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The conservation movement is, at the very least, an assertion that these interactions between man and land are too important to be left to chance, even that sacred variety of chance known as economic law. -Aldo Leopold

We live surrounded by scars and loss. Each of us carries around a list of particular offenes against our place: a clear-cut, an overgrazed meadow, a road, a dam. Some we grudgingly accept as necessary, others we judge mistakes. The mistakes haunt us like demons, the demons spawn avenging spirits, and the presence of demons and spirits helps make a place our home. It is not accidental that "home" and "haunt" share deep roots in Old English, that we speak of the home of an animal as its haunt, or that "haunt" can mean both a place of regular habitation and a place marked by the presence of spirits. Like scars, the spirits are reminders-traces by which the past remains present.

Forty years ago big cutthroats cruised the Gros Ventre River of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Now, in late summer, dust blows up the river bed. It's as dry as an arroyo in Death Valley, a dead river drained by ranchers. Each autumn much of Jackson Lake, the jewel of Grand Teton National Park, is a mud flat baking in the sun, its waters drained to irrigate potatoes. Without good snowfalls each winter the lake could disappear and with it the big browns, and with those browns, Gerard Manley Hopkins" "rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim."' The western border of Yellow-stone National Park can be seen from outer space, a straight line cut through a once fine forest by decades of clearcutting. From the summits of the Tetons, I see to the west a mosaic of farms scarring the rounded hills and valleys, as though someone had taken a razor to the face of a beautiful woman. Farther west, the sockeye salmon no longer come home from the sea. The rivers are wounded by their absence.

These wounds and scars are not random. We attribute the damage to particular people or corporations or to generalities like industrialization, technology, and Christianity, but we tend to ignore the specific unity that made these particular wounds possible. This unity lies in the resource economies of the West: forestry, grazing, mineral extraction, and the vast hydrological systems that support agriculture. Healing those wounds requires altering these economies, their theories, practices, and most deeply and importantly, their descriptions of the world, for at the most fundamental level the West has been wounded by particular uses of language.

Modern economics began in postfeudal Europe with the social forces and intellectual traditions we call the Enlightenment. On one level, its roots are a collection of texts. Men in England, France, and Germany wrote books; our Founders read the books and in turn wrote letters, memoranda, legislation, and the Constitution, thus creating a modern civil order of public and private sectors. Most of the problems facing my home today stem from that duality: water rights, the private use of public resources, public access through private lands, the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park, wilderness legislation, the private cost of grazing permits on public lands, military overflights, nuclear testing, the disposal of toxic waste, county zoning ordinances - the list is long. We are so absorbed by these tensions, and the means to resolve them, that we fail to notice that our maladies share a common thread-the use of the world conceived of as a collection of resources.

Almost everyone agrees the use of public and private resources is out of kilter, but here agreement ends. This absence of agreement is the key to our difficulties, not, for instance, the cost of grazing fees.

A civil society is marked by a barely conscious consensus of beliefs, values, and ideals-of what constitutes legitimate authority, on what symbols are important, on what problems need resolution, and on limits to the permissible. I think of this consensus as a shared vision of the good. Historically, our shared vision of the good derived from shared experience and interests in a shared place. In the West, these "sharings" have vanished-assuming, of course, they ever existed. We share no vision of the good, especially concerning economic practices. One of many reasons for this is the growing realization that our current economic practices are creating an unlivable planet.

The decline in consensus also erodes trust. Trust is like glue-it holds things together. When trust erodes, personal relations, the family, communities, and nations delaminate. To live with this erosion is to experience modernity.2 The modern heirs of the Enlightenment believe material progress is worth the loss of shared experience, place, community, and trust. Others are less sanguine. But in the absence of alternatives the feeling of dilemma becomes paramount: most of us in the West feel stuck.

