Remote wilderness areas - or dense forests - have long been places where Mexican marijuana-growing cartels build their growing operations.  Now many of these glorious places have become like toxic chemical dumps.  These so-called “grow sites” range from the West Coast’s Cascade Mountains - to the federal lands of Kentucky - Tennessee and W. Virginia.

Hang on --- over 700 sites have been found on U.S. Forest Service land - in California ALONE - in 2007 and 2008.  What is the hardest hit place?  The 1800 square-mile Sequoia National Forest.  Home of the giant Sequoia - one of the plant wonders of the world.  The cartels bring in weed and bug sprays - many of them banned in the U.S.  They use plant growth hormones to induce the marijuana plants to growth faster and bigger.  Greed is rampant in these practices.  Greed and a complete disregard for plants - animals - and people.  

Water is diverted for miles by PVC pipes to the growing areas.  Rat poison is spread over the ground to keep animals away from the marijuana plants.  Rotting carcusses of deer and bear poached for food by the workers are strewn about these growing “camps.”  

Ron Pugh - a Forest Service agent - said “These are America’s most precious resources - and they’re being devastated by an unprecedented commercial enterprise conducted by armed foreign nationals.  It’s a huge mess.”

Millions of dollars are expended every year to find and rid the forests of marijuana growing operations - but the Fed officials say no money is budgeted to clean up the governmental mess left behind after helicopters carry off the plants.  Cleanup is done by volunteers - yah the same “tree-huggers” that are trying to save what’s left of the forests of America and elsewhere in the world.  

People remain ignorant of what’s going on in their forests.  If an article appears in the paper about abuses in the forests - people shrug it off and go back to thinking about their mortgage payments.  There is simply too many horror stories to track each day.  Shane Krogen - the executive director of the nonprofit High Sierra Trail Crew - said “Helicopters full of dope are like body counts in Vietnam.  What does it really mean?”

Hang on again --- last year law enforcement agents uprooted nearly 5 million plants in California - 500,000 plants in Kentucky - and 276,000 plants in the State of Washington (my state).  

“People light up a joint and they have no idea the amount of environmental damage associated with it” - says Cicely Muldoon - deputy regional director of the Pacific West Region of the National Park Service.

As of 2 Sept 08 - something like 2.2 million plants have been uprooted in California.  482,000 plants in the remote Sierra of Tulare Country.  Rangers found over 20,000 plants growing in Yosemite.  

I’ll leave you with this: 1.5 POUNDS of fertilizers and pesticides are used for every 11.5 plants.  So those who buy and smoke pot are not just smoking marijuana - they’re sucking in some very powerful chemicals.  Eradication efforts touch but a small sample of what’s actually growing in our sacred wildernesses.  

The Fallout From the Industrial Revolution Now Burying the World

In 1952 - the year I graduated from high school - Albert Schweitzer came to Oslo to pick up his Nobel Prize for Peace.  He did something very unusual - he put forth a challenge to the world - a challenge it has not accepted - it has not heard - it seems to have blatantly ignored..."to dare to face the situation....Man has become a superman [in his mind]....But the superman with the superhuman power has not risen to the level of superhuman reason.  To the degree to which his power grows he becomes more and more a poor man....It must shake up our conscience that we become all the more inhuman the more we grow into superman."

How did this happen?  Erich Fromm - who studied under Freud - then broke off like Rank and Adler and Jung - and whom I've read for over 50 years - has much to say about the reasons the Industrial Revolution has failed and why a dark night of fatalism has set in - the kind of fatalism that would allow marijuana growers to destroy an entire wilderness area. 

Fromm says that the Industrial Revolution was based on two wrong psychological principles.  One - that the aim of life is happiness - that is - maximum pleasure - which he defines as "the satisfaction of any desire or subjective need a person may feel (a sort of radical hedonism being authored into existence).  And Two - that egotism - selfishness (Ayn Rand) - and greed - as the system needs to generate them in order to function - lead to harmony and peace.

Fromm points out that the rich throughout history have practice radical hedonism.  The kings and queens and czars and czarinas tried to find a meaning in life in unlimited pleasure.  People ate - threw up - then ate again.  Things were made of solid gold.  Estates were enlarged - then enlarged again and again.  Every kind of pleasure was devised and practiced.  Pleasure was deemed the opposite of struggle - the opposite of pain - the opposite of what the poor experienced. 

The word "profit" - which throughout much of history meant profit of the "soul" - now in the early part of the Industrial age began to mean material profit - monetary profit.  Even Goethe said "Everybody wants to be somebody - nobody wants to grow."  As a middle class began to form - everybody wanted to have things.  They wanted them bad enough to kill for them - as entire countries began to colonize other countries for their booty - their stuff - their material wealth.

