The Geography of Hope

Some months ago, I posted an essay about how a ranger scolded me for walking 10 feet off the trail at Palo Alto's Arastradero Open Space Preserve. This preserve is in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, a wide-open place where one wouldn't expect the kind of "keep off the grass" rules associated with strips of city park. The title I gave the essay communicated my feelings on the matter ("Signs of The End").

But, I can admit now that I was of two minds on the matter. It still seems ridiculous to be told to stay on the trail in such a wild place. But soon after I wrote the piece, I felt a prick of conscience, and a sense of responsibility to tell the other side of the story. Why? Because I keep going back to Arastradero ... on foot, on mountain bike, alone and with my family. I find myself enjoying that same trail, and many other trails along the San Francisco peninsula again and again, and I began to have new thought share space with my semi-righteous indignation. I realized that I have very little to complain about. I live in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, in the high-tech center of the modern world, and yet ... I am surrounded by simply beautiful natural spaces, forever preserved against development or modification beyond the laying of trail. I have in fact enjoyed open space along the Peninsula for my whole life, in all four seasons, in rain and shine, day and night. I've slept under oaks, prayed on benches, sat writing in journals, and stared without a thought into wilderness ... all in settings that allow my heart and mind and soul to drop their guard and to breath.

Room to breath. This is one of the themes in the language of open space. You come across the phrase frequently in the history of one of the largest of the agencies that oversee open space in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. I wanted to get to know this organization, to meet the people who keep this land for me, and to learn what it takes to preserve open space in a region that the rest of the world associates with high home prices and high technology. How do they do it?

I confess that when I met with Leigh Ann Maze of the OSD, I was looking for dirt (no pun intended): I wanted to hear all about the fights over who gets the land and how it is used. I guess I imagined a great battle over each acre: developers and technologists on one side, and sandle-wearing soldiers in the open space army on the other. Maze couldn't satisfy my need for drama. She said it might get a little hot in the nitty-gritty negotiations over a particular parcel of land, but she's not really aware of any great philosophical divide on the Peninsula. The overall impression I got from talking to her is that the OSD enjoys a lot of favor in the Bay Area. She suggests that open space is a part of what attracts people to live here, and that even the developers recognize that being able to see trees on the mountains increases the value of the homes down in the suburban sprawl between highways 101 and 280.

So it may be that some experience it as a tension, and others as harmony, but either way, there's no argument over whether it is good to have open space here at the end of America's westward expansion. You might expect to see an insulting profusion of development here, in the same way you see great mountains of boulders at the terminus of ancient glaciers. After all, people keep coming .... Instead, land dedicated to open space is increasing, not as much as in the early days, but still increasing each year. Anne Koletzke writes in Peninsula Tales and Trails, a guidebook to the district, that the Bay Area has one of the largest systems of public open space to be found in any urban area in the United States.

But it wasn't always that way. Journalist Jay Thorwaldson, in the foreword to Peninsula Tales and Trails, describes looking down, as a youth on horseback, from the ridges of the Santa Cruz Mountains as the "valley's endless apricot and prune orchards [gave] way to homes and highways in a sad, but seemingly inevitable, roll of market demand and economic reality. Before silicon became the heart of computers," and a significant driver of development for the region, "this was called the 'Valley of Heart's Delight.'" In 1970, the threat was very real. But Thorwaldson was on hand to document a local, citizen-driven campaign to preserve open space. He himself influenced that campaign through editorials which urged these early environmentalists to find a way to buy the land they wanted to protect against development, a strategy also promoted by Wallace Stegner, a Stanford professor and novelist who contributed important ideology to the movement. If you want to preserve open space, the argument went, you have to own it, so that you can keep it open for ever.

