Nestled in the aluminum canoe’s stern, I spotted motion across the far waters. Brisk paddling with my friend rowing in the bow swerved our boat feverishly to shore where a majestic animal strolled from the fortress of evergreens to a cove’s shallow water.
Under gray skies in Maine’s Allagash watershed, we crept our vessel some 40 yards from a moose that casually emerged like a mirage to feed on seaweed and, in a violent flash, whipped on guard against naïve aliens threatening its morning meal. Our shaky cameras captured the frantic moments, and memories tattooed the experience—especially the lingering, alarming seconds when the thousand-pound creature stared down two nervous interlopers.
It was a sensational few minutes, a stirring, magical timestamp of when man meets wildlife. Our junction with the moose highlighted one of annual adventures we shared—saunterings into several magnificent national parks, from Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains to Tennessee’s Cumberland range.
All the countless sacred nature-related treasures—as wide as the Grand Canyon and as tiny as a civic club’s community garden—across Mississippi and the other 49 states remain an essential fabric to America’s dynamic society. Two hundred and fifty years after the birth of our nation, both the importance of dedicated park space and economic property development are forces clasping hands and pushing and pulling life in America.
Hardly a month passes when there isn’t conflict at a zoning or planning commission over building plans that encroach park space or endanger wildlife refuges. Court records at local and federal levels are full of such intersections: The documents narrate the ebb and flow of the pursuit of financial opportunities pitted against the preservation of wetlands, wildlife, mountain ranges, creeks and other natural or man-made refuges.
Demographic shifts constantly live out this dichotomy. Mobile populations regularly move farther to the outskirts of suburbia to escape crowding urban commercialization and to equally seek enough space to peacefully enjoy nature—only to see commercial and residential developers chase their lead and perpetuate a domestic pattern resembling spiderweb circles.
Such contrast has symmetrical origins with two men a generation apart who share a fitting, remarkable connection. One is economist Adam Smith, whose observations drastically shaped and continue to shape the Western world (including new strip malls and gas stations coming to your neighborhood).
The father of economics published “The Wealth of Nations” the same year as the American Revolution. The book’s impact, positing that economic self-interest could improve the material well-being of the masses, was first illustrated, according to author Donald Worster, in Smith’s hometown, the Scottish seaside village Kirkaldy.
The second actor is John Muir, America’s original environmentalist. He founded the Sierra Club and is considered the father of national parks.
In just a few years after Smith’s publication, industrial innovation applied with a capitalistic framework buoyed Kirkaldy’s impoverished population. But it came with a cost: Copious factories rapidly drowned an Edenic countryside.
The resulting eclipse of natural beauty depressed many Scots, including Muir, whose early childhood was near the same Kirkaldy. Its idyllic fields were where he moved freely to “hear the birds sing” and explore the “pools among the rocks when the tide was low by the stormy North Sea,” according to Worster’s “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir.”
Eventually Muir’s family’s dismay at the environmental distortion prompted immigration to Wisconsin. Muir later walked to the Sierra Mountains and, remembering his Scottish youthful roots, made a lasting conservative response to unrestrained capitalism.
Muir and Smith’s contributions represent flags of magnetically dueling interests—like a standoff between a moose and a man—that prod society forward. The interwovenness are dancers able to tango, but unable to leave in the same taxi—because both nature and man are innately restless, constantly orbiting one another in fractured unity.
Both seek survival or better outcomes in the same manner that an oak’s limbs stretch higher for sunlight. Pursuing new natural boundaries is the American past, the American present and the American future.
Perhaps the naturalist David Attenborough best captured Americans’ spirited navigation—“from sea to shining sea”—of its natural contours when he said, “The whole of life is coming to terms with yourself and the natural world. Why are you here? How do you fit in? What’s it all about?”
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
Mississippi Free Press stories are always free because we believe everyone should have access to quality journalism. Donations from readers like you make that possible. Please click here to give to help sustain and grow vital, people-over-power journalism for Mississippians.
Readers can sign up for our free newsletters here.
