Barry Lopez

Who can say how the break between nature and cultural man came about? Or when. Historians of the West might trace it back to the rise of agriculture among early Sumerians, 7,000 years ago in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. Anthropologists tell us, though, the breach is no neat rift, that it has no single cause; central to the separation, though, wherever and whenever it occurs, is a shift in humanity’s attitude toward its place. When one’s home landscape—its animals, waters, plants, and earths—comes to be regarded as a servant, a producer of wealth and surfeit, the divide has opened. When the man who once plucked a few wild berries while traveling across a landscape he belonged to, a specific place which occupied the heart of his daily prayer, evolves into a strategist for profit, the split has occurred.

In essence, one’s home land, once included like a member of a family in the reciprocities of life, has become a thing, an object no longer part of the owner’s moral universe. Once a part of the face of God, it is now chattel.

These breaks, of course, occurred long ago in the West. In corners of Australia and Brazil, however, in Greenland, Mongolia, and other aboriginum refugia, we believe the mutual obligations and courtesies that historically obtained in the human relationship with place have not been completely abrogated. We imagine we can still inquire hopefully here about our prospects.

Time is short, though. If there is wisdom to serve the billions of us in Sydney, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, and Los Angeles, if the outline of a different moral practice is to be had by listening to Navajo, Pitjantjatjara, Hadza, or Inuit tradition keepers, we need to be at it quickly.

In the meantime, we find ourselves in the Visa, CNN, AK-47 present, slightly alarmed by the weather, wondering how to ensure that the last few buttons of undisturbed land remain free of their putative new owners’ social and economic scheming. We must somehow counter the entrenched philosophy of the contemporary investor—corporate, individual, or governmental: the belief that every parcel of land must pay its way. If it cannot provide something marketable, they say, what’s to be gained by keeping it inviolate? If it can’t serve, why care for it?

Land as serf. In nineteenth-century New World terms, the land as Negro.


In the long line of emancipations that have unfolded in the West since the Enlightenment—the abolition of slavery; one man/​one woman, one vote; independence thrown up in the face of colonialism—environmentalism has emerged as a movement for the emancipation of land. Wild land—“nature without an audience,” as the writer Jay Griffiths calls it—is without equal as a symbol of unhindered life. Those who seek its manumission are the same women and men who once drafted the most eloquent of arguments against slavery, colonial subjugation, and corporate exploitation and thievery.

Global climate change is the great leveler in the environmental debate. Leaving our own fate out of it for the moment, it is now instructive to wonder how wild land will respond. Beautifully, one has to think. Adaptation is its history, its legacy. No matter the stress—bolide impact, monocultured forests, rerouted rivers—adaptation is its eternal answer. Wild land exists without regret, has no plan for improvement, no goal outside its own integrity. It is attractive to us partly because it has no defense against the laceration of road building, the penetration of mines, the scarifying of machinery. It is also attractive to us, strangely, because we intuit wild land is apt to meet global climate change with more equanimity than our labyrinthine cities, our drought-stricken fields.


Wild lands, of course, can give some empire builders pause. If he or she sees fresh land as more than a warehouse of goods or a mean wall between himself and other riches, the pause will do us all good. Wilderness is a warning to those who dream of controlling nature: short-term triumphs—bumper crops, fire suppression, brimming reservoirs—are no more than that. Good in the short term only. Further, untrampled land, its innate worth defended by conservationists, offers yet another sort of warning to the would-be plunderer: when strongly tempted by the promise of profit, some people will still choose to hold such ground for the next generation.

If the question remains, Why preserve these areas?, the answer can’t any longer be for tourism or the promise of new medicines, or for the sake of scientific discoveries, or even to preserve minerals or timber for future use. Not if we have in mind the sense of integrity we claim the work of conservation implies. It has to be for emancipation. It has to be because every pleader for preservation knows somewhere deep in his or her psyche that the effort to protect undisturbed lands is an effort to break the stranglehold industrial man has put on the Earth. It is an effort to reduce the reach of corporate muscle, an effort to staunch the bleeding of the brutalized oceans and their continents. It’s a plea to reconcile. It’s a call for principles that take us beyond the adolescent urge to plunder, to overpower, to win. In defending wild lands, we reclaim our dignity.

The real work of preservation, then, is our own salvation. It is not to save nature. Nature will save itself, no matter what climatic or nuclear hell we plunge ourselves into.


One spring I took the Indian Pacific from Sydney to Perth. Most of the way I was able to ride in the locomotive’s cab with the engineers, and so take in the full sweep of the countryside. Crossing the Nullarbor Plain one morning we ran into a violent storm, sheets of rain so dense there was no view forward through the windscreen and but pale views to either side. I reveled in the fury and insouciance of the storm. And then it was gone. Ahead and to the south the span of a double rainbow materialized in the mist, an entity the breadth of Perth itself. The ionized air tore through open windows on either side of us. Neither the engineers nor I spoke a word. We nodded confidently to one another. Yes, we were in it now, an apparition of the wild that lay outside any human control or language. To the north, kangaroos bounded as if in fright or glee, radiating across the Nullarbor in streaks, and the three of us in the cab knew we could sail on like this for days, with no thought of sleep or nourishment. We were feeding on the food of our ancestors, those who had not abandoned nature in order to discover man but who had gone deep into nature to discover the Eden of which man is a part.

We felt emancipated.