Today the OSD owns over 55,000 acres of land, most of which can be explored by anyone who lives in, or visits, the Bay Area. When land is purchased, the first goal of the OSD is preservation, ensuring that the environment in and around the land is protected. These concerns always extend beyond the boundaries of purchases. Wildlife (from ubiquitous deer and squirrels to endangered red-legged frogs) pass through open space preserves and policies within the boundaries must account for the through-traffic. The course of streams in preserves can affect local watersheds and species (including our own species) many miles downstream. At times, early 'improvements', such as logging roads (called by the OSD, 'cultural resources'), need to be reversed to halt the pernicious effects of erosion on the ecosystem.

A very few times, the OSD closes a preserve to human visitors. But the "goal is to keep them open," says Maze, though always with limited provision for human comforts. "We set ourselves apart from other parks: we like to keep the infrastructure to a minimum. ... You'll see dirt parking lots and pit toilets, but no barbecues, play structures, or picnic tables ... the whole system only has one overnight campsite. ... We call what we do ecologically sensitive recreation and education." This emphasis on letting nature be, and not filling it with soccer fields, golf courses, or other recreational infrastructure, is summed up by Wallace Stegner in his Wilderness Letter, who asserted that preserving natural open space has "no more to do with recreation [than] churches have to do with recreation." We need, he says, to learn the "trick of quiet" that our ancestors knew from time spent in the big empty plains. "We could learn it too, even yet; even our children and grandchildren could learn it. But only if we save, for just such absolutely non-recreational, impractical, and mystical uses ... all the wild that still remains to us."

Adding to the delicate balancing act that is managing a piece of nature, the OSD is a public agency and so is accountable to local public opinion, state and federal governments, policies including the Endangered Species Act, and other rulebooks overseen by agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "There are a lot of layers," says Maze, "even for one little project of putting in a bridge ... we have to get permits from cities, counties ... and the public always want to weigh in. ... Ultimately it's the public's land; it's your land, your trails."



With all these obligations to balance, the OSD seems to work really well. They do a great job communicating to the public -- they have a quality website, good-looking publications, and were willing to talk to a snarky blogger like me (that "end of the world" post was not much of a calling card). And, of course, they do a very good job stewarding the land. My experience of the preserves is that they are consistently clean, accessible, and well laid-out. I know that takes work, even when the bulk of the land is trusted to natural processes. Finally, and maybe most impressively, from what I've seen, it appears the OSD manages and spends their considerable budget wisely.

It doesn't mean it's all sunny skies over the preserves though. The downturn in the economy has affected the OSD, like it has every other business. Grants and private donations have dropped, and to add insult to injury, even though the District manages it's budget very well thank you, the State of California is exercising it's "emergency right" to take money from "special districts" to deal with it's own budget shortfall. They are borrowing roughly 2 million from the OSD, "which legally they need to pay back." (uh ... good luck.) When I asked if the money taken from the OSD would at least go to save some of the state parks that are expected to close (again, good luck), Maze couldn't say, and she showed a remarkably goodnatured attitude towards Sacramento. "We look at it as an investment in the state."

For all this organizational complexity, federal policy, resource managment, state budget trouble, and, yes, the threat of development on currently un-preserved land, the OSD does an amazing job of giving the people exactly what was hoped for some thirty years ago: room to breath.

And though I don't like fences in the wild, I recognize the difficulty of protecting land, especially when the land in question is surrounded by forces hostile to it. Regardless of the relatively harmonious relationship between open space and ... crowd-space on the peninsula, I know that if the fences came down, the land would be lost. So I'm thankful for the activists who fought to purchase land to preserve it, and I'm thankful for the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, and other powers that protect land for me, even if it means there are some views I have to enjoy from the trail.

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope. -Wallace Stegner, The Wilderness Letter

A (low) tech writer principle: invest in the things you love. If that loose community of nature lovers back in the 70s had only come together to complain and had not put their money where their collective mouth was, the land between San Jose and San Francisco would be very different today, and we would all have a lot more to complain about.


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http://www.openspace.org/
Get your copy of Peninsula Tales and Trails at the OSD's website to support their work. It's a classic guide book.
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Photography by Karl Gohl and used by permission of the photographer and the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District.

