. Perhaps after spending all those years dealing with classrooms full of blockheaded students, not to mention a dozen children at home, he found the mere idea of any solitary activity irresistible, especially one that promised literally to lift him above the mundane concerns of everyday life. Did he ever actually make it off the ground? Beats me. If he didn’t, though, he was neither the first nor the last dreamer to blur the line between aspiration and reality.

I also wonder what his neighbors thought of him. Did they view him, with stereotypical hard-headed German practicality, as a crackpot? Or did they secretly wish that they too could experience, however briefly, the sensation of breaking free from gravity and getting a view of the earth that, at least in theory, approximated that of God? Will we ever know what really happened in that dusty field outside Luckenbach? I doubt it, and honestly I think I’d rather not know. Anyway, does it really matter? History is, after all, not so much carved in stone as written on the wind. What were once facts are discovered to be interpretations, and the impossible to be the probable (and vice versa). We would do well to remember the words of Bertrand Russell: “those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt.” Aren’t we all, in the end, called upon to live with ambiguity? 

—Martin

What we’re reading

Heather: Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke: Poems

Martin: Wallace Stegner, Marking the Sparrow’s Fall: Wallace Stegner’s American West

Mapping the geography of hope: our place in the wilderness

Last week, during a visit to San Francisco that also took us to the nearby Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Martin and I spent a day exploring the Point Reyes National Seashore with his childhood friends Brad and Hans. Before setting off on our hike, we wandered into Point Reyes Books and wandered out again with the first two volumes of the West Marin Review, a nifty literary journal whose inaugural issue considers Wallace Stegner’s claim that “[w]e simply need... wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”

Even if I can’t give coordinates for the geography of hope, I like the idea that it might exist on some map buried deep under the mess in my brain’s glove compartment. In current mainstream environmental thinking, however, humans and wilderness cannot exist together because humans are an inevitable contaminant. Having spent the drive from San Francisco to Point Reyes with my face glued to the car window taking in an enticing new vocabulary of birds, I’d like to think that the geography of hope includes a place where humans are part of wilderness, not set off from it.

Our hike took us north between Tomales Bay and the ocean, through herds of tule elk, watching waves crash on the rocky shore and tender crocuses and poppies huddled in the chilly wind. As we returned to the parking lot at Pierce Point Ranch, we heard the whine of chainsaws; the Park Service was taking down an enormous Monterey cypress, maybe 75 feet tall. The presence of rot in some branches posed a threat to the uninhabited cluster of historic ranch buildings at the head of the trail. The decision to cut down the tree seemed iconic of the destruction endemic to human activity in the natural world.

So it was with interest that I saw an essay in the West Marin Review entitled “The Fiction of Wilderness,” by Mark Dowie, the former editor and publisher of Mother Jones. Dowie suggests that the Wilderness Act of 1964 set in stone the idea that wilderness was best preserved by balkanizing large tracts of land and ejecting any permanent residents who might have lived there, as the Miwok tribe was ejected from Yosemite. He says this creates “a commodified wilderness... a deliberate charade, a culturally constructed neo-Edenic narrative played out for weary human urbanites yearning for the open frontier their ancestors ‘discovered’ then tamed—a place to absorb the sounds and images of virgin nature and forget for a moment the thoroughly unnatural lives they lead.” (Ouch.)

But Dowie suggests an alternative. His research revealed that many aboriginal peoples have nothing analogous to the Western conception of wilderness and were stumped when he tried to explain it to them. The closest equivalents in their languages were domesticated ones: “back yard,” “big farmyard,” “food,” or “pantry.” There was, in other words, no sense of separation between the people and the landscapes they lived in. Dowie quotes a Tarahumaran ethno-ecologist from Mexico who says that in his culture the landscape is granted the same love and affection as family, resulting in a “kincentric ecology.”

Dowie hopes that environmentalist notions of wilderness can change to include the possibility of human activity intimately embedded within the land in a mutually profitable relationship. When we see ourselves as apart from a pristine nature that exists outside the bonds of kinship, we are more likely to commodify and exploit it.

Serendipitously, my reading took me from the West Marin Review to a publication that our friends Hugh and Sarah Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison gave me just before we left for San Francisco. Entitled Five Ways to Value the Working Landscapes of the West, it may not rise immediately to the top of the New York Times best seller list, although it makes for compelling reading. The first essay, “In Praise, and in Appraisal, of the Working Landscapes of the West,” begins with this heartening pronouncement: “The simplest fact about Western ranches tends to be the one which most folks tend to forget: raising range-fed livestock is one of the few economic activities that produces food—and potentially ecosystem health and financial wealth—by keeping landscapes relatively wild, diverse, and resilient.”

We’re planning our first bison harvest in the near future and have hopes of developing a food culture that will feed whoever happens to be staying at Madroño Ranch and perhaps others in the immediate community as well. Our concern can’t stop at our bellies, though: what feeds us must be fed as well, and well fed. The essay’s authors, Gary Paul Nabhan and Ken Meter, write of working landscapes: “if we commit ourselves to eating their bounty, we derive a good portion of our nourishment from the very ground on which we stand. We do not stand apart [my emphasis] from the energy and water flows of our home ground. Instead, they work through us, and we work because of them. The land is not mere scenery suitable only for tourism and leisure. It is a functioning community in which we either live well or poorly, depending on how efficiently and conservatively we participate in the land’s work.” And then, as the clincher, they quote my new hero Henry David Thoreau: “[P]erhaps we are here to ‘meet the expectations of the land’ and not the other way around.”

This whole blog post may be nothing more than a stemwinding rationalization for contaminating the rapidly disappearing Texas wilderness. But I hate the idea that there is no room for an ongoing and mutually satisfying exchange between the landscape and its human inhabitants. We need guides to lead us from here to there, though, guides who know both the intimate history of the land and the capacities and limits of new technologies. Increasingly, these guides are ranchers like Hugh and Sarah who cherish their working landscapes and who, in return, receive its abundance, even in lean times. We’d like Madroño Ranch to find its own place in this geography of hope.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Henri J. M. Nouwen, In Memoriam
Martin: Jay Parini, Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America

Listapalooza: top ten books about Texas

Time for the next installment in our much-anticipated series of lists (our first two were on our top ten songs about Texas and our top ten books on the environment)! This time, we thought we’d offer up our ten favorite books, both fiction and nonfiction, about the Lone Star State.

Roy Bedichek, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist
Sarah Bird, The Mommy Club

H. G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream
Billy Lee Brammer, The Gay Place

Oscar Casares, Brownsville: Stories
John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative
Stephen Harrigan, The Gates of the Alamo

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas; or, a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier

All right, all you Lone Star literati, let us have it. What classics have we missed and/or forgotten?

—Martin

What we’re reading

Heather: Shelley Silbert, M. Gay Chanler, and Gary Paul Nabhan (eds.), Five Ways to Value the Working Landscapes of the West

Martin: West Marin Review: A Literary and Visual Arts Journal