National Parks are a paradox. Men (usual men) take marker pens and scribe boundaries onto maps. On one side of the boundary the landscape is sacred, to be preserved for ‘future generations’. On the other side, it’s business as usual.
But do bees see these boundaries? Do the birds change their flight paths to stay within protected space? Do the otters turn on their leathery pads at the borderline and head back into the hallowed heartland? And what of such processes as pollination; the cycling of nutrients, matter and energy; migration; photosynthesis and predation? Do they too dance up to the marker pen’s arbitrary line and simply stop?
In fact, are national parks even about preserving ecosystems at all? They are certainly about “jobs” and rural economic development. Pound signs are spinning in the eyes of local landowners, property developer’s, business people and other ‘stakeholders’ in the new Cairngorm national park area where I live. They are also about planning control; development of ‘resources’ like footpaths and interpretive centres; about building new and better infrastructure; about providing ‘facilities’. And, of course, they offer a ready supply of recreational opportunities for us stressed out homo urbanis.
But the same could be said for Euro Disney. So what are national parks really for? If their defining characteristic, beyond those of a theme park, is to preserve and conserve landscapes – ecosystems – they fall sadly short…
Ecosystems are elastic, they ebb and flow, change and shift within functional limits, not hard physical boundaries. They evolve and remain stable so long as the dynamic processes they depend on remain in tact. Sometimes a volcano or an earthquake, a forest fire or a flood, will push these processes beyond their elastic point of no return, forcing them into crisis. The ecosystem will no longer be able to maintain its present state and it will collapse, with devastating effects for it’s inhabitants. Later a new system will emerge – a different system with new limits and inhabitants.
A little while ago an Orca was washed up on the north west coast of America. It’s fat tissue contained so many highly toxic organochloride residues that the scientists who performed the post-mortem had to re-calibrate their instruments to measure them. This Orca was not ‘transient’ – it had lived off these shores for most of its life – and yet it was contaminated with substances that had been banned in that region for over 20 years. Pollution knows no boundaries, in space or time.
If you want to support an ecosystem, it’s the processes that connect all the elements together that must be preserved. Saving individual species out of sentimentality or attempting to ‘freeze’ landscapes to please aesthetic sensibilities in the belief that there is one ‘ideal’ state of nature is a human arrogance, one born in romantic naivety and ecological ignorance.
Thoreau wrote that ‘in wildness…’ (not wilderness but ‘wildness’) ‘ ..lies the preservation of the world’. It is processes like predation and pollination that support the wild essence of life. If we are about preservation then all we can do is get out of the way and let these processes flourish – allow them to be wild, without constraint or control. It’s this ‘wildness’ that will be the preservation of the world.
The minute we introduce pesticides; herbicides; high yield seed varieties; genetically modified organisms and radioactive pollutants into an ecosystem, we introduce them into our ecosystem… forever. We also introduce them into every ecosystem – regardless of where it is. This is how penguins in Antarctica get contaminated with pollutants produced in North America, how New Zealand find’s itself living under a hole in the ozone caused by the industrial revolution in Europe and why an oil spill off the coast of north west Spain is not a just a disaster for the fishing folk and birds of the Galician Coast in 2002, but a global disaster for us all, that will change things forever.
National parks illustrate perfectly how we have confused the geophysical contents of ecosystems with the wild processes of life that support them. They allow us to chop the world into ‘bits for saving’ and ‘bits for sacrificing’ – giving the impression that these bits are somehow separate and can exist despite each other. They institutionalise the landscape and distract us from the reality that to have a wild planet – to have a hospitable planet – we must put away the marker pens.
Giving us somewhere to play at the weekends, somewhere to ‘escape’, is a tonic for our troubled consciences’… but there is no escape. If you’re sitting now on a London tube train or a Birmingham bus, on a park bench in Manchester or in an office block in Glasgow, you are still breathing the same air as the otters in the Outer Hebrides, drinking the same molecules of water as the fish in the Amazon and eating food that comes from the gritty residue of leaf mould and weathered rocks, rocks made of the same minerals as you. You also, like your mammalian cousin the Orca, contain organochlorides in your fat tissue. No boundaries.
If we want to preserve something for future generations (future generations of all species), it should be wildness itself. That invisible life force that always finds a way through our attempts to ‘civilise’ it. Our human wildness is part of this life force, part of a greater unfathomable spirit that is palpable in wild places.
It’s all sacred – every square inch of the Earth. It’s not enough to have National Parks, Area’s of Special Scientific Interest or of Outstanding Natural Beauty. These are the games of cosy career bureaucrats and the well-meaning but myopic scientist whose religion remains the controlling, reductionist science of the Enlightenment. Having these “preserved” zones is to subject the earth to the same ecologically illiterate thinking that has made them necessary in the first place.
I sound like I’m opposed to National Parks but I am not. I just believe they are only really useful if they are taken as part of the big picture. Put simply, they are not enough on their own, and in their shortfall they have become a potentially dangerous distraction from the real work of living within our ecological limits.
If you really value wilderness and the wildness that holds it all together, then you will think well beyond the boundaries of national parks and conservation areas. You will realise that the men with the marker pens won’t be able to make your life sustainable with Agenda’s and Acts, Policies, Papers and Plans. You will realise too, that every product you buy that you don’t really need, every car or air journey you make without exploring the alternatives, is an act of vandalism against the wilderness. It’s all connected, and having the courage to make that connection and then act beyond the brainwashed domesticity of our Great British Culture will take a certain wildness of heart.
Practice that act of wildness today, wherever you are, and make a start on a global national park.