The Left Hand of Eden

by Ashworth, William

• ISBN13: 9780870714603
• ISBN10: 0870714600
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-03-01
• Publisher: Oregon State Univ Pr

Summary

This provocative book challenges basic assumptions about the environmental movement's current efforts to preserve wilderness. A longtime environmental activist and author, William Ashworth grew frustrated with the movement and, in light of new scientific thinking, began to reevaluate its past achievements. In The Left Hand of Eden, Ashworth boldly champions the abandonment of wilderness preservation. Ashworth argues that wilderness preservation is a form of separation from the land and, as such, is as harmful to nature as logging or mining. "The lock-it-all-up mentality is as faulty as the cut-it-all-down mentality; preservation destroys integration with the biosphere as thoroughly as clearcuts do, " he writes. Treating nature as something "other" -- whether to preserve it or destroy it -- creates a false dichotomy, from which all modern environmental battles arise: use versus preservation, civilization versus wilderness. It's a rhetoric that fails to recognize that all things on earth are united under the laws of nature. In a series of graceful and often moving nature essays, Ashworth shows that proper care for the land requires not just use or reverence, but use with reverence. "Careful use of resources is the key to preserving them, " he writes. "It not only works: it is the only thing that ever has." The Left Hand of Eden is an important and original contribution to a growing debate within the environmental community.

Author Biography

William Ashworth is the author of numerous books on the environment and natural history

Table of Contents

Prologue	x
I. The Undiscovered Journey
A Death at Sunset	2	(8)
Witnesses to the Creation	10	(13)
The Undiscovered Journey	23	(7)
II. The Enemy of Progress
The Lone and Level Sands	30	(16)
The Butterfly's Wing	46	(12)
The Thing He Loves	58	(12)
The Enemy of Progress	70	(11)
Hopeful Monsters	81	(7)
On the Edge	88	(10)
III. The Left Hand of Eden
Thoreau's Doormat	98	(8)
Spotting the Owl	106	(21)
The Left Hand of Eden	127	(51)
Down the River	178	(10)
Acknowledgements	188	(2)
Notes on Sources	190

Excerpts

Chapter One

A Death at Sunset

The beach at the mouth of Brushy Creek focused the westering sun like a parabolic glass. To the south loomed the immense black bulk of Humbug Mountain; to the north, the tawny, truncated hills of Coal Point dropped like a golden balustrade into the sea. The breakers of the Pacific, backlit, kept up their ancient, tireless beat of thrust and withdrawal, the silvered rift tendriling up the beach and sinking, mirrored, into the sand. The light was golden; the waves were translucent green. Small knots of people sat on the sand or wandered slowly along the edge of the surf, looking westward. And there was the dying seal.

    The seal lay at the back of the beach, where the storms of many winters had cross-sectioned an ancient landslide, leaving stones, sticks, and whole trees exposed in a thirty-foot cutbank. Tucked into the base of a steep gully in that sandy wall, the color of sand itself, the seal did not immediately attract notice: my wife and I, intent on the September sunset, were well past before another couple called it to our attention. It lay half on its side, its flanks heaving with the effort of breath, oblivious of us until we came to within about twenty feet. Then some small sound from feet or clothing made it lift its head. Black eyes, with plenty of self-awareness still in them, locked onto mine. There was a soundless gape of defiance, but the animal was clearly too weak to do anything more.

    There rises within most of us at such times a deep, almost desperate urge to do something. The suffering of other creatures brings out the altruist in us: we want to ease the pain, prevent the death, make things somehow whole and right again. Could we help the seal back into the sea? Had its plight been reported to the authorities at the Oregon state park on whose grounds it was sinking rapidly toward death? Had wildlife officials been consulted? Had a vet been called? We caught up with the couple who had first pointed the dying animal out to us, and my wife, with her characteristic gift for directness, managed to roll all of these questions into one. Do you know , she asked, how long it has been like this?

    They knew. The seal had first come ashore, they said, four days previously. In the beginning it had moved about a bit, and even earlier this day they had noticed it throwing sand on itself with its flippers, evidently in an attempt to keep cool, though it didn't look up to doing even that any more. Park authorities and wildlife officials seemed unconcerned. Seals pulling themselves ashore to die are not a new phenomenon. There was nothing they--or we--could do.