Daniel Kemmis's fine book Community and the Politics of Place traces some of the West's current dilemmas to the often conflicting visions of Jefferson and Madison, and no doubt some of our dilemmas can be discussed productively in this context. But I think the problems lie deeper. After all, Jefferson and Madison derived their ideas from the works of Enlightenment figures, especially John Locke and Adam Smith, men whose thought was a mixture of classical science, instrumental reason, and Christian revelation.

The heirs of Locke and Smith are the members of the so-called Wise Use movement. Its vigor derives from an accurate assessment: the social order they believe in requires Christian revelation, pre-Darwinian science, pre-particle physics, and a model of reason as the maximization of utility. The accuracy of this assessment, in turn, disturbs both liberals and conservatives who wish to preserve Enlightenment ideals while jettisoning the Christian foundations upon which those ideals rest. Unfortunately, that reduces social theory to economics. As John Dunn concluded twenty-five years ago in The Political Thought of John Locke, " 'Lockean' liberals of the contemporary United States are more intimately than they realize the heirs of the egalitarian promise of Calvinism. If the religious purpose and sanction of the calling were to be removed from Locke's theory, the purpose of individual human life and of social life would both be exhaustively defined by the goal of the maximization of utility." That's where we are now. Instead of a shared vision of the good, we have a collection of property rights and utility calculations.

Since I am a Buddhist, I do not restrict equality to human beings, nor do I justify it by Christian revelation. Nor do I see any reason to restrict "common" (as in "the common good") or "community" to groups of human beings. Other citizens of the West have different understandings and justifications of these key political terms, so part of the solution to the West's differences involves language.

Between Newton and the present, the language of physical theory changed and our conception of reality has changed with it. Unfortunately, the languages of our social, political, and economic theories have endured despite achieving mature formulation before widespread industrialization, the rise of technology, severe overpopulation, the explosion of scientific knowledge, and globalization of economies. These events altered our social life without altering theories about our social life. Since a theory is merely a description of the world, a new set of agreements about the West requires some new descriptions of the world and our proper place in it.

Against this background, environmentalism, in the broadest sense, is a new description of the world. The first imaginings of the movement have led to what Newsweek has called "the war for the West." Attorney Karen Budd, who often supports Wise Use agendas, says, "The war is about philosophy," and she's right. The fight is over intellectual, not physical, resources. Environmentalists fight to reduce the authority of certain descriptions-e.g., "private property"-and to extend the authority of other descriptions- e.g., "ecosystem." It is the language of pilgrims who entered the wilderness and found not Him, but the Wild.

These new forces have occupied the border of our minds-strange figures claiming high moral ground, like Sioux along the ridges of the Missouri. It's unsettling. Folks employed in traditional economies are circling the wagons of old values and beliefs. Their tone and posture is defensive, as it must be for those who, hurled into the future, adamantly cling to the past.

The pioneers who settled the West imposed their descriptions on a place they called wilderness and on people they called savages. Neither were, by definition, a source of moral value. The great debates of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Adams were filled with Enlightenment ethics, revelation, science, political theory, and economic theory. The pioneers brought these ideas west to create a moral and rational order in a new land. Their ideas of what was moral and rational were connected by economics.

The government's great surveys redescribed the western landscape. In 1784 the federal government adopted a system of rectangular surveying first used by the French for their national survey. The result was a mathematical grid: six-mile squares, one-mile squares.4 Unfold your topo map and there they are, little squares everywhere. Fly over a town or city and you will see people living in a matrix resembling a computer chip. The grid also produced rectangular farms, national parks, counties, Indian reservations, and states, none of which have any relation to the biological order of life.

The grid delighted the pioneers though; they believed a rationalized landscape was a good landscape. It was a physical expression of order and control-the aim of their morality. The idea, of course, was to sell the grid for cash. Indeed, the selling of the grid was the primary reason for its existence. This shifted the locus of the sacred from place to private property. As John Adams said, "Property must be sacred or liberty cannot exist." So the grid was sold to farmers, ranchers, and businessmen, and the places long sacred to the indigenous population simply vanished behind the grid, behind lines arrogantly drawn on paper. With the places gone, the sense of place vanished too-just disappeared.

