Is There Anything More Beautiful

Anne Frank, Barry Lopez, and the need to preserve our natural world

According to The Writer’s Almanac, on this day in 1944, three months before Anne Frank and her family were found and arrested, she wrote in her diary,

"Is there anything more beautiful in the world than to sit before an open window and enjoy nature, to listen to the birds singing, feel the sun on your cheeks and have a darling boy in your arms?"

I think she may be right.

I live in an area where residents enjoy our surroundings by doing something in it: hiking, biking, fishing, skiing, and more. I’m not one of those people. Almost two decades ago, upon moving to the Wood River Valley of Idaho, I was introduced to Barry Lopez, an essayist who wrote about nature and humanity’s complex relationship with it. Perhaps it was in his book, Arctic Dreams, or in some essay that I can no longer find, that he described sitting by the river and doing nothing. Nothing but sitting. He did not need to be doing something to enjoy nature. Rather, sitting and watching and listening to the river was enough. It is more than enough.

“Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colors of the dawn and dusk.”
― Barry López, Arctic Dreams

The Washington Post reported today that 245 million acres of public land, managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will be leased for conservation through the auction of “restoration leases” and “mitigation leases.” This is huge. Until now, only oil and gas companies, as well as ranchers, have leased this land for absurdly low fees while causing tremendous damage to land that has led to increased wildfires and the destruction of wildlife habitat.

Of course, we can expect this new rule to be challenged in the courts. Such opposition, however, is, well, a bit like a toddler’s temper tantrum when we know that the past 10 months have been the hottest on record - all across the planet. Yes, we’ve had decades of denying climate change driven by largely by the consumption of fossil fuels. But now, really, this isn’t just an inconvenient truth or the 11th hour, (both films worth watching), this appears to be a fundamental shift that will forever change our planet’s ecosystems.

Also reported this week is how coral reefs in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans (including at least 53 countries and local regions) are experiencing mass bleaching. Rising temperatures are heating the oceans and causing the coral reefs to starve. Reefs are living ecosystems. When they starve, so do 4,000 species of fish—25% of all marine life. In this context, opening up one-tenth of publicly held land in the U.S. to restoration and mitigation leases doesn’t seem terribly radical, does it?

“At the heart of this story, I think, is a simple, abiding belief: it is possible to live wisely on the land, and to live well. And in behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.” ― Barry López, Arctic Dreams

Two weeks ago, while returning from an appointment with an ENT specialist two hours away that did not go as planned, leaving me with pain in my right ear and a loss of hearing and tears that I could not keep from falling, I couldn’t help noticing the beauty of the landscape through which we were driving. I still have my sight, I thought, and I do.

And, for the moment, we still have this beauty.

Here is some of the landscape I was seeing and have been lucky to enjoy in the last two weeks:

all photos by Jan Peppler

“Only the misled can insist that heaven awaits the righteous while they watch the fires on Earth consume the only heaven we have ever known.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays