It can be hard to believe sometimes that parts of the planet remain unviolated by humans.
That there are places you will never go to, places to hold in your imagination like dreams of unimaginable perfection, full of ice and snowcapped mountains and migrating caribou, places where polar bears den down for the depths of winter and migrating birds make the sky come alive, far from humans and the death they bring, death of everything pure and pristine and good on this planet, and worse: the death of imagination, of what could be.
One of the most terrible humans beings to ever step foot on our fragile, life-giving Earth, this worthless cornurbation of yellow-tinged atoms that even the universe is ashamed of bringing into being, with a burn-it-all-down bunch of abysmal merry men at his side, has decided to violate, in a last, Covid-tinged gasp for infamy, one such remaining pristine place: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
To drill for oil.
I will not go into the details. I refuse to dwell any longer than is necessary on this abomination. The incoming administration is signalling it will do all it can to stop this; the announcement by the current gang of ghastly goons is simply spite puréed in with pure evil. May their posturing be a stain on their souls forever.
In 1930, Bob Marshall, a forester who had visited this Arctic region, published an essay in which he wrote:
“There is just one hope of repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every niche on the whole earth. That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness.”
His text was seminal in the environmental movement of the 20th century:
“According to environmental journalist Brooke Jarvis, ‘Marshall saw the enormous, largely unsettled Arctic lands he had explored as a possible antidote to this—not another chance to keep chasing America's so-called Manifest Destiny but a chance to finally stop chasing it.’ Even for Americans who would never travel there, ‘he thought they would benefit knowing that it still existed in the condition it always had.’ ‘In Alaska alone,’ Marshall wrote, ‘can the emotional values of the frontier be preserved.’ “
I stumbled upon this passage after putting down my words above, a lonely last-ditch stand on the importance of imagination. Marshall simply used the words ‘emotional values’ instead of ‘imagination’.
Sometimes it’s good not to feel completely alone.