TWO ARTS

Yesterday I happened to be looking through the open back doorway of the cabin. A housefly's flight came to an abrupt stop and there came the barn spider on its invisible line. Reaching the fly, the spider wrapped it with a few strokes and then subsided, legs tucked in, motionless. I imagined it quietly taking in body fluids of the fly. Next day I went tots webwork and touched the upper right anchor. Immediately the spider shifted, aimed itself at my finger. I jerked back, the spider turned in one smooth movement to resume its original position, alert status ended, tucked again into a spider's pond of calm, not that I know what that is.

Usually a calm for us modern humans seems to be a sort of affair: partial, frets and concerns not quite gone. One of those took me today as I looked through that same doorway, back to another place, other times, the Red Desert of Wyoming. I was with a bird watcher friend and Grant Hagen, Jackson Hole native and wonderful animal artist. We wandered up Steamboat mountain, in no hurry, pooling our fragmentary knowledge of plants and rocks, animals and history; patrolling cliff tops, accompanied by a pair of screaming prairie falcons, finding what we decided might very well be the buffalo drop that Dave Love, Wyoming geologist, had mentioned.

We looked out from time to time at one of North America's grand far-ranging landscapes. The scene shifted to more recent times, Steamboat again, with three veteran Red Desert defenders: Tom Bell, wildlife biologist and founder of High Country News, Mac Blewer, outreach director of Wyoming Outdoor Council, and Marian Doane, a most knowledgeable woman who can read the range. Neither of those days were like quiet dreams nor were they times of fret; they were hour after hour of real living. You know what I mean, I won't dissect it.

The Red Desert intrudes here because it does, that's all. I've mentioned it before, that great country that merges with other high plains regions spreading north past the Big Horns into Montana, south into Colorado, east toward the Medicine Bows. But it's time, friends, skeptics, activists of every stripe, ranchers, workers in the oil and gas patches, BLM people ... yes, you too ... it's time, the bell tolls. We've got to stop and turn and find the crossroads where we went wrong. Because that land is under the hammer, on the brink.

We all have our special places ... home towns, streets, city blocks, mountains, valleys, desert oases ... places that can't be violated without a very damn good reason, such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Places where the bottom line of Exxon or Mobil or BP or WalMart has no standing. For me the Red Desert is not only one of those, it has become a vibrant set of instructions written on the land, directions to what is happening elsewhere.

So hear me out. The crossroad where we went wrong was our backing away from linking to other groups to fight for a rigorous and radical overhaul of federal and state energy policy. Instead, the prime focus, money and bombast were expended on defense of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a part of the circumpolar arctic, all of which is now, and will be (refuge included) in the gunsights of fossil fuel corporations worldwide.

Other lands in the Americas, Asia, Africa are targeted too. It was too easy to think in that small-scale, piecemeal activist cage known as the art of the politically possible. We could have thrown down a gauntlet, insisted on a a wide-ranging ecological/political ground on which to struggle. We could have been talking a lot more to each other, making contacts, building confidence, breaking barriers, building a truly independent grassroots base. Is it too late, to advance the art of democracy.?

Hard row to hoe? Sure, but maybe not quite so tough, once we get into the swing of it, and once we take seriously the fact that the earth does not wait on us, is not under our command, has its own time scale. What that means right now is a huge gap between what has to be done and what we take to be possible. Take the Kerry campaign. No, let's not. Let's look at one of those gaps, neatly summarized by Ross Gelbspan.

"The scientists (who had previously reported to a 1995 United Nations panel) subsequently concluded that to stabilize our climate requires humanity to cut its use of coal and oil by 70 percent in a very short time. In contrast, the Kyoto Protocol calls for industrial countries to cut aggregate emissions by just 5.2 percent by 2014." The Nation, Aug. 15-23, 2004).

Our nation won't even abide by the pitiful, embarrassing, totally ridiculous Kyoto goal. You see what I'm driving at? A bold, overarching strategy for rescue of the Red Desert and other places at risk would link directly to a bold and realistic strategy for moderating global warming.

Being bold these days runs counter to what most of us think of as realistic. Granted. But things have been going very, very wrong lately; we see it and feel it and know that somehow something's got to give, even if it means pulling back from that American dream world we look at every day on the screen: squeaky clean bathrooms, perfect grooming, mowed-to-the-roots chem lawn, shampooed dog, well fed cat, plastic objects everywhere, products galore.

What could be more realistic than a look behind those fake scenes— Poison brew from PVC plastic manufacture; leaks and spills on the Alaska pipeline; radioactive storage in Navaho country; cascading consequences of damming the Colorado river; criminal waste of two of earth's most precious materials: oil and water. And who's counting war damage? It's a time to be bold; might be too late; wouldn't that be sad? Who could we blame?

I was in the midwest during the Reagan apotheosis. Myriads of flags, yellow ribbons on vehicles, power poles, houses. But behind all that, another presence, the dry earth.. Newspapers, printing without fail the national boilerplate, also spent many column inches, and photos too, on the drought. Government offices were prime sources of news; Water Districts, Bureau of Reclamation, Geological Survey, Bureau of Land Management, Agricultural Extension ... wherever some hope or help might be found.

