Essay by Martha Quillen
Growth – May 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES have more in common than they usually admit. For instance, both seem convinced that the world will soon be coming to an end.
Although different factions may quibble about the cause, they agree on the scenario. Either terrorists and the U.N. — or wars against terrorism and U.S. antagonism toward the U.N. — are bound to precipitate that eventuality. Or perhaps the cause will be sin, the Apocalypse, global warming, nuclear weapons, or environmental degradation.
Regardless of their reason, everyone seems to believe that total ruin is right around the corner.
Which makes me wonder. Are things really so bad? Or are we unduly pessimistic?
And if our doomsday convictions aren’t really warranted, why do we harbor them? Is it because our country was attacked? Or because our citizenry is immoral? Or because our environment has been degraded?
Are our apprehensions exaggerated because we’re over-stressed? Depressed? Or neurotic? Do we work too hard? Are we being manipulated by the powers that be?
Even though our era may be disagreeable, most modern Americans aren’t prey to starvation, plague, pestilence, or marauding armies.
And political polarization is nothing new; from the American Revolution to post-9/11, strife has been intrinsic to U.S. politics, accompanying abolition, immigration, women’s suffrage, labor wars, real wars, McCarthyism, and racial integration.
So is our cynicism merely a facet of the new millennium? Has it been stimulated by superstition and legend? Or is technology changing are world too rapidly? Are we overtired and overwhelmed? Is gloom merely a symptom of our culture-shock?
I should probably warn readers that I don’t really have any answers to these questions. But I have noticed some curious things about our state of mind.
For example, a few months ago, Ed and I ventured into Frisco and Silverthorne for the first time in a decade. Thirty years ago, we lived near there, and it was typically rural and quiet.
When we moved to Salida, there was a City Market in Silverthorne and a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Frisco, and not much else in either town. Frisco had that familiar and picturesque, but ramshackle, appearance common to small mountain towns that can’t afford renovations. And even though there were a few condos below the Eisenhower tunnel, trailers provided most of Silverthorne’s housing.
Now, however, Frisco’s main street is neatly lined with faux Victorian buildings, and the town’s boulevards are adorned with landscaped parking lots and walkways, garnished by designer mini-parks and squares. Whereas Silverthorne looks like it’s been cast into the middle of a super mall. The name-brand stores sprawl to the east and west, north and south.. Huge vacation homes fill every gully and gulch, and Silverthorne’s traffic rivals Colorado Spring’s.
SOME OF THOSE CHANGES have been recorded in census figures. In 1990, Summit County and Chaffee County were about the same size, with 12,881 full-time residents in Summit County and 12,684 in Chaffee. But today Summit has 24,537 residents and Chaffee has 16,242.
Those figures hardly hint at the astounding differences between the two regions, however, because Summit County serves many, many more part-time residents, tourists, and seasonal workers and therefore has a mind-boggling amount of commerce and traffic.
Personally, I hate growth, sprawl and crowds, and I know the adventures of driving in Silverthorne would send me fleeing. Yet I have to admit that seeing all of those changes in Summit County, made me wonder if there was something wrong with Salida.
Even though I was pretty sure that I couldn’t live in such a place, I suspected that a lot of the people who work in Summit County have health insurance and pension plans and average American wages, and that’s pretty much unheard of here. Which made me wonder if maybe growth wasn’t quite as appalling as I’d always thought.
And that made me wonder if maybe here in Chaffee County, we’ve fought sprawl and development too well.
But on the other hand, it seems doubtful that our current situation has anything to do with how much we resisted so-called progress — because as I remember it, every time a large percentage of our citizenry turned out to protest a proposed subdivision or apartment building, it got built anyway.
Clearly, Summit County’s growth stems from it’s location along the I-70 corridor.
Besides, Salidans would never tolerate all of those tacky malls and parking lots. In fact, we have been blessed – sort of.
And yet we aren’t celebrating. And that seems to be the defining characteristic of our era: Nothing makes us happy.
