The Last Word On Nothing

At 4 am, driving west from Ashland, Wisconsin, I flicked on BBC news and heard a report out of the North Fork of the Gunnison, a place I lived for a couple decades in western Colorado. It was about oil and gas development and the unprecedented rollback of environmental protections. Voices I know from home expressed concern over increased energy extraction, not just what it means to have more hydrocarbons burning into the atmosphere, but what it would mean for this community of working ranches, orchards, and vineyards to be subject to many new cherry stem roads, pipelines, wells, holding ponds, spills, groundwater fracturing, and chemicals pumped into the ground proven by the Trump-era EPA to be hazardous to local water supplies.

No lack of irony or hypocrisy had me listening to this news while sucking up gas in a rental to Duluth, then flying on to Minneapolis and then Phoenix where I picked up my car and drove till almost midnight back to the North Fork of the Gunnison to see my kids. It was the same day when students around the world went on strike to press for climate action. The next day I asked my boys about the strikes. Seventh grade and 11^th, they go to school in the North Fork, and my younger had to search his memory when I mentioned Greta Thunberg. He hadn’t heard about the protests while I was gone, no mention of them in school, nary a teacher referencing what was going on outside the walls, hundreds of thousands of youth taking to the streets all around the world demanding that climate change be addressed seriously for at least the sake of their generation. My older boy knew this was happening, but not much about it.

On Saturday, I drove my youngest and a classmate of his into town, and as they sat in the back seat I asked about Thunberg and the protests. They both said they were concerned about the future of the planet and that they supported all those kids who walked out of class the day before. When I asked if they’d go on strike themselves, they said they would if they weren’t alone. My boy said he felt as if the problems were too big for one person, and that he didn’t matter. I told them the story of this Swedish girl who was alone a year ago and is now pushing the world.

Not just because of Greta Thunberg, and not just because of my boys, I’m interested in what youth are saying. They’re being handed a steaming pile of uncertainty and platitudes of old narratives. Even if climates somehow level off and the Holocene lives happily ever after, a lot has been dumped on their plate, hearing that their world may be mostly uninhabitable within their lifetimes or that civilization will last decades more at most. I thought it was bad enough growing up in the Cold War with the chance we’d be vaporized while eating our Cap’n Crunch. Now we’re saying with scientific certainty we are entering a full blown apocalypse, that even if we did everything we could, we and everything around us is screwed. That’s got to mess with your head.

While I was in Wisconsin last week, I went out with a couple Northland College science classes to a forested, fenned island on Lake Superior, one of the Apostle Islands. After we motored back to the mainland, I got in a van with the limnology class, a group of freshwater students who had collected samples from one of the island’s ponds. A young man with smart, serious eyes and constellations of pierces said he understood that if we covered Death Valley with solar panels, the entire country could have power from the sun, instead of fossil fuels. I said if you don’t mind the vast mining operations and toxicity that would come from building so many solar panels, acquiring rare metals, not to mention the resources used for energy storage. He suggested that we’re too squeamish about using land for energy, that we’re not facing up to the reality that humans require electricity, internet, and space not just to recreate but to live well and affordably. Death Valley should be a solar capital. If not that, hydro-electric. I said, if you don’t mind clogging free-flowing rivers with dams.

The student had never been to Death Valley. I had. It’s already being strafed by fighter jet maneuvers, but the land is vast and incredible, a region protected because the United States contains some of the last giant holdings of undeveloped landscapes, places becoming rare on a planet being dominated by one species. The student had not seen rivers upended by soaring dams or traveled to foreign countries protesting the construction of enormous impoundments that would kill their waterways. I had. I played the Lorax. He shied away from sentimentality. He gave me a brief dissertation on Gifford Pinchot and John Muir. In the late 19^th century, Pinchot, first head of the newly minted US Forest Service, advocated for conservation by planned use and renewal of the land. He called his vision, “the art of producing from the forest whatever it can yield for the service of man.” At the same time, Muir was arguing for land to be set aside for absolute protection, the invention of the US Park Service and eventually the Wilderness Act. The student, wearing a Metallica T-shirt, was not a fan of Muir’s approach. I sensed he might not be a fan of Pinchot, either. Two dead white men arguing about a future that has already come and is almost past.

We talked for a while as we drove, me in the front seat, him on the bench behind me. He said he prefers conservation to preservation. That is, taking care of places but not keeping them wild for the sake of wilderness. Nature includes human use and interaction, he said.

Survey sample of one, I listened closely to the youth of America. The conversation required straining, windows rolled down because the day was unseasonably hot, more like July than mid-September, an extreme becoming more common. The young man was not fawning over my sagacity, my wish for nature to be held above human need. He held fast as a conservationist.

Whatever differences he and I had, I saw hope. We were aiming the same general direction, but thirty years apart. I don’t know if I saw hope in him or because of him. He was thinking seriously about these issues, and not swallowing a party line. If the world was ending, he was keeping at it, inventing new ideologies, different ways of thinking, maybe abolishing the notion of ideologies. He wasn’t flinching. A future was being forged. I don’t know if he attended the walk-out the next day, or if he was repelled by it. What I do know is that I left a trail of burnt hydrocarbons across the continent that Friday, heading back to my kids to tell them about what Greta Thunberg has done, and to listen to them think.


Photo of my boys a couple years ago in front of an exhibit at the Anchorage Museum.