The sale didn't work out quite as planned. Some land was sold, but often for as little as $1.25 an acre. Other land passed "free" to those who worked it. What was not sold became public land or was reserved to imprison the remnants of the indigenous population. Much of it was simply given to commercial interests.

The railroads alone received 233 million acres. For comparison, consider that Yellowstone National Park's boundaries encompass 2.3 million acres, and that in 1993 our entire national park system-including parks, national monuments, historic sites, historic parks, memorials, military parks, battlefields, cemeteries, recreational areas, lake shores, seashores, parkways, scenic trails, and rivers, in the lower forty-eight and Alaska-totals 79 million acres. Consider also that 59 percent of our wilderness areas (which, combined, total 91 million acres) are smaller than Disney World.

Agricultural practices forever destroyed the autonomy of the land sold to farmers and ranchers. Jefferson wrote that "those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth." God's chosen perceive it good to move water around with irrigation systems; they perceive it good to introduce foreign species of plants and animals; they perceive it good to destroy all that is injurious to their flocks and gardens. In short, they perceive as good that which is good for farmers and ranchers.

Federalists were less convinced of the inherent goodness of farmers, and in retrospect, of course, they were correct. (After all, farmers had burned women at the stake in New England, and, in other parts of the world still boiled and ate their enemies.) Their solution was a federal system of checks and balances. Just as the free market would transform the pursuit of economic self-interest into the common good, so a federal government would transform the pursuit of political self-interest into the common good. Unfortunately, the pursuit of self-interest merely produced more self-interest, an endless spiral that we now recognize as simple greed.

In short, the social order of the American West was a mishmash of splendid ideals and pervasive blindness-a rationalized landscape settled by Christians holding private property as sacred and practicing agriculture and commerce under the paternal eye of the federal government. Eventually, of course, these forces proved unequal in power and effect.

Things change. Governmental regulations, commercial greed, and the expanding urban population gobbled up family farms, ranches, and communities, and left in their place industrial agriculture, large tracts of empty land held by banks, subdivisions, and malls. In Wyoming, for instance, only 2 percent to 4 percent of jobs now depend on agriculture.

Things change. The little squares got smaller and smaller as the scale of the social order changed. First there was the section, then the acre, then the hundred-foot lot, then wall-to-wall town houses, then condos. Last year the town of Jackson, Wyoming, contemplated building three-hundred-square-foot housing-about the size of a zoo cage. Most people live in tiny rented squares and the ownership of sacred property is an aging dream. The moral force of private property, derived from owning land, usually large amounts of land, has dropped accordingly. For most people, the problems connected with large holdings of private land are inconsequential. Asking citizens to lament the government's incursion into private-property rights increasingly obliges them to feel sorry for the rich, an obligation that insults their sense of justice.

Things change. The federal system of checks and balances consistently stalls and sabotages federal legislation, making hash of federalism. Every time Congress meets, it is pressured to gut the Clean Air Act and the EPA. Despite widespread regional and national support, twenty years elapsed between the passage of the Endangered Species Act and the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone.

Things change. Even the mathematical grid is under attack. The idea that our social units should be defined by mathematical squares projected upon Earth from arbitrary points in space appears increasingly silly. One result is the interest in bioregionalism, the view that drainage, flora, fauna, land forms, and the spirit of a place should influence culture and social structure, define its boundaries, and ensure that evolutionary processes and biological diversity persist.

Things change. A new generation of historians has redescribed our past, deflating the West's myths with rigorous analysis of our imperialism, genocide, exploitation, and abuse; our vast hierarchies of wealth and poverty; the collusion of the rich and the government, especially over water; the biological and ecological ignorance of many farmers, ranchers, and capitalists; and, finally, how our old histories veiled the whole mess with nods to Republican and Jeffersonian ideals. Anyone who bothers to read the works of Donald Worster, Dee Brown, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and Richard White will be stripped forever of the comfortable myths of pioneer and cowboy.