For Hobbes - happiness is the continuous progress from one greed to another. 

La Mettrie recommends drugs as giving at least the illusion of happiness.

Da Sade said the satisfaction of cruel impulses is legitimate - simply because they exist and crave satisfaction.

As with so many other aspects of our lives - Man's behavior - revealing his deep insecurities - his self-loathing - his contempt for the Other - is going downhill faster than we can keep up with him.

In my next post - I'll continue on with the theme of radical hedonism and how we're all caught up in it like a variety of fish species in a trawler's net.

I’ve written much on the definitions of “wilderness” and “wildness” and the simple word “wild.”  The culture at large misuses most of these words to describe “wild gangs” (of kids and adults) or “all of them (kids) are wild.”  Once again - the very image of a wild creature is distorted - the actual meaning of these very important words - lost.  

The average person has no idea how the word meanings in his brain affect his behavior - his attitudes - his philosophy - his psychology about life - about the creatures who exist in the last remaining wild places on earth.

Different Faces

The faces on the men who fought in WW2 had a wildness.  A wildness that came from hard physical labor - spending hours in the hot sun - alone.  That has all disappeared - even from the faces of young men who still come from the land: the remaining agrarians in America.  Life has gotten much easier physically as it’s gotten much harder intellectually.  One wonders about the actual toughness of today’s Army.  Most of them - including the officers - look like they’re out of shape.  Their faces are soft.  They know anger - the can swear as well as any generation - but the fierceness that was needed to beat the Japanese and the Third Reich - is completely missing from their faces.  The Japanese and German soldiers of WW2 possessed a fierceness that is missing in the faces of the men in those country's as well. 

Instinct

In the movie Instinct (which stars Anthony Hopkins as a man in Africa trying to understand the gorillas) there is a scene where several prison officials take the Hopkins character to a zoo where a few gorillas live.  The Hopkin's character asks them to look at a big gorilla's face.  “He’s dead,” says the Hopkin’s character.  “All the spirit of life - is gone.”  The fierceness needed to live in the wild was gone because life got soft in the zoo.  His food was brought to him.  A mate was brought in when the zoo wanted breeding to occur.  Clearly the Indians got to know actual wild animals.  Got to revere them.  Included them in their rituals and sacred dances.  In short - picked up the fierceness from them that was needed to survive the toughness of life.

I believe that the wild and the wild creatures who survive there are needed to teach us how to get tougher - not in a way to beat up people - but to endure the ever-increasing difficulties of the modern world (learning a marshal art does not get it done).  Today - many young people stay at home for years after college.  One study said that over 50% of college grads move back into their parent’s home.  Think of that - HALF of them can't face the world.  College grads aren’t prepared intellectually, physically, or psychologically, for the 21st century.  The modern school system - at all levels - is not preparing young people for the world they must face.  It seems that "Most Will Be Left Behind" is a truer slogan.  Mom brings them their food.  Mom does their laundry.  Dad complains about them - but feels superior in some strange satisfying way.  

As more and more people put off taking responsibility for their own lives (this social-symptom is pandemic internationally) - they're own behavior and attitudes - they continue to abuse the natural world.  If they feel like throwing something out of their car while driving down the road - they throw it.  Each year the various states send out crews to pick up things thrown out of cars along the Interstate Highways that corridor through them.  Thousands of tons of every conceivable item is found strewn about for hundreds of miles on both sides of the highway.  But off those well-beaten highways are tens of thousands of roads that remain littered with things.  No one is picking the stuff up.  Animals get to it - eat what is edible - suffer from much of it - and all those people who threw out the stuff remain oblivious to what they’ve done. 

Thoreau's famous statement - made in about 1850 - "In wildness is the preservation of the world" - has taken on an ominous sense as we begin the global cultural wars that many scholars believe will dominate the 21st century.  Since Thoreau's time the population of the world has multiplied over 6 times.  To survive - people are going to have to get dramatically tougher.  Their inner being is going to have to grow fangs (a metaphor for fierceness).  But where can we go and get tougher inside?  Pascal said "All the woes of man are the result of his inability to spend time alone in a quiet room."  People can't stand quiet.  The average person today can't stand to be alone.  They watch TV for hours everyday - as a companion.  Or they're "hanging out" with friends.  The inner makeup of people is wanting - and they know it.  What to do?   When they go to the woods - they go on well-managed trails produced by the Forest Service.  What is needed is to spend time alone in real wild places.  It means saying YES to the fact that we're afraid of things.  To overcome any fear is not easy.  But spending time alone - in quiet wild places - which means no media for long periods of time - not even a radio - is a starting point.  More on this theme in future posts.