A lover's quarrel

My friend Heather writes a beautiful, honest post about returning home to Georgia and the tension of how things change. She talks about Georgia like one might a former boyfriend--winsome memories of lovable qualities, and a hard encounter with all the reasons why it could never have worked out .... Her clear-headed reflection on the imbalance in the urban/rural relationship is itself balanced and evocative.

When I return, I feel...I feel betrayed. Atlanta has sprawled beyond her rightful and necessary boundaries. Or you could say the symbol Atlanta is of urban commerce has overrun its banks and flooded the rural landscape that gives that commercial river the right to flow in the first place. I'm not naive enough to say that commerce is bad or that cities are bad but I am principled enough to say that when the balance of urban and rural gets knocked off its fragile footing both sides lose.

From Heather's blog, Garden Street Farm: A song of you comes as sweet and clear as moonlight through the pines.

Simpler Times?

I found an old copy of Thomas Kinkade's Simpler Times on my daughter's bookshelf, which I promptly re-claimed for collages. She didn't mind: neither of us had ever really read it. The book had been sent to me more than a decade ago when I took a writing job for Media Arts Group, the company that sells Kinkade's pictures. In fact, I poked around on thomaskinkade.com a bit and found the plein-air paintings that I had written about years ago. My words are still there, signed by the Painter of Light himself. You could read my old masterpieces of copywriting if you knew where to look. ... I'm not talking.

The book, Simpler Times, and the art that fills it, is all about a return to some kind of good-old-days: stone cottages, warm firelight, cozy villages, and gas-lit streets. This is all elaborated in the book as the opposite of noisy, media-filled, task-list-crazed individualism. Had Kinkade and his co-author written the book today, I assume blog-writing and -reading, and other webby activities wouldn't qualify as simple-time either. Who would buy a Thomas Kinkade painting of an apartment window glowing with the unearthly fluorescent blue of computer screens? The Painter of Light, 2.0!

Who doesn't love the idea of old stone buildings lit by fire? Kinkade is popular because his paintings strike some pretty big chords - simplicity is highly attractive to anyone who lives and works in this crazy-complex modern world. Longing is probably not too strong a word to describe the attraction. Also attractive are the various elements that populate these works: stone, water, and fire; cottages, gardens, and gazebos. Here at (low) tech writer, I share this attraction. But all of these elements are brought together in a world as unreal as a model-railroad diorama. What is it exactly? A little too much color in that garden scene? Not quite enough color in that crowd scene? Is it all just a little too much of the wrong idea of perfect? As I flipped through the book (before cutting it up for art), I began to discern one significant way that these pictures go wrong. It's the water. When I look at the water in a Kinkade painting, I long for a little less simplicity.

Here's what I see: in Thomas Kinkade's world, water is harmless.




Take a look at the painting titled Almost Heaven (you can zoom in on it by clicking the picture to visit the Web site). The waterfalls in this picture sit on top of the earth like they don't belong there -- like they are just passing through: not like they have been carving the surface of the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. One of these uninvited rivers spills over the high-point on a rock jutting out from a cliff, managing a double-miracle: resisting the tendency of water to flow downhill, and also the habit of water to wear stuff down. Other waterfalls in the scene rage with snowmelt, but seem unable to have any effect on the landscape at all. In other works, rivers float through villages on top of the soft earth in perpetual flood, yet also fail to have any erosive effect on the perfect, grassy banks. It seems to me that Kinkade makes a mistake similar to that made by some of the romantic painters of the 19th century: while 'recording' what they witnessed in the new territory of the American West, they often mixed up their geology by painting what they imagined, instead of what was. Albert Bierstadt painted the scenery of the Sierra Nevada in California from a mix of memory and imagination. He seems to have occasionally confused and combined u-shaped glaciated valleys with the v-shaped terrain created by liquid water.

At least Bierstadt was never confused about the violence that water can do, in liquid or solid form. Looking at Kinkade's paintings, we're left to imagine that God formed the mountains and valleys according to whimsy and then sent the impotent water over it for his own amusement. And, I guess, for painters to have something to paint. Will there be no erosion in heaven?

