Wilderness museums

Abstraction, nature and art

Art in the contemporary world is an almost sacred practice that for many supplants the place of religious participation. Art-making is how we make meaning. Why are we here? What is our purpose? What is the meaning of life?

Take these questions and meditate on them through an artistic medium and you are an artist engaged in the discovery of meaning for oneself and for the world.

Institutions for sorting, presenting, organizing, and preserving works of art emerged out of educational institutions and become autonomous, funded through public grants and private donations. Many museums, galleries, and private collections function apart from any broader educational structure.

Governments and wealthy patrons are the primary funders of the museums and galleries open to the public. Education systems too are now severed from their birthplace within religious organizations. While religious schools remain an important part of the scholastic landscape, public and private schools both function autonomously from the religious understanding from which they came.

Historically, art-making was embedded within human culture and tradition, fully integrated into cultural and religious systems. Generally, no art was made for the sake of art.

For example, for the Indians of California, the crafting of objects that we now consider collectable art works, such as baskets, jewelry and textiles, were mostly used to support daily life. The art of living and the crafting of objects were fully integrated. A beautifully made object was a useful and well crafted object. Clothing, jewelry, basketry, drawing, and painting, were all fully integrated with a theological understanding of the world and the human place within the world.

Beautiful craftsmanship reflected the participatory integrated vision of humanity that the Native peoples lived. Their craftsmanship of objects extended far beyond the mere making of the object itself. Take basket making for example. Making a basket required much work over many years of tending and active management of the landscape to produce reliably harvestable material. To engage in basket making, was to engage in a fully integrated skillful management of land and plant life alongside the skill of assembling and weaving a robust, useful basket that was also beautiful.

Textiles, tooling, hunting, fishing, home making all were part of a way of living that integrated skillful management. This tending and management of the landscape for the purpose of supporting human life, and the life of the earth, flora and fauna, resulted in a world of great beauty.

Our current official understanding of wilderness takes none of this pre-historic human participation with the natural world, that is well documented and recorded by history, into account:

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his 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. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value. - THE WILDERNESS ACT, 1964, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson

This legal understanding of wilderness utterly denies the testimony of Native Peoples in California and beyond.

Tom Little Bear Nason, Chief of the Esselen Tribe of Monterey suggests an entirely different vision of the landscapes of North America:

It's sometimes difficult for me to talk about the loss of ancient forests in Big Sur, products of thousands of years of care by my People, all occurring in my lifetime, on my watch. The Ancestors cannot be pleased. I have seen old-growth ponderosa pines, incense cedars, Douglas firs, and Santa Lucia firs disappear from whole valleys because of damaging wildfires. My grandfather and my father warned the Forest Service repeatedly that this would happen unless fire was returned to the land.

You would think that after so many firestorms raging through Big Sur in recent decades, and all the lost homes and forests, that our community would try a different approach, one that is more open to fire, working with fire not against it. But fire is still being suppressed throughout most of our region. Between the many locals that understand the importance of healthy fire but don't have the means or knowledge to put fire back on their lands, to those who hold onto the wilderness ideology that any intervention by humans is a crime against nature, who is left to take the lead?

Looking into the canopies of old-growth Redwood is a spiritual experience. To consider that these forests are the work of human hands that respected and loved the natural world and respected and loved the human as well is to reject the official, legally defined notion of wilderness.

For centuries, religious understandings and religious institutions guided education and artistic endeavors as part of an integrated social order.

Now, we have museums where art objects sit behind glass, no longer objects that humans use to support life.

Art-making is separate from supporting life. Now art-making is meaning making rather than a fully integrated practive of the human endeavor to support human life and the life of the world.

Now we support the needs of sustaining human life in ways that are separate from beauty, separated by the abstractions of modern life and contemporary mechanization.

Last weekend I was walking along a riparian corridor and noticed a few tiger lily flowers. I stopped to take a picture.

I saw something beautiful and stopped to capture that beauty and share it with others.

For the people that lived in and tended to the Santa Lucia Mountains, this flower represented far more than simply an object of beauty. The bulb of the tiger lily were food. For Native Peoples, cultivating thriving beds of tiger lily was a way to support the life of the human. The beauty of the flower is something we share with people going back thousands of years. But the full value of this plant to regular people is largely lost.

With The Wilderness Act, the riparian corridor I walked is to be preserved as if it were a museum. Simply keep it safe and bounded and protected from the heavy hand of humanity and it will thrive and be preserved for generations to come.

The ancestors of the Native Peoples of this land know different. The beauty of the landscape and the utility of the landscape exist in concert. The Native Peoples created harmonies of soil and flora, forest and fauna. These harmonized landscapes we call pristine untouched wilderness but they called home.

The hands of the Native People and the wisdom they lived resulted in a landscape that was hospitable to the human. This is changing.

As carbon is released into the atmosphere because of human mechanization, the flora grow stronger. And with the current approach to wild fire, and the avoidance of ancient peoples practice of prescribed fire, the flora of the understory grows each year. And grove by grove, all over California, the old-growth dies in flames, fueled by an unchecked understory.

The wilderness designated areas are museums of nature that are being plundered by fire through mismanagement and misunderstanding. Logging removed most of the old-growth. Now, fire will consume what’s left unless significant changes in forest management occur.