People all over the world are dying from cholera - in 2008!  What is cholera?  It’s a bacterium known as Vibrio cholerae (thus "cholera").  It can cause severe diarrhea, vomiting, and leg cramps.  People die because their bodies lose too much fluid, which leads to dehydration and shock.  Without quick treatment, people too often die within hours of becoming infected.

People get cholera by drinking water or by eating food contaminated with the cholera bacterium.  In an epidemic, the source of contamination is usually from the poop of those already infected.  

As you read this post, flooding sewage is causing outbreaks of cholera in many areas of the world.  In the capital of Ethiopia in Northern Africa sewage is accumulating from below Addis Ababa’s skyscrapers - then heading downstream.  Because of flooding, the Kabena river is now full of the city’s human waste (in all its forms), and the stench of it hits the senses like nothing one can describe.  The smell is so all permeating it causes rhinitis (allergy of the nose), sinusitis (allergy of the sinus) and an even a more serious condition called bronchial asthma.

A Sickening Site, A Sickening Situation

In addition to cholera, typhus and many other kinds of parasites - all of which can cause dysentery - are showing up in lab tests.  This is absolute proof that no effective sanitation exists in the entire area. The Ethiopian government - to their credit - will have some 30,000 health workers in the field in 2009 to promote personal hygiene as part of a campaign by the government health department.  The United Nations has declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation.  This has prompted some in the Kechene area to embark on a plan to provide quality drinking water and sanitation facilities.  We do not know what kind of 'facilities' they mean by the phrase “sanitation facilities.”  Often this means merely digging latrines, which do not prevent cholera outbreaks.  So we’ll wait and see what sanitation solutions they'll employ to prevent another outbreak of cholera.  Meanwhile, millions of people continue to suffer and die - many of them children and the elderly with weakened immune systems.

How long will the current epidemic last?

There is absolutely no way to predict how long a cholera epidemic will last.  The last major cholera epidemic in Africa has gone on now for over 30 years.  Soon, from this site, we'll be announcing our own global disaster sanitation solution, along with specific details about how to quickly implement emergency sanitation to disaster victims - within HOURS of an outbreak - whether of cholera or some natural disaster.

In my next post, I’ll report on what governments should and can do cost-effectively to prevent cholera outbreaks, name several famous people who died of cholera, and provide some history on the disease that you might find surprising. 

Please write a comment or send me an email if you found this post interesting.  And thanks for your time.

Several years ago, I decided to attach myself to existence; to try and preserve some part of it.  I chose wilderness.  “Wilderness” was this name given to areas far removed, or at least somewhat far removed, from man’s intrusiveness.  It was a place that ideally had no roads, no buildings, not even outhouses.  It was a place to go to commune with what was left of nature.  The reason to go to such a place was an attempt at renewal; a putting back together that which had been torn loose by modern society.  Wilderness needed protection, badly.  Now the term “wilderness” is used as a metaphor more often than as a place - as I describe above.  Recently, to make the point that some politician wasn’t marching with the current of the times, the newspaper columnist said, “he must have been lost in some wilderness for the last 10 years.”

As these words - like wilderness - get watered down, misused, overused - they lose their meaning and thus have no meaning.  The philosopher Heidegger saw in Western man a lethal attitude - which he saw coming from their metaphysics and religions - that gave them some sort of permission to tame the jungles, cut down wilderness, build roads through it if they felt like it, conquer and subjugate peoples, and in general dissipate anything naturally beautiful - if it was in their interests.  They got from their religions the notion that they could remake nature in their own image - if they simply felt like it.  They, man, Western man in particular, was the highest life-form on earth because “God” gave it to them to “cultivate” - meaning to plow under or cut down or simply plunder - if that would benefit them in some way.  

And so when we drive the roads of Oregon and Washington there is this little thin strip of trees lining the roads, but walk just a hundred feet or so into those trees and suddenly you walk into a sea of stumps.  They’ve cut a swath from Portland to the coast of the Pacific Ocean (I have no objection to logging.  My objection is to over-logging.  Read my post Overstory: Zero).  There's a stench to that form of hypocrisy.  But apparently the people are satisfied with their little strips of trees on both sides of the road, for the forest activists who truly care, who are protectively attached to existence, are a small and poorly financed bunch at best.

Heidegger proposed the philosophy of letting things be, especially the natural things.  But he meant that notion for people as well.  There's a tinge of anarchy in both Nietzsche and Heidegger, and perhaps one day if enough people tire of poor government, an anarchical society may spring up.  At that time we'll discover whether it could work or not.  One thing is certain, everyone would suddenly be involved in the political process).  Still, society restricts and demands conformity as it always has.  The notion of individuality is still in seed form in America - allegedly the most advanced democracy on the planet.  As George Kateb puts it, “Human beings must learn to stop forcing or projecting or imposing themselves on otherness, rather they must preserve it, guard it, shepherd it.”