But if God made the mountains and the valleys, then the shaping of them was done with water. If you've ever tried to swim across a river, or escape a rip-tide, or walked under a waterfall, you know that water has power. And power is precisely what is missing from Kinkade's portrayal of nature.

I can accept the unabashed hopefulness--hope needs nurturing. I can accept the occasional too-sweet sentiment--who doesn't like sugar in their lemonade? I can almost accept that there is never any strife in Kinkade's art: after all, he is painting his vision of heaven on earth, and some of us--even before we take in his luminous, idealized landscapes--are invested in the idea that one day our tears will be wiped away and there will be joy. But, while I believe that this kind of heaven is breaking through into the world, I don't think that it will create the homogeneous and impotent landscape that the Painter of Light portrays. In fact, I'd say Kinkade's powerless waters (for starters) give his vision itself a dangerous power ... power to lure the viewer away from the challenges of reality in the way that psychotropic drugs dilute your desire to find real peace. Take enough Valium and you may just give up thinking about what's wrong with your life.

One take-away from this kind of art is the idea that the creation is ideally impotent. That in this picture of heaven not only will the lion lay down with the lamb, but the water will never again shape the rock, or otherwise change the landscape. But what Kincade fails to document in his vision is that this shaping and changing is a part of the design. It is part of God's design that water and earth are locked in constant conflict, and one result of this clash is that the earth is made more beautiful.

Here's what's true about water. Water is not impotent. In nature, water moves according to huge and hairy rhythms and gives swimmers and sailors something to worry about. Water tears at the landscape, breaks it down, carries it off, and leaves the earth scarred and changed. Here's how awesome water is: if Water was invited to make a guest appearance in a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors ... it would trump them all, but none would fall more memorably than Rock, which succumbs slowly but utterly to water's power.



A pretty good example of what can result from all this clash and conflict between water and stone is a little vacation spot in the California mountains called Yosemite Valley. You may have heard of it. There are peaceful places in the Valley, but I'm not sure a feeling of peace is the appropriate response when looking at a waterfall moving 2,500 gallons of water per second and cutting through a two-thousand-foot granite cliff. Water has terrible power and who would want it any other way? But Kinkade's paintings suggest that something God made powerful will one day ideally lose it's power, and that is a message with the power to make people mistrust true power, wherever it should be found.

One place where power is seldom trusted, where conflict gets a bad rap, is among the human characters that move here and there on the surface of the planet. While nobody loves the wars that plague humanity, even the proverb says that people shape and change each other, that we are somehow improved by conflict:

"Iron sharpens iron,

so one person sharpens the wits of another."

(Proverbs 27.17)

Conflict is not evil. It's only evil when we try to silence or destroy those who challenge or threaten us. That's what makes war. Allow me to suggest a (low) tech writer people-principle: peace does not come from avoiding conflict or clashes, it comes from accepting these things as part of God's design for beautiful people.

Or to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., "I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity".

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The photo of Yosemite Falls, 2005, is by Kevin Ingolfsland and is on WikiMedia Commons.

Water and Fire

Crystal Springs Reservoir is an artificial lake that sits on the San Andreas Fault between San Francisco and San Jose. It is one of the more beautiful reservoirs I know of, and there are lots of pretty views along the lake. Nevertheless, I had to work hard to snap a picture that didn't show barbed wire between me and the water. It's filled from pipes that come from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite, famous for the valley of the same name that was destroyed by the San Francisco Water Department when it was flooded in the early 20th century to provide water for the city. John Muir mourned the loss of Hetch Hetchy, which he compared to Yosemite Valley in beauty (Muir suggested that the governement might as well seal up cathedrals and churches for water tanks while they were at it). But Crystal Springs is a beautiful expanse of water in a beautiful area minutes from Silicon Valley, and beggars can't be choosers.