Few, I believe, would deny these changes, and yet in our public discourse of hearings and meetings and newspaper editorials we continue to trade in ideas appropriate to a small homogeneous population of Christian agriculturists occupying large units of land. We continue to believe that politicians represent people, that private property assures liberty, and that agriculture, commerce, and federal balances confer dignity and respect on the West and its people. Since this is largely illusion, it is not surprising that we face problems.

Only one widely shared value remains-money-and this explains our propensity to use business and economics rather than moral debate and legislation to settle our differences. When "the world" shrinks into a rationalized grid stuffed with resources, greed goes pandemic.

]Many conservation and preservation groups now disdain moral persuasion, and many have simply given up on government regulation. Instead, they purchase what they can afford or argue that the market should be used to preserve everything from the ozone layer to biodiversity. They offer rewards to ranchers who allow wolves to den on their property, they buy trout streams, they pay blackmail so the rich will not violate undeveloped lands. They defend endangered species and rain forests on economic grounds. Instead of seeing modern economics as the problem, they see it as the solution.

This rejection of persuasion creates a social order wherein economic language (and its extensions in law) exhaustively describes our world and, hence, becomes our world. Moral, aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual orders are then merely subjective tastes of no social importance. It is thus no wonder that civility has declined. For me this new economic conservation "ethic" reeks of cynicism-as though having failed to persuade and woo your love, you suddenly switched to cash. The new economic conservationists think they are being rational; I think they treat Mother Nature like a whorehouse.

Ironically, the Enlightenment and civil society were designed to rescue us from such moral vacuums. The Enlightenment taught that human beings need not bow to a force beyond themselves, neither church nor king. Now we are asked to bow to markets and incentives.
Shall we bow to the new king? Can the moral concerns of the West be resolved by economics? Can new incentives for recycling, waste disposal, and more efficient resource use end the environmental crisis? Can market mechanisms restore the quality of public lands? Does victory lie in pollution permits, tax incentives, and new mufflers? Will green capitalism preserve biodiversity? Will money heal the wounds of the West?

One group that answers these questions in the affirmative is New Resource Economics. It welcomes the moral vacuum and fills it with markets and incentives. As economic theory it deserves scrutiny by economists. I am not an economist but a mountaineer and desert rat. Nonetheless, I shall have my say even though the word "economics" makes me hiss like Golem in Tolkien's The Hobbit: "I hates it, I hates it, I hates it forever." For I believe classical economic theory, and all the theories it presupposes, is destroying the magic ring of life.

In the winter of 1992 I flew to Seattle at the generous invitation of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment to attend a conference designed to acquaint environmental writers with the ideas of New Resource Economics. The conference was held amidst a mise-en-scene of assurance and power-tasteful, isolated accommodations, lovely meals, good wine. I felt like a barbarian called to Rome to applaud its splendor.

The best presentations were careful, devastating analyses of the inefficiency and incompetence of the U.S. Forest Service. In sharp contrast were other presentations with vague waves at the preferred vocabulary of self-interest: incentives, market, liberty. They exuded an attitude of "You see!" as though the realm of sylvan possibilities was limited to two choices: socialism or New Resource Economics. They were Eric Hoffer's true believers, folks who had seen the light and are frustrated and angry that others fail to see economics as the solution to our environmental plight.

I not only failed to see the light, I failed to understand what was new about New Resource Economics. The theory applies ideas about markets that are now more than two hundred years old. After awhile I had the feeling of watching the morally challenged tinker with notions rapidly disappearing over the horizon of history as they attempted to upgrade one antiquated idea into another. And yet I have little doubt they will succeed.

Having just flown over the devastated forests east of Seattle, I wanted to scream, "See the fate of the Earth, the rape of the land!" - but I knew they would respond calmly with talk of incentives and benefits and inefficiency.