Americans are now suffering $4 a gallon gasoline and griping about it like little children who’ve had a toy taken away.  Few realize that Europeans have had to pay $6 or more for gasoline for years.  Like the forest wilderness, man seems to have to use things up before embarking on a real program to find a substitute (this single universal trait may prove more lethal than all the nuclear bombs combined).  But like almost every other breakthrough in the world of science or technology, it will come from some individual who has made great personal sacrifices to pursue an idea.  Some person who has, as Heidegger said 'died' to the world, and so is able to be in the world and not in some “fantastic simulacrum of it (Kateb).”  

The one’s who exist within their own ideas, must out of necessity, be no part of the world, that is they must not be a social being.  Why?  Because to be a social being is to be coerced into certain patterns of behavior.  All social beings' time is taken up with social affairs.  The ones who insist on attaching themselves to some protective pursuit must resist such coercion or fail to find the solution that protects that which attaches them to existence.  Everyone who has brought forth an idea that was truly transformational (Edison, Frick, Salk, etc.) was an antisocial being.  They're only attached to the world in some way, some particular way, that makes them want to preserve existence, even though they realize it's a precarious existence at best.  They must live to be protective of something.  That is the only philosophy that allows them to live in the world.  And that notion is what drives them to greater and greater sacrifice to bring forth the solutions that protect that which attaches them to existence in the first place.  

It doesn’t mean that the “horror and obscenities” (Kateb) don’t still crowd around them.  These ones today are fully aware of the impending war between Israel and Iran (which makes each day uneasy, but doesn’t deter them from their protective goals).  No one mind can fathom the horror of such a conflict - even if it doesn’t turn nuclear.  But in this horror-filled potential these ones continue to work positively and fruitfully to protect that which attaches them to existence, even as the fate of the earth remains precarious at best.  As that genius Wallace Stevens said in his poem “On the Road Home:”

    In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
    The world must be measured by eye.

As Kateb teaches, both Nietzsche and Heidegger were individualists.  They’re “individualists in the sense that they locate the highest human possibility in a philosophical relation to existence...If one is philosophical and also nonsocial and antisocial, one is therefore an individual.  Only socially detached individuals can care about existence as such, though they must act with others.

I believe MAN is the saddest creature on Earth.  Why?  No other creature works so hard to destroy itself.  MAN rarely thinks his own thoughts, which is a potential mental capacity he lets atrophy.  He thinks other’s thoughts.  He rarely tries to see things all-the-way-through in an effort to learn the consequences for his actions.  He rarely learns from his mistakes, and so he continues to repeat them, and has done so for millennia.  He rarely tries to educate himself about the world in order to perceive the world through his own eyes, and so he can only perceive the world through other’s eyes.  And all the while he thinks of himself as a free soul.  The delusion is complete.

Specie after specie of animals and plants die off around him and he hardly notices.  He learns about these extinctions - many of which may, according to many biological scientists, contain medical properties he's currently ignorant about - second hand via the evening news.  Like learning about the polar bear being added to the endangered specie list.  “Hey Marge, what do make a that?”  “I don’t know.  Something about melting ice or something.”

Seeing the Polar Bear Before They’re Extinct

Only a day or two into the notice that the Bush Administration has decided to put the polar bear on the endangered species list, the tourists are lining up to see them.  "People want to see them while they are still there," said Frank Cregor of Tennessee-based Cregor Adventures.  "For companies like us, it's a sad thing, but it's almost free advertising.  The tours truly sell themselves."

Cregor books trips to the little town of Churchill in Manitoba.  He’s sold twice as many trips this year as last year.  "We have a huge number of clients from Great Britain and Australia, likely due to the [weak] dollar," says Cregpr.  They’re flocking to Churchill, a town about six blocks long, to see the bears.  They get in the buggies and peer at the animals through specially designed safety windows - without even so much as setting foot on the tundra.

The polar bears try to ignore the buggies and the human oglers inside.  They hunt their seals, eat, and sleep.  I can’t help wondering what they may think about these sad beings who just paid 7 grand apiece to come all the way to Manitoba to see them kill, eat, and sleep.  There are other companies running tours to Spitsbergen, Norway.  But you can’t get as close to the bears as you can in Manitoba.  There you can even see mothers protecting their cubs.  In Norway you can only see them from boats, and you’re not guaranteed you’ll get a “good sighting.”  Yet the tourists still come - and stare and stare and stare.

