Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction by Lex Williford, Michael Martone

consider the opposite proposition — that, so long at least as humans are in the world, in human culture is the preservation of wildness — which is equally, and more demandingly, true. If wildness is to survive, then we must preserve it. We must preserve it by public act, by law, by institutionalizing wildernesses in some places. But such preservation is probably not enough. I have heard Wes Jackson of the Land Institute say, rightly I think, that if we cannot preserve our farmland, we cannot preserve the wilderness. That said, it becomes obvious that if we cannot preserve our cities, we cannot preserve the wilderness. This can be demonstrated practically by saying that the same attitudes that destroy wildness in the topsoil will finally destroy it everywhere; or by saying that if everyone has to go to a designated public wilderness for the necessary contact with wildness, then our parks will be no more natural than our cities.
    But I am trying to say something more fundamental than that. What I am aiming at — because a lot of evidence seems to point this way — is the probability that nature and human culture, wildness and domesticity, are not opposed but are interdependent. Authentic experience of either will reveal the need of one for the other. In fact, examples from both past and present prove that a human economy and wildness can exist together not only in compatibility but to their mutual benefit.
    One of the best examples I have come upon recently is the story of two Sonora Desert oases in Gary Nabhan’s book The Desert Smells Like Rain . The first of these oases, A’al Waipia, in Arizona, is dying because the park service, intending to preserve the natural integrity of the place as a bird sanctuary for tourists, removed the Papago Indians who had lived and farmed there. The place was naturally purer after the Indians were gone, but the oasis also began to shrink as the irrigation ditches silted up. As Mr. Nabhan puts it, “an odd thing is happening to their ‘natural’ bird sanctuary. They are losing the heterogeneity of the habitat, and with it, the birds. The old trees are dying…. These riparian trees are essential for the breeding habitat of certain birds. Summer annual seed plants are conspicuously absent…. Without the soil disturbance associated with plowing and flood irrigation, these natural foods for birds and rodents no longer germinate.”
    The other oasis, Ki:towak, in old Mexico, still thrives because a Papago village is still there, still farming. The village’s oldest man, Luis Nolia, is the caretaker of the oasis, cleaning the springs and ditches, farming, planting trees: “Luis…blesses the oasis,” Mr. Nabhan says, “for his work keeps it healthy.” An ornithologist who accompanied Mr. Nabhan found twice as many species of birds at the farmed oasis as he found at the bird sanctuary, a fact that Mr. Nabhan’s Papago friend, Remedio, explained in this way: “That’s because those birds, they come where the people are. When the people live and work in a place, and plant their seeds and water their trees, the birds go live with them. They like those places, there’s plenty to eat and that’s when we are friends to them.”
    Another example, from my own experience, is suggestive in a somewhat different way. At the end of July 1981, while I was using a team of horses to mow a small triangular hillside pasture that is bordered on two sides by trees, I was suddenly aware of wings close below me. It was a young red-tailed hawk, who flew up into a walnut tree. I mowed on to the turn and stopped the team. The hawk then glided to the ground not twenty feet away. I got off the mower, stood and watched, even spoke, and the hawk showed no fear. I could see every feather distinctly, claw and beak and eye, the creamy down of the breast. Only when I took a step toward him, separating myself from the team and mower, did he fly. While I mowed three or four rounds, he stayed near, perched in