Finally I understood. The conference's hidden agenda was to persuade environmental writers to describe nature with an economic vocabulary. They had a theory, and like everyone with a theory, they were attempting to colonize with their theoretical vocabulary, thus eliminating other ways of describing the world.

The conference literature reeked of colonization. Vernon L. Smith's paper. Economic Principles in the Emergence of Humankind, describes magic, ritual, and foraging patterns in hunter-gatherer cultures with terms like "opportunity cost," "effort prices," and "accumulated human capital." Michael Rothchild, in Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem, extends economic vocabulary to ecosystems and animal behavior; a niche becomes an organism's "profession," its habitat and food "basic resources," its relations to habitat simply a part of the "economy of nature."

In Reforming the Forest Service, Randal O'Toole claims that "although the language used by ecologists differs from that of economists, it frequently translates into identical concepts. Where economists discuss efficiency, decentralization, and incentives, ecologists discuss the maximum power principle, diversity, and feedback loops." O'Toole also maintains that "these very different terms have identical meanings," and he concludes that "ecological systems are really economic systems, and economic systems are really ecological systems.".

The redescription of everything with economic language is characteristic of those who sit in the shade of the Chicago school of economics. Thus Richard Posner, in The Economic Aspects of Law, colonizes legal issues with economic vocabulary. Regarding children, Posner thinks "the baby shortage and black market are the result of legal restrictions that prevent the market from operating as freely in the sale of babies as of other goods. This suggests as a possible reform simply eliminating the restriction."8 Bunker, Barnes, and Mosteller's Costs, Risks, and Benefits of Surgery does the same for medical treatment.

Indeed, all areas of our social life have been redescribed in economic language. If you like the theory in one area, you will probably like it everywhere. Nor is economic redescription limited to social issues. For example, Robert Nozick, in The Examined Life, applies economic language to the question of why we might love our spouses.

Repeated trading with a fixed partner with special resources might make it rational to develop in yourself specialized assets for trading with that partner (and similarly on the partner's part toward you); and this specialization gives some assurance that you will continue to trade with that party (since the invested resources would be worth much less in exchanges with any third party). Moreover, to shape yourself and specialize so as to better fit and trade with that partner, and therefore to do so less well with others, you will want some commitment and guarantee that the party will continue to trade with you, a guarantee that goes beyond the party's own specialization to fit you.
 
In a footnote, Nozick says, "This paragraph was suggested by the mode of economic analysis found in Oliver Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism."

Why stop with love? In The New World of Economics by McKenzie and Tullock, sex becomes a calculated rational exchange.

It follows that the quantity of sex demanded is an inverse function of price.... The reason for this relationship is simply that the rational individual will consume sex up to the point that the marginal benefits equal the marginal costs.... If the price of sex rises relative to other goods, the consumer will "rationally" choose to consume more of the other goods and less sex. (Ice cream, as well as many other goods, can substitute for sex if the relative price requires it.)

So, many men are bores, and what to do? Why bother with arguments, why not just giggle? Unfortunately, too much is at stake.

If we are to preserve a semblance of democracy in the West, we must become crystal clear about how economists colonize with their language.

To start, look at an example of redescription by a theory I disapprove of. Consider, for instance, psycho-babble.


Resource, market, benefits, rational, property, self-interest function the same way as conflict, unconscious, cathect, and projected aggression. They are simply the terms a particular theory uses to describe the world. By accepting those descriptions, you support and extend the theory. You could decide to ignore the theory, or conclude that the theory is fine in its limited context but shouldn't be extended into others. But if we don't want the fate of our forests decided by bar graphs, we need to cease talking about forests as measurable resources. That does not require you to stop talking to your investment banker about the bar graphs in her analysis of your portfolio.

Economists and scientists have conned us into speaking of trees as "resources," wilderness as a "management unit," and picas gathering grass for the winter because of "incentives." In accepting their descriptions, we allow a set of experts to define our concerns in economic terms and predetermine the range of possible responses. Often we cannot even raise the issues important to us because the economic language of others excludes our issues from the discussion. To accept this con emasculates not only radical alternatives, but all alternatives. Every vocabulary shapes the world to fit a paradigm. If you don't want nature reduced to economics, then refuse to use its language.