I leave you with a William Stafford poem titled Roll Call:

Red Wolf came, and Passenger Pigeon,
the Dodo Bird, all the gone or endangered
came and crowded around in a circle, the Bison, the Irish Elk,
waited silent, the Great White Bear, fluid and strong,
sliding from the sea, streaming and creeping
in the gathering darkness, nose down, bowing to earth
its tapered head, where the Black-footed Ferret, paws folded,
stood in the center surveying the multitude
and spoke for us all: “Dearly beloved,” it said.

The polar bear was recently put on the endangered species list.  H. J. Hebert of the AP writes, “It’s not about saving the polar bear as much as the polar bear saving us.  The Arctic bear - facing extinction because of global warming - is bringing home the consequences of cheap energy and - until recently - the need for little sacrifice.

Soon, and according to T. Boone Pickens of Mesa Petroleum it may be very soon, the West is going to have to start making severe changes in its behavior toward energy.  It may entail rationing, even severe rationing.  Higher electricity and transportation costs, which includes the shipping costs of nearly everything, are going to really impact the average person.  The Bush administration, which has mostly ignored the threat of global warming, just listed the polar bear as endangered, but with a list of provisions according to Hebert:

“’This listing should not open the door... to regulating greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, power plants and other sources.’  There is a reason for that.  Business fears the polar bear.”  The administration doesn’t want to connect any business activity with the listing of the polar bear as endangered.  It apparently became endangered on its own - after hundreds of thousands of years of just doing fine.

But no Texas power plant, or melting sea ice, or oil drilling, has anything to do with it.  Environmentalists are going to file lawsuits against all the business-favoring aspects of the listing of the bear.  All three of the candidates running for the presidency agree that mandatory restrictions on greenhouse gases are essential.  

Here’s the interesting part of the polar bear being listed as endangered according to Hebert: “The massive and powerful furry creature that lumbers across the Arctic ice may accomplish what 20 years of environmental activism has not done: force the issue that global warming already is having an effect and there is a price for both action and inaction.

“This ‘puts a face on it, a polar bear face,’ said Bob Corell, director of the global change program at the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment.”  While prominent scientists have talked about the visible damage from global warming, etc., the face of the polar bear and its possible extinction - when tied to the issue of global warming - creates a whole new public dynamic.

Hebert quotes Steven E. Sanderson, president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, “’The animal is big, it’s charismatic, and it’s powerful.  It’s beautiful and it (perhaps most importantly) generates sympathy.  If it blinks out, you’ll notice.’”

I have a picture of a polar bear on the Home Page of this site.  The polar bear and the gorilla are my favorite animals on the planet.  Now both are endangered.  Both may become extinct - like the dinosaurs of old.  The estimate is that there are only about 25,000 polar bears left.  There are no polar bears in Antarctica.  They roam from Alaska to Greenland only, and there’s already a great deal of inertia built into the warming changes taking place across the continent.  Let’s hope their face on the issue of global warming will force leaders toward a truly serious dialogue about it - and that some serious action steps will be taken in an attempt to stall its overall effects on the Earth and all the creatures who live here.

In my next post i’ll write about the endangered polar bear and tourism.  Now that the polar bear is on the endangered list, tourism to see them - perhaps before they’re gone forever - is on the rise.  Man is surely a strange creature.

We are now nearly 8-years from the 2000 election.  Remember the “hanging chads?”  It was a badly designed ballot, something that fourth-graders could have designed better, that produced the election fiasco in Florida.  Yet as we approach the 2008 presidential election, we still have badly designed ballots, which assures that yet another election will become a fiasco.

Lawrence Norden, of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school, is quoted by Deborah Hastings of the Associated Press as saying “...We still have not systematically addressed the need for good ballot design standards.  We’ve spent billions of dollars on overhauling election administration in this country, but we’re still seeing the same ballot design mistakes in almost every federal election.”

Hastings writes, “There are no federal laws concerning ballot design.  Some states have guidelines, others don’t.  Largely, ballots are designed by local election officials, who number more than 5,500.  On Election Day, that means there will be the same number of ballots across the country, all with different designs.”

There has already been all sorts of confusion and controversy in state after state during the recent primaries.  People complained that some ballots containing delegate choices were hard to read and could be easily overlooked.  In Ohio, people got upset when poll workers insisted they remove a perforated ballot stub, which was used as an accounting device, on which, as Hasting’s writes, “was clearly printed ‘Do Not Remove.’”  Thousands of voters feared their ballot would not be counted.  Bad design plagues mankind.

