Untouched: The Myth of Protected Lands
Over the past two weeks I’ve hiked through the ancestral lands of Janos, Chiricahua Apache, and Pueblo. Southern New Mexico is an unforgiving landscape where perhaps the most precious resource is water. As mentioned in my previous post, I don’t think a hike through this region would be possible the way I’m doing it now without all the windmills wells, solar wells, and cow troughs. Naturally flowing water is almost nowhere to be found. The tenacity, resourcefulness, resilience, and toughness of these First Peoples who inhabited this arid land is beyond impressive.
The trail between Lordsburg and Silver City is no exception. After crossing what seems an endless prairie of sage brush and cows, the trail finally climbs into some slightly more hospitable mountains. But while some trees and shade can be found here, a welcome change from the unrelenting, shadeless desert South of Lordsburg, still the only water I found was put there by some modern contraption for the cows. And the cows were nice enough to share. I wish those First Peoples were still occupying their ancestral lands and could share their secrets of thriving in the desert.
Further North another modern development was taking place, foiling the plans of all the Northbound CDT hikers - the Forest Service was conducting a prescribed burn and hence closed the trail through that area. There were a number of options hikers could take to get around the closed area and arrive in Silver City, but all involved a lengthy road walk along the highway. I chose a route I had mapped on GAIA that would cut my road walk down to only three of four miles. Unfortunately, my route went right through several active mining operations. Not wanting to backtrack too far, I pivoted to another option which led to another mine. I ended up scrambling on forest service roads just trying to find a way off the mountain. When I finally did, it involved cutting through some private property, taking some great looking water from a private cow pond, and eventually a 15-mile walk along a busy highway. Some very nice volunteer firefighter pulled over and offered me a sandwich he had apparently gone home to make after driving past me earlier.
These prescribed burns are an interesting phenomenon. Perhaps the best way to explain what I mean is to look at the example of Yosemite National Park. For thousands of years the Yosemite Valley was inhabited by various civilizations, the most recent of which was the Ahwahnechee. The name Yosemite came from a word other local Native groups used for them. The Ahwahnechee hunted, gathered seeds, harvested acorns, fished, acquired materials for clothing, shelter, and baskets, held huge festivals, inviting neighbors from near and far, all within Yosemite Valley. Part of their existence involved methodically burning out the undergrowth in order to facilitate acorn harvesting. They tended to the flora and fauna of the valley in other ways too for the purpose of continuing their culture, their way of life, and the health of the valley they depended on.
When Americans (mostly white) came and visited Yosemite Valley for the first time, it appeared to their untrained eyes (even the eyes of iconic naturalists like John Muir and Ansel Adams) as a beautiful, untouched, edenic wilderness. They saw the people who were very much a part of the symbiotic ecosystem as dirty, ignorant, and backwards. The Americans decided this beautiful garden not only needed to be protected, but that to provide the soul-searching reflection that such a place could offer (white tourists), it needed to be cleared of any unseemly native person - the persons who had lived in and with the valley for generations on generations. It took several decades of lies, broken promises, humiliation, and basically indentured servitude, but finally Yosemite Valley could be a playground, unencumbered by the sight of “filthy Indians”.
2020 was a hard year for many reasons and historic forest fires in the American West were part of that. One reason often cited for such devastating fires was inadequate forest management. What the Ahwahnechee did as a part of their normal routine to harvest food, we now have to pay people to do with no direct benefit other than maintenance. And like any chore, it gets procrastinated, put on the back burner, ignored and defunded, until disaster strikes. Native People put that work into the forest and the forest cared for them in return. Both the people and the forest benefited, and continued in that way for centuries.
Of course the elephant in this room is climate change. At the same time Western civilization was expelling the very people who had tended to the ecosystem for centuries with no plan on how to replace that work, we were also pumping exponentially higher amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, leading to more severe weather patterns, exacerbating conditions for forest fires. We shot ourselves in both feet.
Sadly, the tactics used to rid Yosemite Valley of its Native Peoples became the rule rather than the exception regarding the establishment of parks and protected lands. At some point one has to ask from whom or from what are these parks being protected? Prior to protected status many of these areas were being plundered by Western miners, loggers, hunters, trappers, and none of it was for sustenance or with a view to perpetual continuation. It was about cashing in and moving on to the next resource. So protection was required to save what’s left of these incredible places, but the baby was thrown out with the bath water. Lives and cultures were destroyed. And while this was by no means a dichotomous decision, a hateful fiction was created in order to convince the public and congress that it was. The result of that fiction is the beautiful, “untrammeled wilderness” that we now enjoy for vacations.
When I saw smoke rising over the ridge where the prescribed burn was being done on the CDT, I couldn’t help but wonder about the Native People who had been expelled from that land.