This process of theoretical redescription has been termed "colonization" because it privileges one description of the world and excludes others. The Sioux say the Black Hills are "sacred land," but they have found that "sacred land" does not appear in the language of property law. There is no office in which to file a claim for sacred land. If they filed suit, they'd discover that the Supreme Court tends to protect religious belief but not religious practices in a particular place - a very Protestant view of religion.

Language is power. Control people's language and you won't need an army to win the war for the West. There will be nothing to debate. If we are conned into describing the life of the Earth and our home in terms of benefits, resources, self-interest, models, and budgets, then democracy will be dead.

What to do? I have five suggestions.

First, refuse to talk that way. It's like smoking, or eating lard. Just say no, and point out that your concerns cannot be expressed in that language.

Second, develop a talent for light-hearted humor using economic language. Here again, Thoreau was a prophet. Henry knew a great deal about economics. He read Locke and his followers in both his junior and senior years at Harvard; he was acquainted with the ideas of Smith, Ricardo, Say, and Franklin; and he helped run his family's pencil business when the industry was becoming increasingly competitive and undergoing rapid change. But Thoreau flips economic language on its head. (Remember, the first chapter of Walden is titled "Economy") His "trade" turns out to be with the Celestial Empire; his "enterprises" are inspecting snow storms and sunrises; he "sinks his capital" into hearing the wind; he "keeps his accounts" by writing in his journal; and he gleefully carries the cost of rye meal out to four decimal places: $1.0475. Nothing is fixed, all is metaphor, even economics.

Third, become so intimate with the process of economic description, you experience what's wrong with it. Since economics is a world of resources- physical resources, cultural resources, recreational resources, visual resources, human resources-our wonderfully diverse, joyful world must be reduced to measurable resources. This involves abstraction, translation, and a value. Just as time is abstracted from experience and rendered mechanical (the clock) so it can be measured, space is abstracted from place and becomes property: measurable land. In the same way, trees are abstracted into board-feet, wild rivers are abstracted into acre-feet, and beauty is abstracted into a scene whose value is measured by polls.

Economics reduces everything to a unit of measurement because it requires that everything be commensurate-"capable of being measured by a common standard" - its standard. The variety of these calculable units may be great-board-feet, time, tons, hours-but all of these units can be translated into a common value similar to the way different languages can be translated. Both types of translation require something common. In linguistic translation, it is meaning; in economic translations, it is money - not the change in your pocket, but the stuff that blips on computer screens and bounces off satellite dishes from Germany to Japan in less than a second. An hour's labor is worth a certain amount of money; so is three hundred board-feet of redwood.

Once everything is abstracted into commensurate units and common value, economic theory is useful. If the value of one kind of unit (computer chips) grows in value faster than another kind of unit (board-feet), economic theory says translate board-feet into money into computer chips. In ordinary English: Clear-cut the last redwoods for cash and buy Intel stock. If you don't like deciding the fate of redwoods by weighing the future of Intel, then you probably won't like economics.

Refuse these three moves- the abstraction of things into resources, their commensurability in translatable units, and the choice of money as the value of the units-and economic theory is useless.

Once you understand the process, it's easy to recognize examples. For instance, in Reforming the Forest Service, Randal O'Toole describes walking in the mountains as a wilderness experience using a recreational resource that generates benefits: cash and jobs (206). These benefits are compared to other possible uses of the resource, say, grazing and logging, that generate other benefits. The benefits can then be compared. This provides a rational basis for budget maximization. Your walk in the Tetons becomes, by redescription, an economic event.

