The Last Shade is Burning

“Leiberg began his piece by stating that ‘a steadily progressing aridity is slowly replacing former, more humid climactic conditions from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific.”

– Fifth issue of National Geographic, via Jack Nesbitt

As Robin Wall Kimmerer has pointed out in Braiding Sweetgrass, late modern logic has taken the body of life to the point that two men can clear-cut vast areas of national forest very quickly. This is cheap in dollars. As John Muir put it, “Nothing dollarable is safe.” Now, as global warming can no longer be denied, we as usual look to the heavens for answers. Caring for the trees planted after clear-cutting is not in our minds. Because of dollar-thinking, we do not see the axe and torch that we are holding in our hands as we burn the last of earth’s protection: the wild forests that preserve the last of our reservoir of falling rain and cooling shade.

Willful ignorance that keeps old ways in place is a shameful thing to kill our descendants for—along with all of life. Humboldt told the world what was at stake in the early 1800s. Thoreau, Leiberg, Muir, Grinnell, and many others reported on and opted to save the wild a century later. And still we claim that we don’t know, that it can’t be, that money is more important than life.

If you want to grasp the enormity of the sin and crime of onrushing extinction, read Jack Nisbet’s The Dreamer and The Doctor, or Laura Dassow Wall’s Thoreau: A Life, or Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature, or Scott Freeman’s Saving Tarboo Creek, or Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss or Braiding Sweetgrass. It isn’t too late, but it will be in your lifetime.