Book Review: Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West

Eco-Watch

2/2/94

Charles Wilkinson and Michael Anderson's LAND AND RESOURCE PLANNING IN THE NATIONAL FORESTS has become a narrow-niche classic in understanding the history and legal underpinning of the Forest Service. But Wilkinson engages in broader issues too. In Wilkinson's EAGLE BIRD: MAPPING THE NEW WEST (1992) his focus is on the many issues reshaping the West. Joe Colwell, from the Spearfish-Nemo Ranger District, Black Hills NF, was impressed enough with EAGLE BIRD to write up a short review for us. Colwell shows us the parallels between Wilkinson's assessment of what is happening and our own ecosystem management-- as people pay more attention to place, nature, community, and connections as well as politics, economics, and law.

"Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West"
by Charles F. Wilkinson
Pantheon Books, New York, 1992
Reviewed by Joe Colwell¹

Introduction

The Eagle Bird is a collection of essays on the West and some of the social and environmental challenges we face. Wilkinson, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is one of the foremost experts on the New West.

I will not review the entire book (12 chapters and a little more than 200 pages), but limit this review to a chapter entitled "Everything is Bound Fast by a Thousand Invisible Cords". It is representative of the entire book. Still, I should mention a few of the titles from other chapters to give you a glimpse of what else you can expect if you buy the book: "Western Water from the Miners to Leopold to the Spirits," "The Future of the National Forests: Public Use and a Reduced Cut," "Wild Lands and Fundamental Values," "Toward an Ethic of Place," and "The Yellowstone Ecosystem and an Ethic of Place."

Wilkinson, who feels the West to be the 'true soul of the country, the place that cries out loudest to the human spirit', has defined the environmental movement as one of the 4 domestic social movements of this century that has reshaped law and life in America. The other 3 are Womens's Rights, Worker Safety and Compensation, and Civil Rights.

He says the conservation community is in a major time of transition right now. The movement was christened by high ideals fashioned into law in the 1970s, followed in the 1980s by a focus on economics. He sees good science coming into the debates of the 1990s to fundamentally alter future decisions. We must follow the perception of one of the early prophets, John Muir, that "everything is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords".

The fact that the conservation community (Wilkinson deftly avoids the term environmentalist) has matured to being at least a social and political equal to the extractive industries that once ruled the West has brought with it the responsibility of maturity and positive, systematic leadership. This leadership will involve understanding eight factors that help to define the future. I see such understanding as a challenge to each of us in the Forest Service if we are to emerge as leaders in the conservation movement.

Understanding Classic Conservation Writers

Wilkinson believes that we must know intimately the literature of Muir and Leopold; we must also communicate it better. Their philosophies of conservation are based on an interdisciplinary body of thought that puts them on equal footing with the social and political thinkers like Thoreau, Whitman, Hamilton, and Jefferson.

Muir defined the spiritual foundation of all conservation debates. Wilkinson states that you cannot just know about Muir, you need to read him directly. "You almost certainly will come away thinking differently about both science and spirituality". For Muir, all the trees, water, rocks, and animals were indeed spiritual. He saw not only an orchid, he felt a spiritual force. Having recently read The Way, by Goldsmith--another revolutionary challenge to traditional scientific methodology, I too have come away thinking differently about spirituality and our role in the natural community.

Arrogance and Ownership

The settlement of the West was based on God and Manifest Destiny, at least that's the way Wilkinson describes it. We had to conquer and win the West. This attitude of arrogance and ownership has permeated the West and its development and exploitation. Wilkinson quotes two leaders of New Western thought in debunking this arrogance of ownership. Wallace Stegner said there "was no voice of comparable authority (to Manifest Destiny) to remind us of the quiet but profound truth, that the manner of the country makes the usage of life there and that the land will not be lived except in its own fashion." Bill Kittredge says "The truth is, we never owned all the land and water. Our mythology tells us we own the West absolutely and morally. We don't own anything absolutely or forever. Ownership of property has always been a privilege granted by society. This privilege and responsibility sets a moral standard and this morality redefines rights and wrongs".

Armageddon Forces

Wilkinson argues that we must insist on increasing the debate on the forces that have the potential to make all other environmental debates moot. These are the forces of acid rain, greenhouse effect, ozone depletion, groundwater pollution, nuclear waste disposal, and overpopulation. These issues are more than Western issues, but they are basic and underlying, with the ability to effect everything else. As conservation leaders, we must include these in all our debates.