    That night I lay in my sleeping bag in the park campground, my ears tuned to the ripple of Brushy Creek and the distant, faint boom of the Pacific surf, and thought of the dying animal a half mile away. What was it about the death of a seal that should bother me so? Death is a necessary part of life; it is nature's way of making certain the earth doesn't fill up. It provides a constant small trickle of open spaces in each ecological niche, thus driving evolution and speciation and creating the fascinating variety of living things on this planet. The death of other organisms keeps us alive; this is true whether you are a hunter wolfing down a slab of venison or a vegetarian who merely wolfs down lettuce and celery and apples. Plants, after all, are also living things. Lettuce and celery are killed by the harvest, and though you may comfort yourself with the thought that the apple tree, at least, remains alive, the apple itself is a separate entity that continues to metabolize right up to the time you bite into it. Death is natural, the inevitable result of natural law. Why do we humans spend so much time and energy keeping it at bay, not only for ourselves but for others--even when, as in this case, "other" means not only a different individual but a different species?

    The reason, of course, is that while death may be necessary and good for life as a whole, and even for the species whose members die, it is bad for the individual who is dying. Death is a terminus; beyond lies nothing we can know, except through speculation and faith. We therefore resist termination. Because we are a social species, dependent on each other for survival, we resist the termination of other members of our society as well. And because we are a preeminently empathetic species--a characteristic born of the marriage of our social-animal altruism with our oversized brains--we find it easy to expand the definition of "our" society to include all creatures with sufficient self-awareness that we can believe they might suffer. Most of us will pull weeds or slap mosquitoes with no sense of disturbance, but we will spend thousands of dollars to preserve the life of a favorite dog or cat. This is only partly for the benefit of the dog or the cat. By preventing an animal's death, we also prevent our own pain at having to watch the death, as well as eliminating an uncomfortable reminder of our own mortality. It is as much our suffering as the animal's that we are concerned about.

    A few years before my encounter with the dying seal, in the course of research for a book on bears, I had interviewed Dave Siddon, formerly a cinematographer for the Walt Disney organization, who was then--until his death from cancer too short a time later--the director of a large wildlife rehabilitation center near Grants Pass, Oregon. Siddon had been very blunt on this point. "Everyone says what a wonderful service we provide for wildlife," he told me. "But we're not providing a service for wildlife--we're providing a service for people who care about wildlife. We provide a human service for people who care enough to bring animals to us. We think they need to be encouraged to continue to care. The fact is, if we look on Homo sapiens as the only life form worth saving, it probably isn't."

    Siddon's brutal honesty about his calling can be applied with equal validity to other fields of environmental endeavor besides wildlife rehabilitation. In truth, all environmental protection is at heart human protection. It is really us that we want to save--us, and our world as we want it to be, complete with wild places and spectacular scenery and clean air. Environmental protection began with the superlatives--with the Yellowstones and Yosemites and Grand Canyons--because we wanted them to stilt be there if we ever got a chance to see them. It proceeded to natural places in general because we prefer natural places to (for instance) downtown Los Angeles and we want to make sure there will always be enough to go around. It encompasses clean air and clean water because they are healthier and more pleasant for humans to consume. And it embraces endangered-species protection--and the protection of wildlife in general, including dying seals on a beach--because, as a species and particularly as a culture, we are uncomfortable to the point of irrationality with the idea and experience of death, and find it emotionally necessary to keep the Reaper at bay as long as possible.

    None of this is meant to belittle the environmental movement or the people who give their lives to it. We need, as Siddon said, to continue to care. Protecting wildlands, saving endangered species, and increasing the health of the environment are right and proper, and it is necessary to keep doing these things. But we ought to understand why we do them. It is not to protect life on the planet--life will survive, anyway. A force that can arise in the extraordinarily hostile conditions on a newborn planet, and can thrive equally well today in the screaming ice storms of an Antarctic winter and in the hot, sulfurous, lightless waters of thermal vents on the deep ocean floor, is going to be able to endure pretty much anything we can throw at it. Life will survive. It is the human race that is in doubt.

