For the beauty of the earth

In 1848, Ce­cil F. Al­ex­an­der, wrote Hymns for Lit­tle Child­ren. Alex­an­der is thought to have writ­ten these lyr­ics at Mark­ree Cas­tle, near Sli­go, Ire­land.

Refrain

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful:
The Lord God made them all.

Each little flower that opens,
Each little bird that sings,
He made their glowing colors,
He made their tiny wings.

Refrain

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

Refrain

The purple headed mountains,
The river running by,
The sunset and the morning
That brightens up the sky.

Refrain

The cold wind in the winter,
The pleasant summer sun,
The ripe fruits in the garden,
He made them every one.

Refrain

The tall trees in the greenwood,
The meadows where we play,
The rushes by the water,
To gather every day.

Refrain

He gave us eyes to see them,
And lips that we might tell
How great is God Almighty,
Who has made all things well.

Refrain

One of things that God Almighty has made well is Arizona. I am always impressed with the absolute grandeur of the desert, mountains and plateau that make up our wonderful State. At this Thanksgiving season, let us remember He who made us all and Who has made all things well.

Myths of TV and other media

The proliferation of cable TV channels has exalted the myths of TV to a new level. It is impossible to watch almost any channel without seeing pure nonsense in the form of commercials and entertainment. Without conscious effort the viewer is indoctrinated by this constant stream of concepts that have no anchor to reality. First, it is important to understand that I grew up with TV. I watched hours and hours a week, often until end of the Tonight Show. When I was younger, I was outraged by the suggestion made, in the context of a Church meeting, that TV viewing on Sunday was inappropriate. Now in my dotage, I have finally begun to understand the message of the media and I find it wanting.

Myth #1
That life consists of a series of crisis that can all be solved.

Life does not ever resolve. It goes on and on with no real satisfying ending. Although the cast of characters in real life changes slowly over time, the themes, the plots and the stories never end. There are no easy solutions to life's challenges, unlike the TV episodes that would have you believe people never have to shop regularly for food, work all day for a living, ride buses, drive for hours in cars to get anywhere, go through airport security, take regular baths and perform other such bodily maintenance activities and so forth. Even if people die, the rest of us have to go on with our daily routines. TV fails to show this well or at all. No one would really want to watch a real reality show, it would only remind us how real reality really is.

Myth #2
The majority of people look like movie stars.

I started to watch some mindless movie about a huge earthquake in New York. That should have been the giveaway, there has never been a huge earthquake in New York, but I stopped watching when it turned out that all the refugees from the disaster were beautiful people. Now I have been to New York, and the people there look remarkably just like the people anywhere else in the United States and I didn't see one person that looked like a movie star. You know the type, perfect hair, perfect smile, no skin blemishes, no fat, not one paunch in the lot. When TV does show real people they cut away fast so they can get back to the beautiful ones. I believe the number of beautiful people is roughly similar to the percentage of basketball players that make it into the NBA.

Myth #3
All cars are luxuriously manufactured to go fast and smash through things.

If you watch car commercials, the cheapest Ford or GM models are filled with luxury and drive like they could win the gran prix. Every car is shown charging down the empty highway or dashing through traffic at speeds that would usually get the attention of the local police or photo radar. Despite the commercials, all cars made in the world are about the same. The more expensive fast cars are just that, more expensive and fast, not really any better. Cars vary in their size and weight. The only real innovation in automotive design is a figment of the imagination of the ad agencies. If car manufacturers really cared about gas mileage and innovation then more cars would look like and get the gas mileage of a Toyota Prius. Cars are not a luxury, they do not make us happy or rich or popular. They are a huge expense and have a monumental impact on our culture, our environment and our society and that is not all good.

Myth #4
People are not accountable for their actions and any life style is acceptable.

Not only does TV show only beautiful people, they do whatever they want to do without any consequences. Just as in the old movies, all of the people smoked and no one ever got lung cancer, today, nearly all of the TV shows depict people doing immoral, dishonest and wicked things without any consequences. Wickedness never was happiness and depicting evil as good is not acceptable. Everyone will be held accountable for their actions, either in this life or the next. There is no free lunch, every action has a consequence.


