Wild at Heart

I remember watching Al Gore's documentary "Inconvenient Truth" and seeing a graph showing the exponential growth of the human population. It really hit home, because I could actually see this growth over my lifetime. It wasn't just a concept, it was reality. I will soon be 57 years old. I looked at that graph and saw the population numbers in the 1960's. My little hometown of Angola was much smaller then. There were still wild places one could go to be part of nature, away from human encroachment. "Up north" in Michigan meant lots of forests and rivers and little filling stations and mom and pop grocery stores. It meant few people and lots of wild.

I am wild at heart. I need those unspoiled places to survive. I don't want humans to take over the Earth. I want to believe there are still places where the Plants and the Animals can roam free with no worries of being tortured or run over or captured or sold. I need to believe there are still silent places where one can look up into the sky and see the stars without an airplane or satellite coming into view, or the sound of a distant train or highway interrupting the calls of the loon. I thought back to the mid 1980s, while lying on a stone beach far out in Prince William Sound Alaska. I believed I was in the wildest place in the world. There were billions of stars blanketing the dark night sky, the Milky Way streaming like a ribbon from one end of the horizon to the other. Then I saw one. Then two. Then three. Satellites. My wild heart was broken.

Our beautiful state of Michigan is being eaten alive by the cancer of development, the mantra of our capitalist society. Every day, every year, we are losing more and more of our wild natural lands to development of all kinds - oil and gas, forestry, paved mini-roads being passed off as trail systems, mining...there are very few places left that are safe. Why is it we cannot find value in letting the wild just be - wild? Why is it we can't value the serenity and beauty found in an unspoiled landscape as much as we seem to value holes in the ground left after gravel mining, or clear cut deserts, or polluted waters gifted to us by industry?

Are we really willing to destroy the beauty of this land for the insatiable greed of capitalism? We all want jobs. But can't we create a society where we live sustainably? Where enough is enough, and let all the other creatures live as they are intended?

My wild heart is hurting today.