As a suburbanite living in an overcrowded metropolitan area, I am sometimes surprised to be reminded that I am surrounded by water. Yes I can get to the Pacific Ocean in about 40 minutes, but though the San Francisco Bay is even closer, and there are natural creeks and streams everywhere, water is hard to find; hidden under concrete and usually only seen--but just barely--from bridges. I used to live in Redwood City, and it wasn't until I'd been there for several years that I learned that there used to be canals--canals!--running right into the downtown area. While boats had once docked a hundred yards from the beautiful county courthouse, now you can stand where schooners once floated and not even know that water still flows somewhere underneath your feet.

My heart broke when I learned that I could have walked along canals in the center of this old, interesting town, instead of along a loud, car-filled street. I know why they covered them up. Ships stopped contributing significantly to the economy, and the creek feeding the area was too much work to dredge. Add to that the increase in automobile traffic and the economic potential of more streets and better traffic management, and you can see the logic of paving over nature, which has a way of getting in the way of progress. When the creek went underground, something was gained and something was lost. I don't always root for the losing team (my mom and my wife do that), but in this case I'm crying in my beer.

Thankfully you can still get to the remaining wet places in the area, but you have to get out of your car to see them (the scene above is only visible from the car-free Sawyer Camp Trail), and that means that most people won't see them. You can drive over any number of bridges that span the Bay, and hardly see the water at all. This will be partly because of the railings and traffic that block your view, and partly because if you do try to take in the view, you'll probably crash your car, which might give you more time to look at the view, but behind you will be the drivers of many cars who are now looking at the view instead of driving to wherever it is they want to go, and they will hate you. Nobody likes to be forced to appreciate nature.

You need to get out of your car. Looking at water from inside a car (a parked car, please) is like watching the nature channel--you can't really experience water through the window of your car. You might as well watch it on TV. You need to get close. You need to listen to water as it washes over the sand and as waves slap against the rocks. You have to get close to hear the sounds of water as it tumbles over rapids in a stream, echoing off the leaves of shade trees. You need to be able to watch the surface of the water move (impossible, if you are moving yourself--you have to stop). This is another one of those almost forgotten things that causes my skin to tingle when I experience it after a long time of deprivation.





Fire has also been caged and hidden. For most of us metro-unfortunates, the only fire that burns in our houses is safely hidden from view in steel boxes where our water or our air or our chicken nuggets are heated (that is if we still cook with the box that uses heat waves and haven't given it up for the one that uses electromagnetic waves). For those of us in old homes that still have fireplaces, we are told by the law that we can't burn wood on certain days, because then all the drivers would have to roll up their windows to keep from smelling the air we thoughtlessly smoked up. The air we smoked up by burning wood, another natural thing that is being outlawed while we continue to pursue happiness in cars.

Now I know, because I am reminded constantly, that these days any smoke adds to the danger in an already dangerously overcrowded region. I once heard that the Los Angeles basin has always had a natural inversion-layer and that Southern California air quality was a problem even when the only smoke rose from the fires of Native camps. I guess some places were never capable of naturally supporting large populations no matter how they cooked their food or got to work.

And I know that these days I have a choice: I don't need to burn wood to stay warm or cook my food. Even if I want to barbecue, I'm told, I should get a gas grill because it is more eco-sensitive. Better to burn gas under the food I eat: better for the food (less carcinogenic, I'm told) better for the air (less particulates in the smoke), more convenient (Quicker! Cleaner!). If I miss the smoky flavor of charcoal, I can add it to the meat before I barbecue (Smoke in a Bottle! That's green.)

And I know that these days 99% of the population have no choices when it comes to commuting: they have to drive to work, or think that they have to. The society is set up for cars.

I know these things. But I will never, ever be comfortable with the idea that because so many people burn gas in their vehicles to get to work, they should then come home and use gas to cook their burgers instead of charcoal. How did burning petrochemicals in a barbecue become part of the green solution to an air quality problem caused by the burning of petrochemicals?