Myth #5
No physical possession can make us happy.

TV would have you believe that happiness comes from using the right products or owning the right possessions. None of this is true. Happiness does not come from owning anything. You will not be any happier with a 64 inch flat screen TV than you are today without one. Some of the most unhappy people have the most physical possessions.

More commentary later

Why was the Dutchman lost?

Through the mists of legend, can we discern the truth? Not always. Arizona is replete with stories of lost mines. There are lists, books and Web sites. Very few of the publications acknowledge that no "lost mine" has ever been found.

It always fascinated me that someone could discover a fabulous mineral deposit, spend time tunneling into solid rock and then, lose the mine. Gold and silver are heavy metals. I have a hard time believing that if I had a pile of gold, I could somehow lose it. Even though gold is not easy to carry around, it is so valuable that I doubt I would just leave it lying around. Likewise, if I spent days and weeks, perhaps years, tunneling into the side of a mountain, I probably would remember where it was. As I have pointed out in previous posts, there are over 6 million people in Arizona now, averaging almost 50 per square mile. With all of the hiking, camping, ATVs and other vehicles, it seems almost impossible that there are "undiscovered" mines in the state.

Reality has never been a strong point with those who promote UFOs, Monster Animals or Lost Mines. Lost mines and lost treasures are typical of this type of story. Ship wrecks to the contrary, most of the persistent stories of lost gold and silver involve robberies of some kind or another. (You might note that there haven't been that many ship wrecks in Arizona). The robbers always stash the loot, usually thousands of pounds of gold, in some unlikely spot and then all get killed before they can return and claim their ill-begotten gains. Unfortunately, the stories never tell how a few robbers are able to transport the thousands of pounds of gold to the stash point. It is also absolutely certain, that those who believe cannot be dissuaded by the truth. When I was a lot younger, we had an older desert rat of a man who used to come into the law office where I worked. He returned from time to time and I learned that he was trying to raise money for a mine. He claimed to have discovered the Lost Dutchman Mine. I guess he never got the funding because supposedly the mine is still lost.

Maybe this was the reason that I got started on reading about lost mines in Arizona. For years I researched the mines and read everything I could find printed on the subject. The most famous mine story is that of the Lost Dutchman Mine, supposedly in the Superstition Mountains east of the Salt River Valley. The "Dutchman" was really a German immigrant named Jacob Waltz or Walz. He was reportedly born in 1810 in Wurttemberg and died of pneumonia on October 25, 1891 in Phoenix, Arizona. Likely, the report of a mine came about as a result of a dying man's attempt to explain away his "high grading" activities. High grading was the practice of hard rock miners taking high grade ore and smuggling it out of the mine in sort-off pre-social security system. Coincidentally, a major gold strike was made in the area at the base of the Superstition Mountains in 1892. There were 50 working mines and millions of dollars in gold was mined. If there was a mine near Weaver's Needle in the Superstition Mountains, then it was likely the one found.

More on lost mines later.

Contrast contrasts

I recently wrote about the population of Arizona. This post was in contrast to the earlier posts about wilderness. Arizona is quartered by major Interstate Highways, but off of these heavily traveled roads are highways where it is still possible to drive for a long time without seeing another car. On some of Arizona's dirt roads, it is best to be prepared for trouble. If you break down it could be days or longer before someone happens along. As I have learned first hand, your friendly automobile insurance company will not dispatch a tow truck to help you out of being stuck in sand in the middle of a dry river bed. The contrast between six, eight or ten lane freeways and a dirt road is immense. Not just the technology gap, but the whole outlook on life difference. On the freeway, in most metropolitan areas of Arizona, you can get a traffic ticket for driving too slow. On a dirt road, you can get seriously injured by driving too fast, not to mention turning your tires into macrame.

As you speed along at 75 mph on the freeway, you can often look off to the side of the road and see a dirt track snaking off into the distance. Here is a quantitative illustration of the difference between the two worlds:

Over ten million people per year visit the Grand Canyon.

Sonora National Monument (you may never have heard of this one) has only 20,000 visits per year and it has a major freeway going right through it.

