Second Nature

When I moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1990, I felt at a loss. Accustomed to living in England’s secondary nature, I had difficulty reading a landscape in which so much primary nature showed through the patchy overlay of around 140 years of white settlement and enterprise. Hunting for a workable analogy, I tried to see myself as a visitor to Roman Britain at the end of the second century, taking in the new cities, the network of paved highways, the agricultural estates and military installations, superimposed on a land lightly occupied by tribal people. But that conceit was flawed: the British tribes had permanently altered the land with mines, farms, forts, and ritual and funerary monuments long before the Romans came, while the Northwest Indians left few visible traces of their 12,000-year habitation. West of the Cascade Range, where wood rots fast in the soggy climate, the Indian past faded continually behind the ongoing present, like the dissolving wake of a cedar canoe. Artefacts like painted chests, ritual masks and wall hangings survived, but whole towns were reclaimed by the forest within a generation, leaving little more than overgrown shell middens to mark where they’d stood. Wherever the land was significantly shaped, or ‘scaped’, the work appeared to have been done just recently – a spreading accumulation of raw concrete, pressed steel, brick, sheetrock, telephone poles, pavement, fencing, neon, glass and vinyl, scattered in piecemeal fashion across a nature whose essential bone structure of mountains, lakes, forest and sea inlets was still so prominent that the most ambitious attempts to build on and subdue it looked tentative and provisional.

Living in Seattle, one would have to entomb oneself in the basement to avoid the view. On clear days, the snowy bulk of Mount Rainier, high as the Matterhorn, towers over the city, which squats on the edge of Puget Sound, more than a hundred fathoms deep. The lower slopes of the Cascades to the east and the Olympics to the west are thickly furred with forest, or the appearance of forest (for most of the visible timber is actually second- or third-growth ‘tree farms’). Black bears and cougars forage in the suburbs; threatened Chinook salmon flounder through the shipping on the Duwamish Waterway, struggling upstream to spawn and die; from my window, less than two miles north of downtown, I watch bald eagles on their regular east–west flight path over the Lake Washington Ship Canal; a walker in this city can see killer whales breaching, California sea lions hauled out on docks, beavers, coyotes, opossums, foxes, raccoons.

Nearly four million people live in the coastal sprawl of metropolitan Seattle, and there can be very few cities of its size where it’s so easy to feel like a trespasser on the habitat of other creatures, and to be uneasily aware that those creatures, given half a chance, would quickly regain possession of their old freehold. Squint, and you can imagine the wood-frame houses collapsing into greenery, and large mammals denning in abandoned malls. It’s hardly surprising that the urban Pacific Northwest is home to a strain of radical environmentalism whose aim is not just to conserve what’s still left of nature in these parts, but to dismantle the machinery of industrial civilization and restore large tracts of country to the wild.

Whenever a bridge on a forest road washes out in a winter storm, a lobby springs up to demand that the entire road be condemned. Some dams are being breached to return rivers to the salmon, and many more are targeted for demolition. The movement, supported by a string of court victories, to prohibit – or drastically restrict – logging, mining and livestock grazing on public lands has steadily gained momentum over the last decade, even though the Bush administration and – until January 2007 – the Republican-controlled Congress, have fought to unstitch the environmental legislation of the Clinton years. Gray wolves, fishers, wolverines and grizzly bears – all species that survive here in minuscule numbers at present – are being reintroduced. (In the case of the widely feared grizzlies, Canadians are making the reintroductions in British Columbia and the undocumented bears are immigrating into Washington state.) At present, two bills making their way through Congress will soon add 200 square miles of mountain lakes, old-growth forest and river valleys to existing ‘wilderness areas’ within an hour’s drive from Seattle. As the Wilderness Act of 1964 put it: ‘A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.’

This is landscaping in reverse. Its main advocates are politicians, activists and non-profit foundations in large coastal cities such as Seattle and Portland, Oregon, who argue that the rise in ‘quality of life assets’, created by such wilding of the countryside, can amply compensate for the loss of jobs in traditional rural industries such as logging, mining, ranching and farming. ‘Nature’ and ‘Solitude’ – those Emersonian essay titles – have a potentially higher cash value, say the conservationists, than horizontal trees or pockets of natural gas trapped in the coal seams underlying a beautiful mountain pass. When land is designated as wilderness, property prices immediately increase in its vicinity, and so does the flow of cash brought into the area by campers, hikers, hunters, fly-fishermen, snowshoers and mountaineers.

For the economist in a city office, it’s a simple transfer of figures from column to column, from Agriculture & Industry to Services & Retail Trade: if the loss in one is equalled or exceeded by the gain in the other, nobody should have cause for complaint, at least in the long run. But that’s not how it’s seen in the country, where the fast-advancing cause of wilderness has been met with very modified rapture
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To the loggers and farmers, man-the-visitor-who-does-not-remain is just another tourist; a member of a breed much disliked in the rural West for its presumed wealth, ignorance and disdain for the concerns of people who work the land instead of using it as a weekend playground. Hundred-year-old lumber and market communities, faced with the prospect of a radical shift in their economies, can see the future all too clearly in the shape of the ‘gateway towns’ that rim national parks like Yellowstone, Glacier and Yosemite; those desolate strips of competing motels, minimarts, gas stations, gift shops and fast-food outlets. Whatever these places may once have been, their only business now is to make the beds, pump the gas, serve the meals and wash the dirty linen of the tourists – occupations in which there’s money but little dignity.

And it’s the assault on their dignity that so offends the country-dwellers: the treatment of the logger, proud of his skilled and dangerous job, as a reckless vandal; the subordination of rural work to the recreational interests of urban sportsmen and nature lovers; the assumption of intellectual superiority by city-based environmentalists, with their mantra of ‘best available science’, routinely abbreviated to BAS. The West is in the middle of a furious conflict between the city and the country, in part a class war, in part a generational one, which has significant political consequences.

In the 2004 general election, every city in the United States with more than 500,000 inhabitants returned a majority vote for John Kerry. The election was won for Bush and the Republicans in the outer suburbs and the rural hinterlands. Much was made of ‘red states’ and ‘blue states’, but the great rift was between the blue cities and the red countryside. Environmental politics, in the form of fervent local quarrels over land use, were at the heart of this division. Beneath the talk of Iraq, health care, terrorism, gun control, abortion and all the rest lay a barely articulated but passionate dispute about the nature of nature in America.