The Packit Toilet, An Example of Good Design

We take great pride in the fact that what we say the Packit Toilet will do, it does, and exactly as we say it does.  We worked very hard to make it as intuitive to use as possible (the same for the Digger).  We have a label that has images showing how to assemble it, but even small children, 6 and 7-year olds, ‘figure it out’ by themselves.  Even though they’ve never seen the Packit Toilet before, it only takes them a few minutes to set it up, insert a waste bag, and use it without incident.

Good design is the result of taking all sorts of things into consideration.  Who is going to be using the product?  Where are they going to be using it?  What are their ages, nationalities, gender, etc?  For example, the typical home toilet is some 65 pounds of porcelain bolted to the floor.  It’s usually about 15 and a half inches off the floor, which is fine for most adults.  But it’s not fine for most small children.  They can’t touch the floor with their feet for balance.  This produces all sorts of problems.  Many children lose their balance and fall off - in too many cases causing injury.

We did a lot of research to determine how high the Packit Toilet should be to accommodate the most people - including most children - safely.  A child of 3 can sit alone on the Packit Toilet and touch the ground (even some 2-years olds).  Yet a 6 foot 4 inch person can sit on it and not feel awkward.  We learned that 14 and a half inches was the perfect height for an ultralight toilet that required people of varying sizes and ages to balance themselves with their feet while eliminating their body wastes.  Our customers - young and old - agree.

Without meaning to be arrogant, we have 3 suggestions for ballot designers.  1)  Leave some space between the delegate’s names.  Space allows even a person with poor eyesight to create separation between the choices.  2) Print the names larger than the accompanying text, and with a bold easy-to-read typeface.  3) Ask 8 and 9-year old children if they understand the ballot - before getting them printed for the general voters.  Children will tell you if you have a good design or not.  If they don’t like it, the adult [children] who are voting won’t like it either. 

In my last post I showed how language often fails us; how often word definitions remain vague, cloudy - even after digging into their roots, prefixes and suffixes.  The whole notion of marine “wilderness” is even more cloudy.

Anyone who has been to the edge of an ocean experiences the sense of vastness - the sense of size and scope compared to oneself.  Hundreds of poets use the ocean as a metaphor for danger.  The ocean is flat out inhospitable, deserted, mysterious, always threatening, and contains all sorts of creatures that can kill you or bring you harm.  

The phrase “untrammeled by man,” un-ruined, a place where man is but a visitor, applies and yet doesn’t apply to the ocean.  Everyday, tens of thousands of ships ply the sea, often throwing waste overboard - even when maritime law tells them not to.  Offshore oil and gas development goes on daily - again spewing waste into the oceanic environment.  Commercial and domestic fishing continues to mine the seas and the seashores.  So the notion of an area “untrammeled by man” simply doesn’t apply.

I personally do not see the oceans as “wilderness” areas.  Many marine writers - in trying to draw attention to the damage being done to the oceans - slip in the word “wilderness” to draw attention to it.  But the oceans are not “wilderness” areas.  Wildernesses must remain those few remaining places where man is but a temporary visitor.  He doesn’t ply them; he doesn’t work them; he doesn’t use them in order to survive - except perhaps as a psychological tool.

However, if marine scientists, marine writers, get some benefit out of calling parts of the oceans “wilderness,” so be it.  There are many parts of the ocean now designated “a protected area.”  After the Great Barrier Reef in Australia was declared “a protected marine park,” it almost immediately started to improve.   Now we have the Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve.  Some 340,000 sq. km, second only to the Great Barrier Reef, Man is actually beginning the process of helping these important ecosystems recover from human abuses.  

Millions of pounds of debris have been removed.  From old fishing nets, plastic things of every description, which of course merely treat the outward manifestations of human ignorance.  Some of these places are the last refuge for many marine species, some of which are not only endangered, but on the verge of extinction.  The entire population of Hawaiian monk seals is found in the new reserve.  It also contains 65% of all coral reefs in U.S. waters.  Under the Wilderness Act, agencies are required to conduct an analysis of whether a given activity is appropriate and is so how it can be done with minimum impact on the “wilderness” qualities of the area.  

Although I don’t consider any part of the ocean “wilderness,” if the Wilderness Act helps those who are working to protect and preserve the various habitats and environments critical to the survival of sea life, I’ll put up with the use of the term until something that makes more sense - communicates the actual meaning of ocean habitats and environments - comes along.

Words in the English language are usually made up of a root word, then prefixes and suffixes are added to expand their use and meaning.  The word “wilderness” is a strange word.  It has two suffixes in a row - “er” and “ness.”  No one knows why.