Coal Mine Canyon has such few visitors that there don't seem to be any records of how many people go there. (Now you ask, where is Coal Mine Canyon?) You will just have to read these posts in the future if you want to know.

Arizona, probably not what you thought

Arizona is a land of contrasts and extremes, but it is likely that there are a lot of things you didn't know about this, the sixth largest state.

The U.S. Census Bureau gives some of the following facts:

• Arizona had a population in 2006 of 6,166,318 people.
• The Arizona population increased 20.1 percent from 2000 to 2006.
• Only 4.8 percent of the Arizona population is classified as Native American but 29.2 percent are Hispanic or Latino in origin and 25.9 percent speak a language other than English at home.
  
• The median household income was $43,696 in 2004.
• Arizona averages 45.2 people per square mile out of 114,006 square miles.
  

Arizona's capital, Phoenix, is the fifth largest city in the United States. Only New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston are larger. Eight of Arizona's ten largest cities surround Phoenix in the Phoenix/Mesa Metroplex with a total population of 2,931,004 in 1999.

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04000.html

The highest point in Arizona is Humphreys Peak (one of the San Francisco Peaks) at 12,633 feet. The lowest point is near Yuma only 70 feet above sea level. The highest temperature ever recorded was 128 degrees F. at Lake Havasu City on June 29, 1994. The lowest temperature was -40 degrees F. at Hawley Lake.

More later.

Wilderness is in the eye of the beholder

One of the most sublime places is one of the least visited and, for most people, one the least attractive, that is the western deserts of Utah. The area south of the Salt Flats is mostly flat and barren between the low hills and one of my favorite places in the whole world. In reflecting on the attraction of this area, I decided that it is real wilderness. Except for a few sheep herders, no one seems to have found a use for the area. The United States Government has used it for chemical and biological warfare testing, and accidentally killing herds of sheep in the process, but no one else seems to be able to figure out what to do with the huge empty land.

Recently, we have seen an increase in the number of all terrain vehicles and four-wheelers. But the land is so big, that even they have to plan for the distances involved.

Almost all of the areas designated as "Wilderness" possess extraordinary natural beauty like the Grand Canyon, and other places where people have traveled from around the world to visit. I would guess that virtually no one travels from Europe or Asia to the western desert. There are no bus loads of Japanese tourists, no French and German campers, no car loads of Chinese. There is just miles and miles of solitude and beautiful empty desert. There are animals. In the picture above, if you look closely, you can see mounds of dirt. These are ancient ant hills scattered across the valley floor. From their size, it is obvious that they are thousands of years old. There are also antelope, actually Pronghorns. They run in small herds across the plains at speeds in excess of thirty miles an hour. If you do not know where and how to look, they are almost invisible.

Now, what are the chances that some environmentalist group is going to throw themselves in front of the bulldozers to protect this desert. The chances are vanishingly small. Why? Because, for all the hand wringing and angst of the environmentalists, they are only really interested in preserving the outstandingly beautiful parts of the land, the Yellowstones and Yosemites, where there are thousands or millions of visitors. But if you really want to have a wilderness experience, you need to go into the western deserts of the world. Then you can really begin to understand the meaning of the word, wilderness.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am certainly in favor of National Parks and Monuments. I certainly recognize the need to "preserve" the physically attractive places of the world from dams and development. But, that isn't the same as wilderness. In hiking across the Grand Canyon, I probably passed thousands of people. In driving out into the western desert, we might pass a few cars on the road. Off the road, you may never see another person.

More later.