IN FACT, if you visited a lot of Colorado communities in the last decade, you may have noticed what I have: A community’s anxiety over growth doesn’t bear any relationship to the problems it’s experienced due to growth. On the contrary, the smaller and quieter a community is, the more the residents worry. For instance, residents in Crestone and San Luis seem far more concerned about growth than residents in Longmont and Colorado Springs, where growth has been phenomenal.
And in some ways, that makes sense. It would take a lot of growth to utterly transform Longmont or Colorado Springs – and not much to seriously disrupt life as they know it in Crestone or San Luis.
But there’s an ironic perversity intrinsic to that phenomena. Essentially, it means that if there’s not much wrong with your community; you have more to worry about. And there’s clear evidence of that paradox in our political priorities. Here in the West, where we’ve still got some semblance of wilderness, we worry a lot more about the environment than they do in toxic cesspools where the smokestacks belch particulates into the leaden sky.
So, when you stop to think about it, it only stands to reason that Americans feel like the world is coming to an end. Because even if things in your hometown are still pretty good, in the U.S. today, everything is changing all of the time. We have no stability; no security; no structure. Damn, it’s got to be easier to be sleeping under a pile of refuse in Botswana.
Well, come to think of it, maybe not.
But I think it would be a mistake to underestimate how insecure many Americans feel.
Sure, we’re eating now, but good jobs are hard to come by. Health care is too expensive. The politicians are tinkering with Social Security. And most citizens can’t really afford to get old, but are headed that way regardless. Housing, utilities, and gasoline prices are spiraling. The war on terrorism is costly. And college tuition is outrageous, but they say your kid will need it — if he wants a job.
And to make matters worse, everybody wants to decide whether you should pray in school, and whether you can own a gun, and what kind of medical treatment is appropriate for you.
And some people actually seem to think that your beliefs on war, birth control, the environment, global warming, feeding tubes, abortion, rangeland, wolves, and sexual identity should be outlawed.
Furthermore, we tend to blame one another for our problems. We insist that others are ruining our livelihood, our habitat, our morals, our planet….
Yet despite our inclination toward authoritarianism, we not only live in a democracy, we are also exporting democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq. So it stands to reason that we should be able to govern ourselves fairly and effectively.
But that’s a tall order. And most Americans don’t seem to have much faith in our government, although some of us blame big business, while others blame big government.
Yet even so, everyone cannot just more to New Zealand; it is simply not big enough.
RECENTLY, Ed and I attended a conference at Colorado College, where we heard Terry Tempest Williams (a naturalist and environmental activist) speak about the atrocities of our modern age. She talked about nuclear testing in the 1950s; about how her mother and brother died of cancer; about her grandmother and aunt who were victims of cancer; and about the four boys who once lived on her childhood block who died of lymphoma.
Then she talked about freedom of speech and our democratic right to protest and how they’d both been curtailed in the climate kindled by 9/11, the War in Iraq, and the Patriot Act.
And she talked about the horror of War. And about birds, landscape, nature, environmental protection, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and its wealth of beauty and solitude, steppe and tundra, migrating birds and caribou, and about threats to our public lands and wildlife.
In conclusion, Williams asked: “Where is our outrage? Where is our outrage?” she repeated, louder. And it resonated throughout the room, bringing the packed auditorium to its feet.
Yet I really don’t believe for a minute that Americans lack outrage. On the contrary, the way I see it, a lot of Americans are outraged about almost everything most of the time.
But don’t get me wrong. Williams is a passionate, poetic, thought-provoking speaker, with a rare gift for engaging her audience.
In fact, most of what she had to say is in her latest book, The Open Space of Democracy, and in an earlier volume, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, and I heartily recommend them. In The Open Space of Democracy she writes:
It is easy to believe we the people have no say, that the powers in Washington will roll over our local, on-the-ground concerns with their corporate energy ties and thumper trucks. It is easy to believe that the American will is only focused on how to get rich, how to be entertained, and how to distract itself from the hard choices we have before us as a nation.
I refuse to believe this. The only space I see truly capable of being closed is not the land or our civil liberties but our own hearts.
…Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinion? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up – ever – trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?
It’s hard to argue with such conviction and certainty.
But as Williams talked, it became obvious that her passion has aroused both followers and opponents. She talked about her father’s disapproval, the people who have heckled her, and the school officials who insisted that she shouldn’t be allowed to speak at a graduation ceremony.
She also writes about collaboration and conciliation:
We are all having to move beyond what is comfortable. Patience is stretched. Personalities get in the way. Egos provide points of obstructions. It is never easy. We are learning to listen. We are learning to forgive. We are learning to go forward, believing what binds us together as a community is stronger than individual bickering points.
But despite those words, I figured Williams was kidding herself. She is no conciliator. In fact, she sums her position up best in her book, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert:
…What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart.
Those don’t strike me as the words of a mediator. Nope, Williams is more of an instigator. But she’s in good company. She communicates in that time-honored tradition practiced by Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau, Edward Abbey and Hunter Thompson.
Williams doesn’t lack outrage. Instead, she writes to arouse people, and sometimes they respond with vehemence. That, however, is also a time-honored tradition. Thomas Paine, a man often credited with inspiring modern democracy, was a hero of both the American and French Revolutions, but later he was imprisoned in France for refusing to endorse the execution of the king, and he was derided and abandoned by his friends in America for being unreservedly critical of traditional religion.
But maybe that’s just the nature of outrage: Outrage begets outrage, until almost everything inspires more outrage. And when it comes to outrage, Williams sometimes spreads hers pretty thin. For example in The Open Space of Democracy she writes:
It is time to acknowledge the violence rendered to our souls each time a mountaintop is removed to expose a coal vein in Appalachia or when a wetland is drained, dredged, and filled for a strip mall. And the time has come to demand an end to the wholesale dismissal of the sacredness of life in all its variety and forms, as we witness the repeated breaking of laws, the relaxing of laws in the sole name of growth and greed.
A wild salmon is not the same as a salmon raised in a hatchery. And a prairie dog colony is not a shooting gallery for rifle recreationists, but a culture that has evolved with the prairie since the Pleistocene. At what point do we finally lay our bodies down to say this blatant disregard for biology and wild lives is no longer acceptable?
Well, hey, I like prairie dogs as well as the next guy (well, actually, I like them considerably more than I like most guys). But where does all of this outrage lead? Does it mean we should picket every contractor who tries to get rid of pesky prairie dogs? And every farmer who eliminates gophers? And every rancher who kills a rattlesnake?
Should we protest every new house built in our beautiful rural environs? Should we insist on a moratorium on new businesses and roads and annexations?
Or should we get so darned enraged that we become convinced that the world is a hopeless place which must be fated to end very soon?
Although it seems obvious, that citizens sometimes need a little outrage to stand firmly against the things that threaten them, I think that maybe we’ve embraced too much outrage. Maybe we need to try something else.Once upon a time, black and white civil rights activists worked together. But we had a better idea — and it was Outrage. Surely outrage would precipitate greater change at speedier rates.
So we had Black Power, Brown Power, Gay Power, a Feminist Revolution, and a Religious Revolt.
And they worked, for awhile. But at this point, we seem to have overplayed the rage card. Now activists seem to think that we can be thoroughly outraged about hundreds of things, all of the time — by abortion, sex education, scum-sucking liberals, gay marriage, stem cell research, illegal immigrants, war protestors, war, steroid-abusing ball players, genetically altered food, mining, logging, endangered species, pesticides.
ON THE OTHER HAND, in my view, Terry Tempest Williams’ outrage is wholly understandable. She and her fellow naturalists worked hard to get fragile environments protected, and sometimes it took decades. Then the Bush administration disregarded all of their painstaking work, and announced its plans to drill for oil. It was enough to make a fish scream, and you would too — if you were a naturalist who had spent decades working to provide protection for what you, in your expertise, deemed to be sensitive landscapes.
