By George Sibley One of Henry Thoreau’s most intriguing lines, in my mind, was his exhortation: “Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature.” I thought of that one day last week, while following a few public land managers up a gully in an intermittent watershed near Gunnison called Cabin Creek. That quote led, like everything does today, to contemplations on where we’re going in this experiment called America. Cabin Creek was once a meandering stream in a grassy valley bottom, the grasses yielding to sagebrush as the land sloped up to the brownish-green rolling hills that make up ...