Wilderness Incorporated -- the American view of wilderness

The November 2008 Arizona Highways ran an article about the environmentalist, Martin Linton. One of the quotes from the story caught my attention. Linton said, "Nature, where man has not interfered, is always sublime; mankind's interference is always crass and ugly." He also said, "We're the aberration on Earth--humans are what's wrong with the world." Not just anti-development, not just pro-wilderness, but anti-human altogether. Ironically, Linton spent the latter part of his long life, ferrying people down the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. His company, Grand Canyon Dories, advertises: "10,000 Trips, 3,000 Destinations, 126 Countries." The Grand Canyon Trip is from 4 to 19 days and costs from $1,735 to $5,267 per person. See http://whitewater-rafting.gordonsguide.com/grandcanyondories/trips.cfm

So apparently as long as the aberration is willing to pay big bucks, they are welcome in his wilderness. If you don't want to pay that high price for a trip down the river, the current waiting list for private trips has over 8,000 names on it, and the projected wait period is about 15 years. See http://southwestpaddler.com/docs/coloradoaz2.html

The Grand Canyon National Park has about five million visitors each year according to the National Park Service. See http://www.grand.canyon.national-park.com/info.htm The description of the regulations about river trips is pages long and as detailed as a legal contract. See http://www.grand.canyon.national-park.com/river.htm Even though you might hate humans, wilderness is a big business in the United States.

More to come.

Ah wilderness

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) one of the major political philosophers of the Enlightenment is often cited as the creator of the noble savage myth. However, the actual phrase came from John Dryden's The Conquest of Granada, a play first performed in 1670. Briefly, the idea of the noble savage is that man, in his natural state, is good and noble and that he has been corrupted by "civilization." The idea of the noble savage is so pervasive in literature that it has become a significant theme. Just as Rousseau saw civilization as corrupt, this same viewpoint has become a dominant theme among those who would preserve the wilderness.

The title of this post, "Ah, Wilderness" comes from Quatrain XI of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. There was also a Broadway Show of the same name by Eugene O'Neill. Neither of which have anything to do with wilderness. Actually, the translation of the Rubaiyat says "Oh, Wilderness."

It turns out that there are 704 Wilderness Areas in the United States with over 100 million acres of designated land. According to Wilderness.net, over 12 million people visit wilderness each year. In this context, only Federally designated land that is part of the Wilderness Preservation System under the Wilderness Act of 1964 is considered Wilderness (with a capital W). 4.57% of the United States, an area slightly larger than California, is designated as Wilderness. Assuming the government or any one else can actually count the number of people that visit a Wilderness (how do they know how many times I visited the Superstition Wilderness last year, for example) you can compare that to the attendance at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom, 17.1 million visitors in 2007. See http://travel.latimes.com/daily-deal-blog/index.php/socal-amusement-park-1492/

See also http://www.wilderness.net/index.cfm Wilderness.net Just as a note, I searched this site for a photo of "Arizona" and got a picture of the Superstition Mountain from the west. It must be a really old picture because where the photographer is standing is now all subdivisions.

Now, back to the noble savage and his connection to the wilderness (with a small w). It reminds me of the time we were sitting around Thunder Falls, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It was well over 100 degrees in the shade and we were waiting until evening to hike out of the canyon. We had a number of young people with us, including one of my sons, who was under 12. Suddenly, we saw this man run up to the waterfall and start frantically pumping water through a water purifier into a canteen. He was dressed in the best REI attire imaginable down to the expensive hiking shoes. I wandered over to ask him what was going on and he told me that there were a group of people up in the canyon and they had run out of water and he was carrying all the canteens and was going hike back up and rescue them. I pointed out that Thunder River came out of the cliff side about 200 feet away and there was likely no reason to filter the water. He filled the canteens and ran off up the trail. A couple of hours later, the group came stumbling down the trail and literally fell into the creek. They were in terrible shape. Later, when it was cooling off, we left them and began our hike out of the canyon. We had stashed water along the trail on the way in, so we would have enough to make the hike out. On the way out, we reported the unfortunate hikers to the National Park Ranger we met on the trail and he headed their direction.

What is the attraction of the wilderness that will put a group of totally unprepared hikers at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in the middle of the summer without adequate water? Why do 12 million people a year think it necessary to hike, camp, ski, and climb in the wilderness every year? Why do I see hikers in flip-flops or with shoes taped with duct tape hiking out of the Grand Canyon?

