Is This Nature?

Sometimes the wistfulness of an aspiration serves its own purpose. 

Getting anywhere amid a pandemic is complicated, risky, and potentially irresponsible. You can take every precaution, but there’s no guarantee you won’t become part of the hypocritical problem. No one should travel unless absolutely necessary - but after a year’s postponement I have decided that now is the time to fulfil my dream to hike the Continental Divide Trail. Why do I get to criticize people strutting about maskless on a beach in Miami, when I’m driving to another state, staying in hotels, booking airline flights, etc? I don’t have an answer. Myopia, I guess. 

Alas, my ever-responsible, loving, kind, empathic partner, Molly, agreed to help me accomplish this goal, and here I am, cowboy camping in a dry creek bed in southern New Mexico. Winds that seemed intent on tearing my tent to shreds last night inspired me to forego the tent tonight, and of course there’s no wind at all. 

There’s another quandary that’s been on my mind since I started hiking two days ago: How do we define “nature?” In his book, “Conservation Refugees”, Mark Dowie identifies the difficulty in defining nature, or wilderness. I started this website with the hope of bringing attention to the mounting problems facing the climate and ecosystems that support biodiversity around the world. I didn’t know whether we as a planet were already too far gone, with too much CO2 in the atmosphere, too much pollution and litter, too much plastic waste that will take eons to decompose. Biodiversity has plummeted during my own lifetime. That’s unheard of in the history of planet earth, except when viewed through the lens of mass-extinction. There is very convincing evidence that we, as humans, have already caused a mass-extinction, the full implications of which we still don’t know (The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert). I began to see that these may not necessarily be problems of individual choice, like choosing to recycle or buy organic food, or give up meat. They may not even be political problems solvable by crafting the right regulation to stop so many ecologically harmful practices. The problem may be that this is what we, as humans, do. Mark Dowie disagrees with this view, citing dozens of groups of people who have existed in sustainable harmony with the ecosystem in which they live for thousands of years. And that evidence is incontrovertible. But unless we all conform to that lifestyle, will it be enough? And this is what got me thinking about nature and wilderness. 

On the Continental Divide Trail, part of what is so enticing is this intense, long-term immersion into what I think most people would call Nature. But the whole idea would be completely impossible for someone like me without a substantial dose of decidedly “un-natural” aspects. Take my gear, for starters. I’m literally typing this on my phone as the wind whispers through the brush and stars are twinkling overhead. But also, in my phone are numerous navigation and GPS apps that keep me found. I have paper maps and a compass as well, but my inexperience with those tools almost got me killed yesterday when I took a wrong turn, ran out of water, and couldn’t find a well once I was back on the trail. My internal organs were seriously threatening to shut down. But even something as basic as shoes are clearly not “natural” with all of the chemicals and synthetic materials used to make them. The unnatural colors used to entice us and make us feel like they communicate something to the world about us.  How could anyone attempt a 3,000 mile hike through desert, mountains, and snow without a several good pair of shoes? The point is that it seems impossible for me to enjoy nature without leveraging virtually ever imaginable violation of it.

The desert aspect of the CDT is no joke. Like I said, when I couldn’t find that well yesterday, I seriously started contemplating how I would arrange a rescue. I wouldn’t have made it another day. So where is this water in the desert that enables potential thru-hikers to stay alive? Most comes from wells powered by wind mills or solar panels. These wells, strewn throughout the far, remote reaches of Southern New Mexico provide water for cattle, which are not natural to this climate, and in many cases have overgrazed the land well past any semblance of sustainability. When there is nothing left to graze ranchers will provide hay, which also doesn’t grow very readily in this climate. Amid the brown, arid moonscape, you might see a random verdant field and wonder how it’s possible or sustainable or even fair to suck every drop of water from already struggling ecosystems and communities in order to unnaturally grow hay to be able to unnaturally feed cattle.

And thanks to all that, hikers find plenty of water on the trail, though most of it has been contaminated by cow shit. We hikers take care of that unnaturality with one of our own: filters and chemical treatments. The only hikers who forego that precaution are those who end up in the hospital.