The suffix “er” means someone or something that performs or undergoes a particular action - like adjuster, or flyer.  The suffix “ness” means state, condition, degree, even a strip of land near water.  None of this helps us learn the meaning of the word “wilderness.”  “Wilderness” seems to be one of those words like “happiness” “worthiness” and “emptiness” that become more abstract concepts when the suffix “ness” is added.

“Wilderness” - in the public's perception - seems to have little to do with people.  Although the public's perception is that human actions toward "wilderness" are often harmful.  It’s only associated with people by the extension that people enter it and use it in various ways.  “They logged part of the (such and such) wilderness.”  “A child was lost in the (such and such) wilderness.”  "People hike and camp in the (such and such) wilderness."

The word “wild” - in itself - is very interesting and completely unwieldy.  What follows is just some of the uses, intended uses, and clearly stretched uses for the word "wild" (from Crossing Boundaries in Park Management: Proceedings of the 11th Conference on Research and Resource Management in Parks and on Public Lands, edited by David Harmon):

•  marked by extreme lack of restraint or control; "wild talk;" "wild parties."
•  in a natural state; not tamed or domesticated or cultivated; "wild geese;” "edible wild plants."
•  in a state of extreme emotion; "wild with anger;" "wild with grief."
•  deviating widely from an intended course; "a wild bullet;" "he threw a wild pitch."
•  violent: (of colors or sounds) intensely vivid or loud; "a violent clash of colors;" "her dress was a violent red;" "a violent noise;" "wild colors,” "wild shouts."
•  baseless: without a basis in reason or fact; "baseless gossip;" "the allegations proved groundless;" "idle fears;" "unfounded suspicions;" "unwarranted jealousy."
•  raving: talking or behaving irrationally; "a raving lunatic."
•  hazardous: involving risk or danger; "skydiving is a hazardous sport;" "extremely risky going out in the tide and fog;" "a wild financial scheme."
•  fantastic: extravagantly fanciful and unrealistic; foolish; "a fantastic idea of his own importance."
•  desert: located in a dismal or remote area; desolate; "a desert island;" "a godforsaken wilderness crossroads;" "a wild stretch of land;" "waste places" (unfortunately people take this literally).
•  crazy: intensely enthusiastic about or preoccupied with; "crazy about cars and racing."
•  barbarian: without civilizing influences; "barbarian invaders"; "barbaric practices;" "a savage people;" "fighting is     crude and uncivilized especially if the weapons are efficient" - Margaret Meade (anthropologist); "wild tribes."
•  a wild primitive state untouched by civilization; "he lived in the wild;" "they collected mushrooms in the wild."
•  rampantly: in an uncontrolled and rampant manner; "weeds grew rampantly around here."
•  angry: (of the elements) as if showing violent anger; "angry clouds on the horizon;" "furious winds;" "the raging sea."
•  in a wild or undomesticated manner; "growing wild"; "roaming wild"
•  wilderness: a wild and uninhabited area left in its natural condition; "it was a wilderness preserved for the hawks and mountaineers." 

Now when you use the word “wild” or “wilderness” - what are you trying to say?  Language fails us daily.  It fails to get us close to the meaning or meanings we’re trying to convey - to carry over.  So the media often uses images.  We see pictures of waterfalls, deer in a meadow, vast spaces of forest, etc., and the purpose is to convey the idea of “wilderness.”  In my experience, very little is conveyed.  There's a sort of "huh" that goes on in the mind, but not much more.  Conservationists tear their hair out trying to talk about “wilderness” issues - and fail.  So what are we to do?

Roderick Nash, whom I’ve written about in this blog, is a “wilderness” historian.  He says the word “wilderness” conveys both positive and negative connotations or meanings.  A “wilderness” can be at once inhospitable, alien, mysterious, and often threatening, as well as breathtakingly beautiful, friendly, and capable of ecstatic elevating and delightful experiences. 

Again, the definition of “wilderness” is too often vague.  The definition I like and the one I believe ALL of us should embrace and use - including the global media - comes from The Wilderness Act of 1964.  Some of the wording in the Act comes from the famous Wallace Stegner letter of 1960.  The Act defines “wilderness” this way: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

Granted, much of the definition still seems abstract and contrary, lacks the blatant clarity we might all wish, but the key defining phrase of this definition is: “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man...”  Simply put, man destroys the wild places.  Man is a waste maker extraordinaire.  I believe the only way we're going to make progress is to continue to suggest meanings for words that the public can accept and use - and then to continue to write about the issues.  At Ultralight Wilderness Toilet we go one step farther, we offer a personal toilet kit that fits in a backpack, is easy to use, and when enough people use it, they make a significant difference in the overall health of the wild places or "wilderness."