Just as Rousseau, who had probably never talked to a native aboriginal person in his life, romanticized the native existence, so too today in a society that has lost contact with nature and either believes that it should be transformed into a more manageable commodity or preserved out of a nostalgic desire to return to a simpler and less commercialized society. In both cases humankind is viewed as something apart from nature, either separated by our responsibility as custodians or our need to preserve "wild places" from the evils of society as a whole. Often, the native indigenous population is seen as an integral part of nature, not exactly human, and therefore also to be preserved in their primeval pristine state.

There is an insightful essay on the issue of wilderness sponsored by the Faculty Resource Laboratory at the University of Connecticut. You can read the article by David R. Klein at:
http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/HistoryCulture/wilderness.html

Although I do not agree with most of the article's historic analysis, I do agree that only a small minority of the American population ever visits a wilderness or a Wilderness. Klein's statement that "[t]he act of offering legal protection for wilderness that is far removed from our everyday lives provides salve for our conscience, perhaps in recognition that we have lacked the will to initiate the major governmental and economic restructuring necessary if we are to move toward sustainability of Western society" is a capsule summary of the entire wilderness issue.

More later

Thoughts on the illusion of wilderness

The theme of wilderness permeates western civilization and its literature. But the concept of a place devoid of human habitation and untouched by human intervention is a highly charged cultural concept that has little relation to the actual existence of such a place in the real world. Many of the early pioneers from the earliest European settlers along the eastern seaboard and westward across the continent had the concept that the area they were entering was a "wilderness" even though it appeared to be inhabited, sometimes heavily, with native American people. Today, it would be difficult, if not impossible to point to an area of the world, other than the continent of Antarctica, that could fall into the classic cultural notion of a wilderness. I have found petroglyphs and other evidence of human habitation in some of the most remote areas in North America, evidence that people have lived in the area for thousands of years.

In the United States we have codified our wildernesses into Federally owned enclaves, designated by law. Some of these areas are as heavily visited as an urban mall, but are still "wilderness" under the law. One night, I was laying awake in the bottom of Pariah Canyon, a norther Arizona slot canyon and an officially designated "wilderness area." I looked into the dark midnight sky and realized that I was watching a series of airplanes fly over. With a little thought I remembered that the main north/south airline routes between Phoenix and Salt Lake City, led right over the canyon. I thought of my wilderness experience, being days on foot from the nearest commercial outpost, but in reality, only a few thousand feet from people sitting in comfort reading or sleeping or talking on a cross country flight. The experience shattered the illusion of wilderness, that I could somehow separate myself from the rest of humanity by merely walking into the desert or mountains.

In the eastern part of the Mesa/Phoenix Metroplex there is a famous range of mountains which are included in the Superstition Wilderness area. Driving along U.S. 60 going east from Mesa, you can look towards the mountains and see them outlined with a line demarking the edge of the "wilderness" next to suburban subdivisions.

I frequently read about someone who moves out into the countryside, to experience the solitude and like a recent article in Arizona Highways magazine, living "off the grid... where the world is more primal and elemental." Arizona Highways, November 2008, page 21. But the fact that we are reading about this person in a major magazine, a person who is usually a contributor, indicates that living in the "wilderness" is simply part of their job, if you will. They define themselves by living at some distance from commercial services to make a point.

Talking about a businessman that just purchased 2.5 million square acres of wilderness in Chile, the news report states: "Doug is intense, driven, obsessive and self-deprecating. He is a curious fusion of Henry David Thoreau and Charles Lindberg with Martha Stewart's eye for detail. But at his core, he is a deeply committed environmentalist." Describing his land the article explains, "In this isolated region with chronic poverty, Doug is creating his own Utopian world -- a South American Walden Pond where natural splendor is complimented by handcrafted beauty. No detail too small: paths made of stone, fences of twigs, signs hand-carved, public campgrounds immaculate. And nine Hobbit-like cabins for visitors. Pumalin isn't just about preserving wilderness, it is about living in harmony with nature."

Wilderness including all the modern conveniences. As the article states: "Suddenly, in this remote mountain valley near the bottom of the earth, we enter a manicured lane way, passing immaculate gardens, glass greenhouses and then, far from everyone and everywhere, a graceful home. This is where Doug Tompkins and his wife, Kristine, live."

See http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/GlobalWarming/story?id=2931202

More about wilderness later.