A fourth way to subvert economic language is to realize that nothing of great value is either abstract or commensurate. Start with your hand. The workman's compensation office can tell you the value of your hand in dollars. Consider your daughter. An insurance company or litigation lawyer can tell you her value in dollars. What is your home place worth? Your lover's hair? A stream? A species? Wolves in Yellowstone? Carefully imagine each beloved person, place, animal, or thing redescribed in economic language. Then apply cost-benefit analysis. What results is a feeling of sickness familiar from any forest sale or predator-control proposal. It is the sickness of being forced to use a language that ignores what matters in your heart.

Finally, realize that describing life-the completely individual, unique here-now alive rtfs-with abstractions is especially dissonant. Consider the "resources" used in a biology class. The founder of experimental physiology, Claude Bernard, said that the man of science "no longer hears the cry of animals, he no longer sees the blood that flows, he sees only his idea and perceives only organisms concealing problems which he intends to solve."10 He sees only the idea that will give him something to do in the world. Meanwhile the screams of animals in laboratory experiments are redescribed as "high-pitched vocalizations."

In an extraordinary essay, "Pictures at a Scientific Exhibition," William Jordon, an entomologist, describes his graduate education and the ghastly (his word) treatment of animals it required.

Fifteen years ago I saw several of my peers close down their laboratory for the evening, and as they cleaned up after the day's experimentation they found that three or four mice were left over. The next experiments were not scheduled for several weeks, and it wasn't worth the cost and effort to keep the mice alive until then. My friends simply threw the extras into a blender, ground them up, and washed them down the sink. This was called the Bloody Mary solution. Several days ago I talked with another old peer from my university days, and she informs me that the new, humane method for discarding extra mice in her lab is to seal them in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer.

I repeat: the attitude toward nonhuman life has not changed among experimental biologists. Attitude is merely a projection of one's values, and their values have not changed; they do not respect life that is not human. (199, my emphasis)

Science, including economics, tends to reduce nonhuman life to trash. The screaming animals, the dead coyotes, the Bloody Mary mice, the stumps, the dead rivers-all are connected by these processes of abstraction, commensurability, and financial value. There is no logical necessity for us to describe the world this way. The Apaches didn't do it, and we need to reach a point where we don't do it either.

We need to find another way of describing the world and our experience in it. Leave this pernicious, mean-spirited way of talking behind. One of my heroes said he could imagine no finer life than to arise each morning and walk all day toward an unknown goal forever. Basho said this is our life. So go for a walk and clear the mind of this junk. Climb right up a ridge, over the talus and through the whitebark pine. through all those charming little grouse wortleberries, and right on into the blue sky of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End:


Traveling to that conference last winter, I found the approach to Seattle from the east to be infinitely sad. Looking down at those once beautiful mountains and forests, so shaved and mowed down they look like sores, I didn't care if the land below was public or private, if the desecration was efficient or inefficient, cost beneficial, or subsidized, whether the lumber products were sent to Japan or used to build homes in Seattle. I was no longer interested in that way of looking at the world. Increasingly, I am a barbarian in the original sense of the Greek word-one who has trouble with the language of civilization. So, slowly and reluctantly, I am burning bridges to the past, all the while noticing, as if in penance, that the ideas and abilities of a trained pedant follow close as shadows.

A passage from an obscure journal by the philosopher Nelson Goodman often occupies my mind. "For me, there is no way which is the way the world is; and so of course no description can capture it. But there are many ways the world is, and every true description captures one of them."12

The universe we can know is a universe of descriptions. If we find we live in a moral vacuum, and if we believe this is due in part to economic language, then we are obligated to create alternatives to economic language. Old ways of seeing do not change because of evidence; they change because a new language captures the imagination. The progressive branches of environmentalism- defined by an implacable insistence on biodiversity, wilderness, and the replacement of our current social grid with bioregions- have been sloughing off old ideas and creating one of many possible new languages.

