The View From Listening Point

NEWSLETTER of the Listening Point Foundation, Inc.

VOLUME 2, NUMBER 1 - SPRING/SUMMER 2000

On Wilderness Intangibles

To talk about intangible things is difficult because they are hard to define, explain or measure. You can measure soil, and you can measure water and trees, but it is very difficult to measure intangible values.

Intangible values are those that stir the emotions; that influence our happiness and content; that make life worth living. We talk about the practical considerations of conservation, and they are important, too. Back of all concrete considerations, however, are always other factors that we call the intangibles. Their values are so involved and integrated in all conservation work that it is impossible to separate them.

Aldo Leopold said, "Conservation means the development of an ecological conscience." What I think he meant was that unless humans develop a feeling for our environment and understand it; unless we become at one with it and realize our stewardship; unless we appreciate all the intangible values embraced in our environment, we cannot understand the basic need for conservation.

It is easier for me to think of the intangibles with respect to water than most other resources, for I've always lived close to it. When I say "water," I instinctively think of my own country, the Quetico-Superior and the wilderness canoe country along the international border with Canada. What is the importance of that country, its timber, its vast deposits of iron and other resources? There is no denying the part they play in our economy, but when I think of it, I remember the vistas of wilderness waterways, the solitude, the quiet and the calling of the loons. They are the intangible values that some day in the future, with our zooming population, may far outshadow all others in importance.

Water, and I think of Izaak Walton and the line in the stained glass window of the cathedral at Winchester, England, where he is buried. There are only four words in that line, "Study to be quiet," but they embody his whole philosophy and way of life. Life was a search for tranquility and peace, clear evidence of his communion with the outdoors. No mention of the number of fish he caught, only the quiet and a hint of the intangible value of the things he wrote about.

I visited Crater Lake, Ore., last summer and remember its startlingly blue water, its high peaks and shining snowfields. I remember especially how it looked in the early morning when it was half covered with mist. It is one of the most dramatic vistas on the continent and possibly in the world. Intangible values? You bring them away with you but you cannot explain them.

I remember a little trout stream from a long time ago. I followed it to the headwaters on the advice of an American Indian who told me I would find a pool that no one had ever fished. I found that pool after looking for it two whole days. I have never been back there and I do not want to go back because I've heard that the pool has changed.

There were great trees around the pool -- primeval yellow birch, huge white pines and hemlocks. It was a rock pool, and I climbed out on a ledge and looked down into the water that was clear and deep. Down on the bottom were schools of speckled trout, just lying there fanning their fins and waiting for a fly. I remember tossing a pine cone to the surface and how the water exploded with rising trout. I sat on that ledge for a long time and watched them and the great trees around the pool, and I thought to myself, "This is something perfect and unchanged, this is part of America as it used to be."

There were no dollar values around that pool, only the intangibles.

And what about wildlife and the intangibles there? Do you duck hunters remember how many you shot last year, or the year before? No, but you do remember the sound of wings in the dawn or at dusk. You remember as though it were yesterday that mallard hen quacking far out in the rice, and how the rushes looked when they were gold against the blue water.

Have you ever stood in a stand of virgin timber where it is very quiet and the only sounds are the twittering of nuthatches and the kinglets way up in the tops? John Muir once said, "The sequoias belong to the solitudes and the millenniums." I was in the sequoias not so long ago and it was a spiritual experience.

To realize that those great trees were mature long before the continent was discovered, that their lives reached back to the beginnings of western civilization was sobering to a short-lived man and his ambitions.

We need trees. We need them for our mills, for industry, for paper. We must have them for our particular kind of civilization. They are an important factor in our economy. But let us not forget that there are other values in trees beside the practical, values that may be more important in the long run.

It is predicted that by 1970 there will be a fifth mouth to feed at every table of four. What is that going to do to our way of life? What is it going to do to the places where a man can still find silence and peace?

Much of my time is spent in the effort to preserve the wilderness regions of the United States. They are the wild areas set aside by the states and the federal governments as forest and parks. A constant effort is necessary to save them from exploitation. We are fighting to preserve this less than one percent of our total land area. We are thinking of those places not only in terms of the physical resources within them but of their spiritual resources and intangible values.

The fact that last year 46 million people visited our national parks, and more than 30 million visited our national forests, indicates that there a hunger, a need in the American people to renew their associations with unspoiled nature.

And so when we talk about intangible values, remember that they cannot be separated from others. The conservation of water, forest, soils and wildlife are all involved with the conservation of the human spirit. The goal we all strive toward is happiness, contentment, the dignity of the individual and the good life. This goal will elude us forever if we forget the importance of the intangibles.

-With the kind permission of Zachary Hoskins, Editor, Izaak Walton League of America magazine, Outdoor America, Winter 2000