CARE IN SUCH A WORLD 11extirpated.” Strikingly in 1864, amid civil war, Marsh knew enough to blame
heedlessness and avarice for the exhaustion and erosion of soils, for deforestation,
for destruction of plants, trees, insects, birds, fish, whales, whole habitats.
For the next hundred years, more headlong than other peoples because of
our limitless vistas and inexhaustible resources, America kept gorging the conti-
nent as if bent on fulfilling Marsh’s premonitions. Hunters extinguished billions
of passenger pigeons migrating in mile-wide, 240-mile-long flocks. Loggers
stripped old-growth forests. Now we abuse North and South American land to
consume a quarter of the world ’s beef. Oilmen and their political helpers clamor
to drill “some remote part of Alaska,” the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that
“empty wilderness” ripe with fossil fuel.
As for “the earth and its cycles,” says Alaska’s poet John Haines, “Nature
has hold of the other end of the string,” and sooner or later jerks us up short.
He and younger nature poets, compelled by each day’s worsening news, cross
celebration with loss. In America the Beautiful and elsewhere, carbon-sucking
forests and their wildlife have been lost to logging, wildlands to drilling, prai-
rie and grassland to overgrazing, wetland and desert to developers, woods to
snowmobiles, dunes to “off-road” and “all-terrain” vehicles, canyons to dams,
Scared Buffalo, Yellowstone National Park.
Natural Trails and Waters Coalition.