Emerson started the tradition by dumping his Unitarian vocabulary and writing "Nature" in language that restored nature's sacredness. Thoreau altered that vocabulary further and captured our imagination. The process continues with the labor of poets, deep ecologists, and naturalists. It is not limited to radical environmentalism, however; it includes many who are only partially sympathetic to the radical cause. Michael Pollan, for example, tells us in Second Nature that science has proposed some new descriptions of trees as the lungs of the Earth. And radical economist Thomas Michael Power suggests in The Economic Pursuit of Quality that "economy" might be extended beyond commerce. The process is enforced when Charles F. Wilkinson, in The Eagle Bird, suggests changes in the language of law that would honor our surrender to the beauty of the world and of emotion.

Imagine extending the common in "common good" to what is common to all life-the air, the atmosphere, the water, the processes of evolution and diversity, the commonality of all organisms in their common heritage. Imagine extending "community" to include all the life forms of the place that is your home. Imagine "accounting" in its original sense: to be accountable. What does it mean to be accountable, and to whom and to what purpose? What's "a good deal" with the Universe? Imagine an economics of need. Instead of asking "What is this worth?" ask "What does this forest need?" "What does this river need?"

Consider Lewis Hyde's beautiful description of an Amish quilt sale: "A length of rope stretched around the farm yard full of household goods. A little sign explained that it was a private auction, in which only members of the Amish community were allowed to bid. Though goods changed hands, none left the community. And none could be inflated in value. If sold on the open market, an old Amish quilt might be too valuable for a young Amish couple to sleep under, but inside that simple fence it would always hold its value on a winter night."

"Hold its value on a winter night"? What's happening here?

It's as simple as that rope and a group of people deciding to place aspects of their shared experience above economic values determined by the open market. They don't ignore economic value-there is still a price, bidding, and competition-but it is restrained by a consensus of appreciation a wider market would ignore.

Although this example comes from a religious community, its power does not turn on religion; although it comes from an agricultural community, it does not turn on agriculture. It turns on two things: shared experience and shared place-the politics of locale. As does the Bill of Rights, the rope creates a limit with standards and values shared by the community. We need to imagine an immense fugue of variations on that simple fence, each creating a new world.

These imaginings will be the worthy labor of poets and thinkers and artists whose primary task, it seems to me, is to extend those qualities we value most deeply-the source of our moralities and spiritual practices-into what we call "the world." Many will find that source is empty, drained like the great aquifers that water our greed. Others will discover links between their integrity and that of an ecosystem, between their dignity and the dignity of a tree, between their desire for autonomy and the autonomy all beings desire, between their passions and the wild processes that sustain all life.

Extend these moral and spiritual sources into nature and the spirits of each treasured place will speak as they have always spoken -through art, myth, dreams, dance, literature, poetry, craft. Open the door and they will transform your mind-instantly. If children were raised hearing stories of spotted owls, honoring them with dances, imagining them in dreams, and seeking the power of their gaze, then spotted owls would speak to us, transformed by mind into Our-Form-of-Life-At-The-Place-of-Spotted-Owls.

Then we wouldn't have to worry about clear-cutting spotted-owl habitat. And when wildfires articulated their needs, we would not drown them in chemicals. When wild rivers spoke, they would be cleared of dams, and the salmon would come home from the sea.

Dig in someplace- like a great fir driving roots deep into a rocky ridge to weather storms that are inseparable from the shape of its roots. Allow the spirits of your chosen place to speak through you. Say their names. Say Moose Ponds, Teewinot, Pingora, Gros Ventre, Stewart Draw, Lost River. Speak of individuals-the pine marten that lives in the dumpster, the draba on the south ridge of the Grand Teton. Force the spirits of your place to be heard. Be hopeful. Language changes and imagination is on our side. Perhaps in a thousand years our most sacred objects will be illuminated floras, vast taxonomies of insects, and a repertoire of songs we shall sing to whales.

It is April and still cool beside Deer Creek in the Escalante country. Around me lies last year's growth, old sedges and grasses in lovely shades of umber and sienna. Beside me stands an ancient Fremont cottonwood. At the tips of its most extended and fragile branches, bright against a cobalt sky, are the crisp green buds of spring.

By CrazyHorse