There are few things that bring me more peace than the sight of a deserted trail stretching in front of me. Every step I take out onto it becomes such an intimate thing--a soft, hushed application of my weight, muted to silence by the awe of sprawling life all around me. I cross the bridge, emerge from the first canopy and breathe in the vast, open expanse of field beyond, and suddenly it's as though the teeming acquirocracy I left only minutes before no longer exists, and never did.

Then there's thudding breath, a beat of footfalls, entwining muscles clenching and releasing, body chemicals coursing, rushing, stories and songs rolling through my head, struggle and freedom at the same time.

Occasionally I crouch and pluck a fat, squirming worm from its spot in the dusty, gravelly trail—the poor inchoate sensor having stranded itself in the powdery suffocation from which it wouldn't escape—and place it gently down on a nearby spot of bare, damp, cool ground. Then I straighten up and go back to the joyous struggle.

At the end, I almost don't but then do pick up some cast-off filth from near my car—the random debris that only careless humans can create, the kind that poisons while being made and poisons after being discarded. And only because of that extra few seconds' work am I still there when you arrive, and though I came for silent, solitary meditation, I am glad to see you and speaking with you makes me happy. And I leave thinking that somewhere in these few simple moments is most everything I need to know about life. I know I'll forget it soon. And remember it again sometime after that. And so it goes.

Labels: Ruminations, Running

Good news for our national forests: this past Friday a federal judge threw out new rules enacted by the Bush administration that would have allowed commercial use of forests without lengthy environmental reviews.

According to this story, "when government officials announced in December 2004 the first new rules since the 1970s, they said changes would allow forest managers to respond more quickly to wildfires and other threats such as invasive species."

But this looks like little more than a smoke screen for what amounts to a federal subsidy for logging and mining industries--in other words, corporate welfare for industries which are rapidly burning through their supply of private lands to use as fuel. This is only one example of such corporate welfare, used to prop up inherently unsustainable industries for the sake of an artificial standard of economic growth.

With real agriculture and manufacturing capacity on a long and steady decline in this country, we're trading an economic focus on industries that could keep us competitive in the international arena for short-sighted, destructive, polluting industries like coal, timber, and oil, which will only drain our resources, pollute our ecology, and turn us further into consumers--rather than producers--than we already are. Add this to our already astounding trade deficits, and it doesn't paint a pretty picture for the economic future.

As I see it, this attempt at a rule change by the Bush administration is also part of a larger effort to turn over our public resources to private interests. Bush has drastically cut funding for our national land management, requiring huge cuts in national park budgets and staffing, and forcing our national lands to rely more on private oversight, with the expected disastrous results.

This ideological distortion of the purpose and protection of our public lands shames me as a citizen and someone who cares about the natural world, and it makes me further ashamed of the President. But if you're in favor of government-approved books that claim the Grand Canyon is 6,000 years old and was created by Noah's flood, then maybe this all makes sense somehow.

For more on the state of our public forest lands, efforts by the Bush administration to undermine their protection, and citizen efforts to defend them, see the American Lands Alliance. (Note: the image above is from an ALA mailer I received a while back.)

Labels: Environment, Politics