Close Encounters: The Mountain

So I've been reading Encounters With the Archdruid and have finished part I. The book is divided in to three parts: the mountain, the island, and the river. Part one, believe it or not, actually took place on a mountain and was, in short, a means to juxtapose two of the men in the party of scientists. One, David Brower, is the leader of the conservationist organization called Friends of the Earth. He hikes the mountain trails ahead of everyone else in the party while drinking spring water from his Sierra Club cup and complaining about how the Forest Service is the worst thing that has happened to the national parks. His foil is Charles Park, a geologist and mineral engineer who "believes that if copper were to be found under the White House, the White House should be moved." The bulk of the chapter is thus devoted to contrasting the conservationist philosophy of Brower with the preservationist ideas of Park... and I find that I'm reminded of those fond discussions regarding the biocentric and anthropocentric approaches to nature.

Brower believes in the conservation of wilderness for the sake of wilderness, for the big-picture "insurance" it serves to the ecosystems of the world as a means of preserving biodiversity. In an argument with Park regarding the merits of a road leading to Glacier Peak, Brower says that the only way to see the stellar view it offers is to properly earn it -that is, to get there on foot. Park counters with"what about people who can't walk?" to which Brower responds, "They stay home. Ninety-nine point nine per cent can walk -if they want to." Yeah. Ouch. But he goes on to say that he does have a friend who wears leg braces and even he says that for him, it's enough to know that the mountains exist as they are. Existence value.

Park, on the other hand, says that Brower is an extremist and that he can't understand how people will deprive the present generation of resources that could be harvested (namely copper from the mountain, in this case) without devastating repercussions to the natural environment. He advocates a utilitarian conservation approach, wanting to do the most good for the most number, satisfy everyone's need while causing the least amount of harm -then again, his idea of "harm" seems to be different from Browers'. The take-home point, however, is that these guys each believe they give nature respect, but approach the issue from such different starting points (with Brower seeing nature as intrinsically valuable and Park seeing its monetary value) that they rarely ever make a consensus. This isn't to say that they don't. They can abhor the abuses to nature that are most visibly wrong, but just can't agree on what is right... or how right you have to be.