We have candles in our fireplace now. It's pretty I guess. We don't need the fireplace to warm the house, so it works out. It's better for the air: kids and adults with breathing-related illnesses like asthma will breathe easier. That's a win. But something has been lost too. The sights and sounds of a wood fire in a house are emblematic of home, shelter, comfort: the sound of fire, almost like banners moving in stiff wind, with the occasionally snap or pop that makes you jump and check the floor for sparks; the sight of fire, intensity of color, flames rippling, also like banners, trapped in their own thermals. Move in close, as close as possible, to stare at the embers. It's like looking into a volcano in miniature, as close as I'll ever get.

Will California broadcasters ever realize that most of their audience is now in the same boat as New York apartment-dwellers and put a yule log on the TV at Christmas time? Oh, I forgot, we are allowed to put gas fireplaces in our new homes, which is kind like the TV yule log already, with the following differences: 1) you still get the pleasure of lighting your "fire"; 2) it doesn't come into the home over the air, but through pipes; and 3) it still produces some heat and exhaust gasses. If I had to choose one over the other, I don't know which is worse for the planet. But for my money, if the gas fire is burning behind glass, I figure I'll just go with the TV, and turn up the heat.

Henri Cartier-Bresson on Natural Light

On respecting the natural state of things, by legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson: "It is essential, therefore, to approach the subject on tiptoe - even if the subject is a still-life. A velvet hand, a hawk's eye - these we should all have. ... And no photographs taken with the aid of flash-light either, if only out of respect of the natural light - even when there isn't any of it. Unless a photographer observes such conditions as these, he may become an intolerably aggressive character."*

To deny myself the convenience of flash lighting in a photograph, even when there is no light! Cartier-Bresson would rather that I lose the picture than use a technique that is so disrespectful to natural light. Using a flash in darkness, I may get the picture, but I've taken it by force, impatiently. And, perhaps I have violated a natural law, in the same way that artificial light has virtually eliminated the natural human rhythm of sleep-when-the-sun-goes-down and rise-when-the-sun-comes-up.

For the creative photographer who chooses with a purpose, flash-light now has the effect of invoking a photojournalistic quality (in which the flash is required to catch a fleeting, news-worthy moment). But it is not a natural quality; is not at all the way we see people. Natural light is three-dimensional and alive. It comes from multiple sources: the sunlight that shines on the left side of our subject also reflects off of other surfaces in the space, creating a complex interplay of light - a world of light. Flash-light principally shoots directly from the camera into the face of our subject like we are the source of illumination and they are the victim of a kind of egocentric, photographic super-nova. The flash forces the camera itself to become the source of light--an unnatural arrangement. Subjects become two-dimensional and evenly, eerily lit, without shadows to give depth ... only a sharp black line along one edge to indicate the offset of the flash from the lens.

It reminds me of one of the ways that fighter pilots gain the advantage in a dogfight, by getting between the sun and their adversary. The sunlight blinds the other pilot, who will not be able to see the aggressor in the glare. Flashes on cameras have a similar effect, that of disorienting a subject and putting them on the defensive - after the POP of the flash, the subject blinks and staggers, waiting to adjust to the dark again. If the photographer were a spy, taking a portrait of their enemy, now would be the moment to strike.

Where a photograph taken in natural light can be like a gift given by the subject with the help of the sun or lamp, and received by the camera on behalf of the photographer. Flash-light is something more like the artistic version of an act of overwhelming force.


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*p. 28, The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers. See picture books and others by and about Cartier-Bresson at Amazon.

I found my copy of The Mind's Eye in the photography section at one of my local used bookstores, Book Buyers, a clean, well-stocked shop in Mountain View, California. It's a good bookstore and would only be improved by a few places to sit. And maybe less fluorescent light.