So what then is a marine wilderness?  In my next post I’ll probe that whole sphere of our environment and perhaps we can find some definition that makes sense and can be widely used in order to help preserve and protect the oceans.

The ad industry is ruining the world.  It began innocent enough - serving as a means to inform people of new products, etc.  Catalogs - such as the famous Sear’s catalog - were packed end-to-end with stuff.  Everything from washing and sewing machines and tractors and every imaginable small tool, seeds, clothing, etc., etc.  Then came radio ads, newspaper ads, magazine ads, as well as every sort of mailed piece the mind could imagine. 

Then something happened: markets got "mature" when suddenly everybody had all the necessities.  The ad industry had to either morph into something else, take on a totally new role, or shrink into oblivion.

Enter the new ad techniques for getting people to want things they don’t need.  Enter planned obsolescence.  Cars that barely made it to 60,000 miles (which philosophy began the end of the American auto industry).  Clothing that lasted for a few washings and then come apart.  The idea was to accelerate the replacement time frame and thus accelerate the consumption cycle.  Time to go to the mall and get more new stuff to replace the old stuff that didn't last very long.  And so was born “the consumer society,” and “the consumer economy,” as they exist today.  Either people consume stuff they don’t need, extra stuff, or the economy tanks. 

Soon other nations, notably the Japanese, stepped into the vacuum of "un-quality" and began offering quality in the form of dependability and durability.  And as they say: "the rest is history."  Simply put, the ad industry created dozens of new social conventions based on stuff people don't really need, but can be easily influenced to want: fashion, entertainment, cosmetics, transportation, travel, etc.

The completely irrational life style that has emerged via irrational advertising (television and cable television can only survive via this form of advertising), requires the use of vast sums of Earth's un-renewable resources.  It can’t be sustained and the ups and downs of the global economy over the last 30 years is all the proof anyone should need.  Now China is growing its new "capitalist" economy by pouring mostly cheaply made products into America and other countries via streaming boatloads full of containers. 

Meanwhile, the American economy, the one based on endless consumption, has reached its limit.  Many economic scholars write that America peaked in 1979.  That America is now and has been in a downward spiral since that time is manifest by the complete uncertainty of its stock markets, the unrelenting global unrest America's fading economy produces, the flood of jobs leaving for other soils, and the massive debt both Americans as individuals and the U.S. Government now support.  In short, the finite resources of the Earth are in rapid decline and thus can no longer sustain the faux lifestyles of the West and the rising East with their continuous, unrelenting, consumption.

A Tired Earth

Many scientists have written that the Earth is tired.  That many parts of the Earth need to be left alone for a few “decades” (in many areas they recommend centuries) in order to recover.  That deserts are increasing at an unprecedented rate, while ordinary forests and rain forests have been harvested to a tipping point.  With all the bad news floating around out there, the average person simply ignores it and blunders on.  Still, there is a strange foreboding in the air.  Different.  A sense that things are really out of control, even as the politicians in the current election cycle make claims to be able to make things better.

I’ve written much about the state of wilderness, back country, and parks.  Cutbacks in personnel in ALL the government agencies that are charged with protecting these few remaining wild places have produced an impossible situation.  A single ranger responsible for ten thousand square miles can’t police his or her territory enough to make a difference.  And so people continue to use the wild places as a dumping ground for everything they can no longer store in their houses, apartments, garages, and rental storage spaces.  

Rational Advertising

Billions of dollars each year are spent to get you and I to want more and more stuff.  When we see an ad that has a rational purpose, we recognize the difference immediately.  There’s a sense of honesty and helpfulness about a public service announcement, for example.  Yet even the so-called conservationist journals and much of their advertising seems a bit strange.  Often, there just as one-sided as the people who want us to buy things we don’t need.

What is there to do?  Here at Ultralight Wilderness Toilet we've taken on a single problem and offer up a simple, yet practical, solution.  The problem is people pooping on the ground and leaving it there.  Our solution is a personal lightweight toilet kit that makes it easy to deal with one's own poop and toilet paper while using the wild places and parks.  Our Packit Toilet kit makes that not only easy but affordable. 

We’ve tried and will continue to try to get people to see that it’s in their own self-interest to take responsibility for their own body wastes when using these remaining sanctuaries from the effects of civilization.  If not, there won’t be any place to go that isn’t ruined by man's incessant and uncontrollable negligence.  Random polluting, damaging soil with APVs, and leaving every sort of garbage on the ground for the next guy to deal with, is only correctable through a rational ad campaign that starts the process of creating a new social convention that is opposed to such behavior.

Rational advertising is the only way we can get numbers of people to get the sense of what’s actually going on in these places that everyone enjoys.  We have to show people images of the results of people’s negative attitude against these truly sacred places.