Public land is under an ever-increasing squeeze from all directions.  The land is needed and used for wood and mineral products, wildlife habitat, and recreation.  The last, recreation, is the newest pressure.  Recreational use of public lands has increased 130% over a decade earlier, and a doubling of many outdoor recreational activities is anticipated by 2020.  Can recreation coexist with commodities extraction and preservation? 

       I am an organism, as is each of you, made of some 10¹⁴ cells (that's 100,000 billion).  These cells are being replaced at the rate of 25 million each second, all with nearly perfect coordination and interconnectedness.  All cells know precisely what to do, but are utterly unable to do so without 10¹⁴ cooperative interrelationships.  Each cell requires energy, and each must rid itself of waste.  Each cell takes in messages, chemical and electrical, perhaps emotional and spiritual as well, and sends out an equal number of responses.  As an organism, you and I are very very impressive. 
       Each recognized species is also a similarly impressive organism. There are 10 to perhaps 100 million species on the planet.  Each is dependent on others and on a system of energy delivery and waste removal, consumption and production.  Even single-celled organisms have uncountable chemical reactions within their internal environment, and uncountable external interrelationships, both chemical and sensory, with their surrounding environment. 
       Now, consider the concept that a piece of land is also an organism.  It is an organism little different and not separate from you or me.  This idea is generally in opposition to what we learn early in our life:  that each of our neatly packaged and very intelligent human organisms is a separate entity, a separate being.  But this packaged organic body of yours is a system that works only in concert with an infinite number of internal and external relationships with other systems.  These systems can be living or non-living, organic or inorganic.  These systems produce and consume food or energy.  Some produce oxygen, some carbon dioxide.  Some systems take care of our wastes.  Some clean our water and air.  But they are all indispensable.  Take one away, and you may disappear, too.
       We do not really have a thorough understanding of the complexity of our bodies, our personal organism.  It is easy to imagine, then, our lack of understanding of the land-as-organism.  It is even more complex because it involves many organisms all intersecting, all interrelating, all producing and consuming, cleaning and excreting, breathing and eating.  The only thing missing to this land-as-organism is skin.  Skin to define its boundaries. 
       The land does not boast a consciousness with which we can communicate in English.  But inherent to the land are continuous innumerable complex interrelationships within and between the organisms present, just as between the cells in your body.
       Now consider the land-as-organism without life, only rocks and the elements.  On this inorganic land there remains a system of interdependent processes just as in your skin-covered organism.  We call these processes by physical names such as erosion, mountain building, exfoliation, adsorption, freeze expansion, and so forth.  This system of interrelationships exists and functions just the same as in any living organism.  Processes depend on other processes.  Systems depend on other systems.  Weather erodes rock into sediment which may filter water for a while before it gathers into sedimentary rock which may compress into metamorphic rock, and then crystallize into valuable minerals or erode back to sediment.
       We now have three levels of organisms:  the living creatures (you, me, and all those other recognized species), the organic land teeming with life and all their interconnections, and third, the land itself, an inorganic relation of things only.  This last serves humans and all other organisms as the medium in which our interconnections take place.  It gives us a place to stand in an otherwise largely evacuated universe.
       There is a fourth level, a more "cosmic" level if you will, in which all these interconnections could be reduced or translated into exchanges of energy only.  That energy connects each of us with every other species and with every piece of land and with every piece of star in the universe.  But, let's leave this fourth level for a later discussion.
       The big leap that I'd like you to make with me is hard for some people to accept, harder to comprehend on a truly visceral level.  Put very simply, the land is us and we are the land.  We breathe, the trees breathe -- we exchange gases.  Without one another, we would both die.  We excrete, bacteria clean up after us.  To us its waste, to the bacteria its life-giving food.  Without one another we would both die.  We drink water that the land provides to us reasonably clean, and we return it, though not always in the same appetizing form.  The land is not separate from us.  It is us and we are it.  There is missing only skin to envelop us and the land and define this union as a discrete organism that fits neatly into our taxonomy texts.  We could think of the planet's boundaries as that skin, but it, too, exchanges energy and material, experiencing gains and losses.  We are only one small cell and the land is just another small cell on this planet, and we work together in this infinite interrelationship of processes. 
       Consider for a moment what happens if we mistreat our own organism, our body:  a cut bleeds, a blow to the head hurts.  Smoking probably causes cancer.  Couch potatoes gather moss.  We can expect to suffer consequences from this bodily mistreatment.  Sometimes, we heal from this abuse.  Sometimes a scar remains.  Sometimes we do not heal, we are permanently disabled.  Sometimes we die.
       We try to compensate with exercise, good food, and fun times, keeping all those 10¹⁴ cells happy and well fed.
       An organism of land is no different.  Cut it and it will bleed.  It may heal, may scar, or may be permanently disabled.  It may require time and therapy to recover.  Deal it a severe enough blow and it may die.
       How do you treat your body, the organism that's covered with skin?  Do you feed it toxins?  Do you slash it with a sharp knife?  Do you weaken its immune system?  Or, do you treat it well, care for it with exercise and gentleness?
       How do you treat your body the land?  Do you cut paths across it without concern for healing or scars?  Do you consider how the land is feeding you when you ride or hike or build a new trail?  Do you excise an organ or two because you don't understand their function or because they are in the way? 
      If you fill in a wetland, you fill in a liver, and you fill in your clean water.  If you cut a trail, you cut your body's skin.  If the cut is bad, a scar forms.  If the cut is re-injured, it continues to bleed.  If you desiccate your streams or fill your arteries with sediment, you thicken your blood, you clog your arteries. 
       If you separate your body-the-land into small parcels, place a heart over in one corner of the room and place a pancreas over in another, a muscle up by the ceiling and bone down on the floor, the interrelationships that make us a functioning, healthy organism become harder, if not impossible, to maintain. 
       If you cut a road or trail through a forest fragmenting the ecosystem, you leave some "organs" on one side of the road and some on the other.  Their ability to relate and survive is impaired.  The effects of fragmentation are very well documented in the scientific literature of our time.
       We ask of the land to clean our air and water for us.  We ask it to feed us, physically and emotionally.  We ask it to nurture us, not like a mother, nor as a separate entity.  "Mother Earth" we call it, that time-honored metaphor, but this is inappropriate.  Instead, the land is no different, not even separate from us.  If we ask something of the land, we must ask what we can give in return.  At the very least, we must be aware that we are part of the infinite interrelationships that take place with or without our conscious input, with or without our understanding.  Can the land speak our language?  No.  Perhaps it time for us to become multilingual and learn to speak its language.              BACK TO TOP