Sustainable Development and Conservation Measures

Too often, says Wilkinson, resources are consumed for short-term economic gain, ignoring possibilities for sustaining them and society for the long term. A land ethic, as championed by Leopold, was to ensure the preservation of the health of the land, the capacity for self renewal. Wilkinson argues for two broad elements in order to achieve a self-renewing, or sustainable, society. The first element is basic conservation of resources. Our throw away society has not been very skillful at doing this. The second element is the understanding of a sustainable resource base. This simply means living within our means. It is not a case of primitivism versus progress. A middle ground is sustainable development. This requires us to understand carrying capacities and the implication on not only us but on future generations. We must reexamine our habit of taking benefits now and postponing the costs. Economists have a term for this--externalities. That's when we allow an industry to ignore the full cost to society by not having to clean up its pollution. But we as a society must pay for it later. Its the old pay me now or pay me later syndrome.

The Place of Government Regulation

Government regulation has occurred on the use of the vast federal landholding in the West. Wilkinson argues that such regulation is often made inefficient in terms of environmental protection due to the lack of state or local regulation of non federal lands. Private owners and philosophical conservatives claim taking of private property rights. We must weigh this claim against the previous sustainable development and ownership arguments. In a recent US Supreme Court ruling, Edmund Burke was referenced as saying a great unwritten compact exists between the dead, the living, and the unborn. We must leave to the unborn something more than debts and depleted natural resources. It is a constitutional morality that all property in this country be held under the implied obligation that the owners use of it shall not be injurious to the community. These restrictions are properly treated as part of the burden of common citizenship.

The Place of Market Economics

Instead of just letting market principles rule development, Wilkinson proposes that we use "multiple-objective planning in which the result is not just satisfactory results as measured by classical economic analysis and its bottom line, but also satisfactory results as measured by community, wildlife, recreational, scientific, aesthetic, and spiritual values." Such an approach, he says, avoids an inherent weakness of classical economic philosophy: the use of economic self interest as the primary driving force behind human behavior. Wilkinson believes that there is a larger motivation than short term economic self interest. He also feels subsidies can be both good and bad. We need to eliminate those subsidies that dedicate public resources for private gain. We should pick and choose from economic analysis, supporting those that help achieve good policy objectives and rejecting those that don't.

Bioregionalism

We must look at larger watershed or ecosystem scale when viewing our use of the land. It adds human communities into the ecological equation. Wilkinson argues that this theory unites both Muir and Leopold. Muir believes humans were part of that web bound fast by a thousand invisible cords. Leopold's land ethic also uses this thinking as its holy grail.

Geologic Time

The vast scale of geologic time that conservationists must understand needs to be better studied. We must reach back to when there was nothing but rock. Then we should reverse that thought exercise and reach into the future and act responsibly to the people and others who will inhabit the earth then. Wilkinson thinks this will make us humble and conservative. He believes that such conservatism is proper and necessary.

Wilkinson says that Conservationists have shown us three ways in which all things are bound fast by a thousand invisible cords: first,that all nature is connected as John Muir emphasized; second, no single discipline--economics, law, biology, forestry--holds all the answers; and third, those of us on the earth today are bound fast by invisible cords to people and societies who will come much later.

All the above thoughts unite us in an obligation that carries with it transcendent opportunities which are embodied in an ethic of place. Wilkinson further expounds on his ethic of place--this ethic is premised on a sense of place and the recognition that we thrive on a mix of landscape, neighbors and history that constitute a homeland. It equally respects the people, land, animals, vegetation, and water of a place. This ethic is vastly different from multiple use. It does not try to be all things to all people. It respects diversity--of peoples and cultures as well as plant and animal life, and the dignity of all life.

¹Reviewed by Joseph A. Colwell, Spearfish-Nemo District, Black Hills National Forest

A Personal Postscript:

Much of this sounds very familiar. Ecosystem Management, as we've come to recognize it, embraces many of these principles. We are struggling with this revolution in our professions, as well as in the Forest Service and sister agencies in government. In a profession of conservationists, being (as Wilkinson encourages) conservative, revolutions can be difficult. Accept it or not, we are redefining ourselves, not only as the Forest Service, but as conservationist citizens of the West and fellow travelers of this planet. As one of the combatants in the land use struggles in California, a Quincy lawyer, Michael Jackson, stated "the war is over. We just haven't figured out yet the terms of surrender" (Winter 1994 Wilderness magazine, "Dimming the Range of Light," by George Weurthner).

We try and define ecosystem management. I struggled with this on the Black Hills as part of our Forest Plan Revision process. We can quote principles that our videos and multi-sentence definitions give. But to me EM constitutes more than definitions. It really means much of what Wilkinson has stated in his above principles. It is a state of mind that accepts us as humble stewards, as missionaries of a spiritual quest who place respect for the dead, living, and unborn. And, like John Muir, who can see the spirituality in an orchid.

Some say that we are already practicing EM. In some ways we are and have been all along. Some can't buy totally into what Wilkinson says--too radical. It is a little too extreme for us conservatives. My prediction is that history will look on this time as a revolution as real as that one that Pinchot led. And revolutions involve radical changes. The echoes resound from a small western mountain town: "The war is over. It is time to agree on terms of surrender and chart a new course for the future."