Andy Goldsworthy on Tech

Sculptor Andy Goldsworthy writes on his process: "The work itself determines the nature of its making. I enjoy the freedom of just using my hands and 'found' tools - a sharp stone, the quill of a feather, thorns. I am not playing the primitive. I use my hands because this is the best way to do most of my work. If I need tools, then I will use them. Technology, travel and tools are part of my life and if needed should be part of my work also. A camera is used to document, an excavator to move earth, snowballs are carried cross country by articulated truck."*

I am very comfortable with this pragmatic approach to technology. The problem (here begins my opinion) is not technology, in itself, it's in the adoption of technology, or technique, as "the way" (or even "the best way") to fulfill a desire. When a community (artists, for example) discovers a piece of technology that makes a part of their job easier, or a technique is developed that introduces efficiencies into a process, this is not a bad thing, per se. But if technique precedes meditation, exploration, and inspiration, then creativity withers.

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*From the introduction, Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature.Take a look at Andy Goldsworthy's other books at Amazon.The DVD, Rivers and Tides is a very good documentary, rich and satisfying. Remember, if you can find these books at a local independent bookstore, get on your bike and go. Photo of The Neuberger Cairn (2001) at SUNY, is from Wikimedia Commons, and is in the public domain.

Dirt. Trail. You Walk on It.

We live in a world where hiking-boot manufacturers have been compelled by some misguided sense of environmental responsibility to sell low impact tread on their boots, as if walking on a dirt trail with boots might hurt mother earth. Worrying about the erosion that walkers cause in the wilderness strikes me as wasting good environmental energy on a non-issue. So: you buy your gear, made in a developing country by poor labor (or worse, child labor), drive all day to the mountains in your V-8 SUV, leaving a trail of to-go cups behind you, and then, because you are environmentally sensitive, you try to not leave footprints on the trail. The dirt trail. Like every dirt trail that humankind has been walking on since the dawn of time .... Heck, since every wild animal in the world has been walking on since the dawn of time. Should we go barefoot? Maybe Bighorn Sheep should wear booties to minimize the impact of their mountain climbing? Maybe packhorses should be shod in Crocs?

I've backpacked and hiked close to 1500 miles in California's Sierra Nevada and in other places in the world, and I've seen a lot of trail. The kind of boots we used to wear (in the 70s and early 80s) were heavy leather and took a hundred miles or more to break in ... they also had quite a bit more tread on them (Vibram!) than the boots you can buy today. You needed that tread to survive the salt-and-pepper granite of the Sierra high country--like walking on the coarsest sand-paper--and to keep your footing in the mud when carrying 80 pound packs. And yet with all that tread underfoot, the only time I saw trails suffer from erosion was when a trail had been poorly laid. Some trails become creek beds after a rainstorm, if they are laid along a natural runoff. And I remember one spot in the Emigrant Wilderness, where a trail had been laid right along the floor of a meadow, instead of along its sloping edge, and had, over the decades, become a four lane highway in the soft dirt: as each "lane" became too deep to walk in, hikers would walk next to it, making a new trail. But almost everywhere else in the mountains (and everywhere else I've hiked) trails appeared almost unchanged from year to year. I know there was always trail work going on to repair damage from water runoff, fallen trees, etc. But I can't say I ever saw that the presence of humankind was especially hard on the dirt along a trail. Sure, at times, there was litter, or initials carved in tree trunks--people impact the environment negatively. But walking? ... Sorry, but walking, even in boots, is a perfectly natural thing to do that the earth is perfectly capable of surviving. Thank you very much for your concern.

Reducing the tread on hiking boots to minimize our impact on the dirt trails in the wilderness is wasted technology. It's a tech solution for a non-existent problem. The real problem is the incursion of civilization into wild areas. The problem is sprawl and the spiritual distance between people and unspoiled wilderness. The problem is roads and internal combustion engines and plastic packaging and sin. If you want to know what the problem is NOT, the problem is not the desire of a single person to walk on some of the unspoiled dirt that remains in the world. The presence of footprints does not spoil the wilderness. If you want to know what spoils wilderness, just look at the wilderness buried under your favorite city.

Find a dirt trail, preferably one with no view of anything concrete or glass or metal, and preferably out of earshot of any industrial noise, and walk on it with no guilt whatsoever.