Droughts come and go. We can't engineer them out of existence. What we can do is adapt, by drastic measures, which we are not taking, because we've been trained to think only within the bounds of "Get the government off our backs." But government is absolutely essential and the arid land crisis is proving that. The real issue is not what, but who. The art of the politically possible, a pathogen, most virulent in the Beltway and media-land, but its spores spread across the land, infecting the rest of us who live with real consequences. We're hamstrung by fear of stepping over the line; we're afraid of being labeled radical, naive, utopian, revolutionary, or worse.

CHEATGRASS

The latest issue of the Zephyr opened up an important piece of the ecological/political puzzle: alien plants (aka noxious weeds). I'll add my bit.

A July day in Horse Canyon, northern Nevada. Cheatgrass was abundant, especially along the cattle trail. Barbed "florets" snagged my sneakers and socks and worked into the fabrics and stabbed. Dozens of them, and they were hard to dislodge. Lacking forceps I went after the worst ones with my teeth. Humiliating, time-consuming. I tried walking barefoot, but the trail was too rocky. There were no alternate routes, the narrow canyon bottoms being literally choked by a noisy stream and its tall jungle. Finally, I simply held a steady pace, accepting pain.

Cheatgrass, Bromus tectorum, invaded from Europe in the 1880s and found ideal conditions on roadsides and other exposed places. It competes with native plants, but does not necessarily displace them. It can be beautiful in early summer, pale green and silky in shimmering masses. Grazing animals can use it then, before it dries and polishes its armament.

The canyon broadened and branched, cheatgrass dwindled, having met the fringes of a new set of conditions: alpine-like meadows. I stopped at the creek bank and worked on shoes and socks. The sun was low. Decision time. Should I run the gauntlet again? I drank from the canteen. Not much left. Afraid of Giardia, I didn't take water from the creek.

I decided to try for the spine of the range and follow that down and out. It was hard traveling, heaving upward through aromatic brush. The ridges ahead began to reveal their complexities. Too much unknown territory up there, and I'd be moving in thirst and darkness. Not wise.

I retreated, took the cheatgrass way, settled into a steady grind. Pain, some bloodshed. I made it to the car and poked it along a two-track road. Erosion ruts, sounds of sifting dust and ghostly dry brush scraping by, and then the highway embankment loaded with shimmers of pinkish-brown Bromus tectorum, ripe and ready. Not long after that encounter I holed up in a Bureau of Land Management campground in Wyoming. I brewed coffee and read a glossy little BLM pamphlet called Noxious Weeds. A Growing Concern. Ten of the aliens were identified. Spotted Knapweed, Leafy Spurge, and so on. They are bad because they "displace native plant species that provide habitat for wildlife and food for people and livestock." One of them is poisonous. The pamphlet tells us that we can all help with invasions by not transporting unknown flowers, by not giving our horses feed that might contain noxious seeds, and by driving only on "established roads and trails." Cheatgrass wasn't mentioned. Next day was a good one. I followed elk and deer and wild horse trails and logging roads to a fine view of Whiskey Peak. Back in camp I re-read Noxious Weeds. Some of the swatches of yellow color in meadows and old clearcuts had looked suspiciously like one of the aliens, Dalmatian Toadflax. If so, I wanted to know if it is really serious, or moderately so, and what are the realistic chances of defeating it. Will it exterminate Paintbrush, Geranium, Phlox, Wild Buckwheat and the other good, solid Americans? Or might they all arrive at some sort of coexistence and in the process add a bit more color and variety to the ecosystem. But wouldn't the answers to these questions vary, depending on each terrain's degree of erosion and grazing, its fire regime, floral composition, soil structure, weather pattern? The pamphlet had only a color photo of Dalmatian Toadflax and five words of description, "...extensive and deep root system." It's noxious, never mind the details, take our word for it. That was the message.

A tad irritated, I turned contrary, began a list of other invaders of these mountains, beginning with myself and my gear and vehicle and my fellow campers who were lounging at creekside or under RV awnings, wetting fish lines, fussing with fires and grills, giving their four-wheelers a workout.I recalled the wealth of information that turned up in my previous cheatgrass research. Fascinating stuff. Soil and climate and altitude preferences; growth habit; season of danger to grazers; fire hazard; experiments in progress to determine where it might be a threat, and where possibly not.

Come on, BLM, trust us, give us more data and the big picture. We might take an interest. With what you're giving us so far you can't really believe we'll go all bushy-tailed to make ourselves activists in the war against aliens. We've got enough troubles. Oh, we might refrain from picking and transporting beautiful strangers, but I don't see many of us making sure that "within 96 hours before entering back country (we) give pack animals only food that is certified weed free."

Come to think of it, I wonder if the battles against noxious aliens are already being lost because of reckless building of logging and mining and oil/gas roads into back country, under your supervision. You can't blame us for wondering why you and the Forest Service don't get together and wipe out a few thousand miles of old roads and two-tracks whose total mileage now exceeds that of the entire interstate system.

Never mind, I'm out of here. What's this? A little brown envelope into which I forgot to enclose the camping fee. Damn, this is really irritating. If you feds need more money, and I'm sure you do, and I'm all for it, go get it from taxes and you know which brackets to hit. This is our land, you know; this is public land. Okay? Oh well, thanks for not charging me a trailhead fee. (Cheatgrass is a shortened version of a piece first published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, Aug. 11, 1999).