    Because our species has been so successful at manipulating natural forces to our own ends, we have somehow got the idea that we now stand outside these forces and so control them. This is pernicious nonsense. We have never eradicated a single law of nature nor escaped its consequences. We have played them off against each other, using the results of some to counter the results of others, and have managed to gain some benefit from them through this process; but we have not "harnessed" them, and we have certainly not separated ourselves from them. We may heat our homes and generate electricity through combustion, but we must also live with the other results of the laws that allow combustion to happen, including muddled views, respiratory disease, and acid rain. Aerodynamics may give the appearance of conquering gravity, but gravity still operates, and when aerodynamic lift is reduced too far a plane still falls to the ground.

    What is true for the laws of combustion and aerodynamics holds as well for the rest of the laws of nature. The principles governing population dynamics, climate, landform development, energy flow through ecosystems, growth, and ecological succession are as immutable as the principles that send electrons down wires, or produce tightly controlled explosions to propel vehicles down highways, or guide the combination of atoms into molecules and of girders into buildings. We can manipulate the results of these laws, but we cannot change the laws themselves. Relaxation of environmental resistance still leads to overpopulation, whether it is cattle protected from predators or predators protected from hunters. Overpopulation still leads to resource degradation, whether it is deer in a crowded forest, livestock on an overgrazed range, or humans on a small, blue planet spinning around a medium-sized, class-G star. Shore drift still moves sand along coastlines. Sunlight still drives photosynthesis. Earthquakes still build mountains. Winds still blow.

    And things still die. On a beach at sunset; in a hospital bed, harnessed to feeding tubes and monitors; in the heart of a forest, with chainsaws tearing through bark into the living cambium layer beneath; in the garden, snatched from the nurturing safety of the soil to be cut into chunks and dropped into stewpots. Flies die bumbling against windowpanes; petunias die with the frost, after one bright, brief season in the sun. Death is our constant companion. Year after year, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta releases statistics on the prime causes of death among Americans. Year after year it is wrong. The leading cause of death is not cancer or heart disease or AIDS; the leading cause of death is life. It may take more than a century, but birth is always one hundred percent fatal.

    Instinctively, we deny this. Driven by the ancient urge of our chromosomes to preserve and replicate themselves, we crave immortality, not only for ourselves, but also for the things we love. For wild things--the damp, rich smell of forests in the rain, the wind across the tundra, the rustle of rivers in the darkness, the surge of birds through the autumn air. For pleasurable things--good food and good wine, a fire on a winter's night, conversations with friends, tales woven skillfully by authors or acted movingly on the stage or screen. For familiar things--our own homes, our own jobs, our own families; the grove of trees we have known since childhood; old prices, old tax levels, old rules. And for dreams and the right to chase them--the mother lode, the winning lottery ticket, the resources to build an empire. Wealth for all citizens. Peace among all nations. Liberty. Justice. Love.

    There is nothing wrong with any of these things, except for this: not one of them is permanent. Heraclitus had it right. All things are in motion, nothing is at rest. You cannot step into the same river twice. The only unchanging thing in the universe is change itself. Attempts to preserve anything--jobs, or private property rights, or forests, or clean water, or economic growth, or equal opportunity--will always run up against the incontrovertible, uncomfortable, fundamental presence of impermanence. Every religion has an afterlife, because none of us can conceive of ourselves as not existing. But change is inescapable. And so is death.

* * *

Outside the tent there was a brief scratching and rustling, as some small animal attempted to open the bag of potato chips we had left on the campsite table. Beside me my wife stirred. In the distance the surf kept up its restless, heavy serenade to the dying seal. Lives ticking past; change occurring; deaths approaching, my own death among them. An oddly comforting thought. All of us are one with the rest of the natural world after all, at death if at no time else. Air ebbs and flows through lungs or leaves; blood pumps, sap rises and falls; the Krebs cycle churns, and churns, and eventually runs down. Old organisms die. New organisms, new species and genera, whole new kingdoms of living things arise to take their place. Science calls it "punctuated continuity." It is life.

Copyright © 1999 William Ashworth. All rights reserved.