I’ve always thought it was a bad idea to drill in the Arctic Refuge, because as I see it, we need to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil, and we could start that process by embracing alternative energy sources and new technology right now. And that could generate new jobs and insure America’s technological future, and serve the polar bears all at the same time. But we are not going to do any of that unless we make it a priority.
But even so, I don’t think drilling for oil is in the same category as contaminating miles and miles of the American west and thereby killing herds, hatchlings, pups, cubs, miners, government workers, and William’s mother, brother, and neighbors. In fact, when Williams expressed her horror at the idea of the caribou left to dwell in a land sullied by rusting equipment, I was tempted to laugh – because I really doubted that the caribou would care.
And yet the caribou may not survive if people like Williams and her associates don’t champion their cause. Because in our era of monumental outrage, we have turned upon each other.
Now infuriated conservatives rail against any clean air and water standards, and they condemn habitat protection, claiming that environmentalists care more about snails, prairie dogs, and owls than they do about farmers, ranchers and loggers.
And they have a point. Environmental politics haven’t been logical. Americans aren’t giving up their cars and decks and gadgets. We’re merely banishing mining and manufacturing to third-world countries, where they won’t be conducted safely or environmentally, and where poverty and bankrupt governments will ensure environmental destruction and death.
In our era of outrage, environmentalists seldom worry about whether former miners and loggers have decent jobs and adequate pay. And industries seldom fret about lowering wages or environmental standards. And most of us tend to censure the immigrants who swim the Rio Grande to spend twelve-hour days laboring in our fields, rather than the governments that negotiate the trade agreements, treaties, and wage laws which motivate that migration.
Today, there are desperate, unemployed Americans who would gladly support the repeal of all environmental and safety standards if that meant they’d have a better chance at a steady job.
No wonder so many Americans seem to believe that the world is coming to an end; it’s easier than thinking about how we can fix everything.
And yet if they’re wrong, the world will still be here tomorrow, and so will all of our problems.
LEADERS LIKE Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ayn Rand, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Rachel Carson, Stokely Carmichael, Cesar Chavez, Betty Friedan, Lech Walesa, James Dobson, Franklin Kameny, and Russell Means champion causes, disseminate information, and deliberately provoke outrage.
Williams is resolved to protect the environment. She’s impassioned by her vision and determined to never back down. She’s infuriated by our President, and by politicians and citizens who stand against her goals. She urges us to fight for the land, the canyons, the migrating birds and polar bears, for peace and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and for each and every plant and animal.
But I think the challenge to those inspired by leaders is to not simply follow. Instead, it’s to integrate our ideals and recognize the needs of others.
In a democracy, we are the ones who prioritize and decide. And toward that end, we must recognize that many people need more access to education and medical care. We must acknowledge that the unemployed need jobs, that both humans and wildlife are safeguarded by clean air and water standards, and that the powerless need a voice.
We must appreciate that the disenfranchised need representation, that the accused need lawyers, and that the peasants need food. Afghani children need schools, Palestinians need homes, local children need dental work, lost pets need shelter. People throughout the world need economies that discourage serfdom and exploitation; wounded American servicemen need better long-term treatment; and everyone, everywhere, could use a little more peace.
Terry Tempest Williams refuses to believe that Americans merely care about wealth and entertainment. And it would seem that Americans on all sides of the issues, from those who stand vigil on the grounds near Terri Schiavo to those who march against the war in Washington, prove her point.
We live in a world of finite resources, in an age of global communication, on a planet that seems to be getting smaller and smaller. Today, the lives of others, in exotic climes and foreign nations, are irrevocably and almost inexplicably intertwined with our own.
Our greatest challenge, I suspect, is to harness our outrage, so that it doesn’t turn into rage and inspire us to turn against one another.
Our greatest impediment, I think, is that we tend to get incensed by all of the needs, demands, entreaties, and outstretched hands.
Our problems are uncountable, our needs are great, the task before us is eternal, and it is guaranteed that we will never meet all of the demands. Yet I believe that all of us should embrace the assumption that we can do better and serve more. Because simply accepting that the end is near solves nothing.
