FATAL BEAUTY

FATAL BEAUTY

Benjamin Alva Polley

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The fatal beauty of Glacier National Park and other places of grandeur are places revered yet loved to death. Why do we kill that which we love? Why are these places just another place to check off of our lists? So we can say, “Hey, been there, done that. I slayed the Glac!”

In our ever-increasing bucket list of places to go and people to see, why does it always become more pertinent to look at those places that are disappearing and dying? Scientists predict the 22 remaining glaciers in the park to be gone by 2030. That gives us 12 years. “Must see the glaciers before they’re gone.” 

We are all guilty of these pleasures. We load up the kids and the gear in the car, hop a freight, jump on the next plane, in whatever gas-guzzling contraption that will get us there to the Going-to-the-Sun Road. So we can drive up the steep, serpentine, death-defying, engineering feat and say, “Hey, we did Glacier.” If we are lucky, we get out of the death contraption and smell the trees and flowers and hike the trails. But, let’s face it, folks, most people don’t.

How often do we stop and think in our must-see craze that we are all contributing to the death of beauty and glaciers? Too often, the thought comes too late in a reactive reminisce and longing for nostalgia and the good old days of what should have been and could have been.

We are all guilty of it — I am. I moved out here to Montana because of Glacier National Park and being offered a job building backcountry trails in 2002. I just find it interesting and especially now that the park is not only getting busier but the last three years all have had over 3 million visitors and is breaking visitation records from the previous year. Last July, Glacier had more visitors than Yellowstone did in the same month. In 2011, the park was barely getting a million tourists for a single season. Social media is the main contributor to the people flocking to national parks. Everybody including me is posting selfies in wild places next to wild animals. 

 

In our ever-growing need to see and conquer, we are also killing beauty. The other day, I heard an interesting study on Montana Public Radio that Joshua Tree National Park in California, is undergoing the same fate. People are flocking to see Joshua trees, but the Joshua trees are migrating north out of the park due to climate change, a warming planet and are getting too warm there for their liking just like the glaciers disappearing. Will future generations have to change the names of both parks; "The National Park formally known as Glacier" and "The National Park that formally had Joshua Trees"?

Meanwhile, on another note, most people in this country have heard of the famous naturalist, John Muir. He is considered by many the father and forebear of the National Park System. This essay is not about John Muir and his crusted bread in his pocket or about his sic beard, but about another naturalist that most people aren’t familiar with. His name was John Burroughs.

Burroughs was 20 years Muir’s senior, and in fact, he looked up to him. Burroughs was a naturalist, writer and conservationist and a dear friend of president Teddy Roosevelt. Side note, Burroughs was also good friends with Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau as well and actually wrote biographies about a few of them.

John Burroughs and John Muir butted heads and didn’t agree with the latter’s vision of setting aside and protecting National Parks. They argued with each other over this but more importantly listened to what the other person was saying. Burroughs warned Muir that if we partition off protected areas throughout the country that people will ignore the near-at-hand (their own backyards) for that which is far away and held on a pedestal. People will flock to these places and ignore their own towns, cities, counties, states, and regions in favor of the untamed West and places untrammeled.

Looking over the past century and at what is now happening, John Burroughs’ words resound true with a new clarion call. This is exactly where we find ourselves. We are loving places of beauty to death. I am not condemning John Muir or his vision, and in fact, I would have done the same thing, if given that opportunity to save them from industry and an economic system that believes in growth for the sake growth, which is similar to the philosophy of a cancer cell. We can't have infinite growth in a finite world. It's not possible and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you to fatten their pockets. I am very pleased that we have protected areas and public lands, but we also need to adhere to the wisdom of Burroughs by re-beautifying and re-wilding our cityscapes, our counties, our states and our regions. As a challenge I am asking Can We Genuinely Make America Great Again before the beautifully protected places are choked with smog, congestion, clogged with traffic jams, buried under asphalt, developed or slain to build more parking for the masses?

Together, we can beautify and rewild this lovely country and planet of ours. It is just too bad the beauty is a double-edged sword that helps our economy but also kills beauty and what we cherish most as a nation.