Despairing of Hope

I spend much more time than I should reading the reader letters on Salon.com, especially those in response to Glenn Greenwald's matchless daily column on the Constitution, government, and the media (incidentally, why do we still call it a blog when it has obviously become something more--why is it not a "column"? just a question of semantics). The most recent post and discussion has to do with a watershed moment in recent American history, when it seems that the country is beginning to wake up to the appalling lawbreaking and immorality of the Bush Administration.

While I do have some hope on the fronts of real freedom and the defense of the Constitution, I cannot join in with even tentative hope for the future of this country and the world. I might get lynched for this, but my heart is less wrapped up in freedom of speech than it is in the physical future of the land that I love. And I'm not talking about global warming.

Today is my birthday. I planned on going for a hike, but it's raining, so I sat in bed having late tea and writing, which I do frequently. And I found myself thinking of this recent Salon discussion, feeling around in my own heart for symptoms of hope, and suddenly dissolving into tears. No, it's not just pregnancy hormones.

My solace -- practically my religion -- for my entire life has been escape into nature, especially the wilderness of my home in the Rockies. It has always been my only real release from the pressures of life, although I find it harder to penetrate in the East Coast's sticky, oppressive summers.

But fresh, clean air and water, and unhindered views are fast disappearing. There will no longer be any solace in them for me. Which brings me every day, I'm afraid, to question the purpose of my existence. All I truly care about is nature. All I truly love and believe in is wilderness. And this one thing, the thing that makes life worth living to me, is the one thing the rest of the world sees as completely expendable, as having no worth in itself. Why do I live if what I care for is the only thing that the world refuses to protect or value?

Every day that question weighs upon me. There are many other things to live for and enjoy, I know, but this is the deepest thing, the one thing that my heart cannot let go of, the loss of which I will never stop mourning. And I despair in a life that says I have to fight for it, never enjoy it, never just take daily pleasure in it. I have to fight to preserve just a little of it, all the while knowing that the fight is, in the end, already lost. The pressures and greed of humanity will always take precedence over that which can only be lost, never found or created again. My heart -- my very spirit -- shrivels in that knowledge.

I don't want to live like this. Not that I want to not live, but existence without recourse to wilderness is, to me, absolutely bleak. Some year soon enough I will no longer be able to walk in any untouched land without the hum and roar of ATVs and snowmobiles intruding on me, or without the constant conscious threat of coal mining and the demands of rapacious development.

I don't want a planet like this. Our freedoms, our Constitution, our self-respect, these things we can fight for and win back, but a landscape once destroyed will always be scarred, and wilderness once taken away can never, ever be truly regained.

What hope is there in this prospect? How can I raise my children with the values of husbandry and stewardship that were instilled in me, when I can see that I would be raising them only to have their hearts broken? Those who deeply, burningly love the land are too few to fight against those who say that the rights not just of human survival, but of unencumbered human property come first.

Until I can walk into the wilderness and know that nobody is secretly planning to drill oil wells in it, or level its mountains and poison its water for coal mining, I will not feel hope. And right now, as the country is waking up a little to political horrors, it is hurriedly pushing tens if not hundreds of brand-new coal-burning plants whose fuel extraction will utterly destroy the land of my heart. And the demands of a generation with money to spare are building gated mini-estates in hills I once walked freely. Their huge houses are like a swaggering, overweight man with a belt barely cinched below his paunch. They grin as their views give them the illusion of lordship, but they know nothing of the land they seek to own, or how to love it.

So no, I do not yet have hope. My faith is in something fragile and precious, something that others do not care for or understand, something too easily destroyed.