This Land Is Your Land

The battle is uphill, but our legs are strong

Conservation is a bitch.

No matter how deep your spiritual experience roaming a remote mountain, how multi-generational the hunting story, or the enormity of the gleam in your child’s eye as they behold their first fish, some jackass is going to try and sell it. Each hidden grouse spot, each brookie honey hole, each pollinator paradise is worth an exact and ever increasing amount of money to someone else, for our planet is finite, and for every suburban housing development approved there is exactly that much less wild space on it. Such a decline in resource can only result in its exponential rise in monetary value. The battle between money and art is nothing new.

I don’t know how many times I’ve written about the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Many. I’ve probably begged for it to be left alone more times than I've explored its depths. In our sprawled-out, anti-nature excuse for a civilization, we have precious few spaces left like the Boundary Waters. Little remnants of a continent that once seemed impassible. Wild places built of clean water and the natural rhythms of life set in place at the beginning and continuing, by some miracle, even through our time. Why do some of us think these places holy and some think them exploitable? There are so many approaches to the human experience that these differences shouldn’t surprise any of us, but each time the battle over mining the watershed of the Boundary Waters bubbles forth I am bewildered by the callousness of the argument.

I’m typing this article on a computer that operates using materials found deep within our Mother Earth’s guts. We mine, I get that. But of all the mines, of all the places, why the hell this thing keeps coming back to the Rainy River baffles me. Why a Chilean mining company with a disastrous environmental record keeps coming back time and time again as some kind of salvation of the working class of northern Minnesota is a bill of goods so translucent and fraudulent that the fact anyone will take it in exchange for one of their most beautiful wildernesses simply does not compute for me. Side note: the copper coming out of that mine would be headed for China, not the US. Are we so gullible now, are our individual realities so algorithm-based that these simple facts no longer count for anything against the will of politicians? Does the fact that Pete Stauber keeps bringing this same company to the table year after year not raise any red flags with anyone else in Congress? If the mine is owned by Chile and the bounty is owned by China and the jobs provided are temporary at best, doesn’t that logically lead us to ol’ Pete getting some kind of cut out of this deal? I sure as hell can’t see what the rest of us are getting (besides yellow sludge flowing through the BWCA).

A lot of us have had it right now. I’ve had it, I’ll tell you that. I live in Minneapolis and in my city federal ‘troops’ (the quotes are because I feel using the word troops to describe ICE is insulting to all the actual troops out there) are marauding around in their new power without any hope of consequence, weak-minded little bullies that failed out of basic, and the same bastards that armed them are now coming for my church, which is made of wild land. Wild land cannot fight ill-placed mines and fascists alone. Wild land plays the long game: she hopes her enemies will vanish from the Earth before too much damage is done. She needs our help.

Get on an airplane sometime and get yourself a window seat. As you fly over our amazing country, especially over its eastern half, make note of its woods and fields. The Wisconsin or Indiana forest in which you hunt whitetail each fall may feel immense as you touch its roots on a frosty November sunrise, but from your seat on this plane you will see it as a small and finely carved out rectangle, surrounded by farm or suburb, barely clinching to its wheezing breath and only existing at all because enough people have made a stink against selling it off. From the air the parcels of holy land we have left approach the pathetic in their cruel geometry. Nature does not make perfect rectangles. Thankfully we are so small that the chunks of wilderness we retain can still seem large when we’re immersed in them. Now, say your flight gets diverted to the north because of a storm. Suddenly you find yourself approaching the northern border of Minnesota and far below unfolds a jagged and marvelous million-plus acre patch of woods and water. What on Earth?

All the arguments, all the politics, all the lies and manipulation are all countered by the simple fact that there just isn’t much left. We have it well in our power to destroy it all. There are plenty of countries in the world with no remaining wilderness. To me, the saddest part is that so many people don’t care at all. So many Americans, living in the land of the North American Model of Conservation and all its glory, have no love for wild space. Be it greed, fear, or simple ignorance, so many of us do not have a deep connection with the wilderness and those who do not love it cannot understand why the rest of us fight so dearly for its survival. They cannot understand why that rugged mess of swamps and mosquitos that is the Boundary Waters isn’t used for something “constructive.” So many lakes absent of summer homes is an affront to many a developer’s sense of capitalism.

Maybe this will never change. Maybe the farther we go, the fewer of us will feel the call of the wild. Maybe the more we settle into climate controlled cars and AI-written emails and comfort comfort comfort, the thought of busting hump through heat and cold and rain and bugs to find a level campsite will appeal to fewer and fewer of us. What gives me Hope is that, for me, these symptoms of modernity have the opposite effect. The more I have to deal with the indoors, the more fiercely I desire the outdoors. Maybe you’re the same way? Maybe there are actually more of us than we assume? We have to hope, because our hope that our deepest human connection, which tethers us to our Mother Earth, is still to be found in the majority of us, even if it has to be dug out through layers and years of dormancy, that hope is what can save our wild places. Have you watched your children play in the woods? That is the lighthouse on the stormiest of seas.

My friend and, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest voices today defending the wild and untamed, Hal Herring, recently told me that this is Our Time. Right now we get to decide what kind of country we are. And I believe him. Americans have so many examples of bringing our natural spaces to the brink of extinction. So many. Yet, often, and often in the very nick of time, the people who care about them, the people that fairly need their existence to justify their short time here, the people that worship the unknown in their depths, have come to their defense. This is another one of those examples. We have the choice, and the privilege, right now, to defend the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness against forces that do not give a damn if it continues to exist at all.

In my opinion, there is no amount of money or temporary employment opportunity that is worth endangering the Boundary Waters. Money is worthless in the wilderness, anyways. When you are five lakes in from your entry point and a ferocious summer thunderstorm decides to visit your campsite, you might offer the gods a million dollars each and none of them would be able to get you to the nearest hotel faster than your own little canoe paddle. This is exactly why so many of us love it in there. Self-reliance, freedom to choose your own path, the pace of Nature, cooperation, hard work, deep connection to the land, indescribable rewards, generational knowledge, these are qualities of a life in the wilderness and they are the enemies of fascism and greed, and I am on their side.

Call your representatives and let them know! Capitol switchboard: (202) 224-3121 . Leave a message with your rep’s office and they will listen to it.