Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

The oldest anecdotes from which we know ourselves as human, the stories of Genesis, make it clear that our defects are sufficient to bring the whole world down. An astonishing intuition, an astonishing fact.

One need not have an especially excitable or a particularly gloomy nature to be persuaded that we may be approaching the end of the day. For decades, environmentalists have concerned themselves with this spill and that encroachment, this depletion and that extinction, as if such phenomena were singular and exceptional. Our causes have even jostled for attention, each claiming a special urgency. This is, I think, like quarreling over which shadow brings evening. We are caught up in something much larger than its innumerable manifestations. Their variety and seriousness are proof of this.

I am an American of the kind whose family sought out wilderness generation after generation. My great-grandparents finally settled in Idaho, much of which is wilderness now, in terms of its legal status, and is therefore, theoretically, protected. In the heart of this beloved, empty, magnificent state is the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Laboratory, among other things a vast repository for radioactive waste. Idaho, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, beautiful names for vast and melancholy places. Europeans from time to time remark that Americans have no myth of landscape. In fact we have many such myths. People who cherish New England may find it difficult to imagine that Utah is cherished also. In fact, I started writing fiction at an eastern college, partly in hopes of making my friends there understand how rich and powerful a presence a place can be which, to their eyes, is forbidding and marginal, without population or history, without culture in any form recognizable to them. All love is in great part affliction. My bond with my native landscape was an unnamable yearning, to be at home in it, to be chastened and acceptable, to be present in it as if I were not present at all.

Moses himself would have approved the reverence with which I regarded my elders, who were silent and severe and at their ease with solitude and difficulty. I meant to be like them. Americans from the interior West know what I am describing. For them it is, or is like, religious feeling, being so powerful a reference for all other experience.

Idaho, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico. These names are all notorious among those who know anything at all about nuclear weapons. Wilderness is where things can be hidden, from foreign enemies, perhaps, but certainly from domestic critics. This effect is enhanced by the fact that wilderness dwellers everywhere are typically rather poor and scattered, not much in the public mind, not significant as voters. Wilderness is where things can be done that would be intolerable in a populous landscape. The relative absence of human populations obscures the nature and effect of programs which have no other object than to be capable of the most profound injury to human populations. Of course, even wilderness can only absorb such insult to the systems of life to a degree, for a while. Nature is very active — aquifers so vast, rivers so tireless, wind so pervading. I have omitted to mention the great Hanford Reservation in Washington State, with its ominous storage tanks, a whole vast landscape made an archaeological history of malign intent, and a great river nearby to spread the secret everywhere.

Russia is much more generously endowed with wilderness than America. Turn the globe, and there is an expanse that puts our little vastness in perspective. It is my impression that depredations of the kind we have been guilty of have been carried farther in Russia and its former territories, at least in proportion to the permission apparently implied by empty spaces. But wilderness can be borrowed, as the coast and interior of Australia and, of course, Nevada have been by the British for their larger nuclear weapons projects, and wilderness can be relative, like the English Lake District and the northwest coast of France. And then there is the sea. We have all behaved as if there were a place where actions would not have consequences.

Wilderness is not a single region, but a condition of being of the natural world. If it is no longer to be found in one place, we assume it exists in other places. So the loss of wilderness always seems only relative, and this somewhat mitigates any specific instance of abuse. Civilization has crept a little farther; humankind has still to learn certain obvious lessons about living in the world. We regret and we repent and we blame, and we assume that things can be different elsewhere. Again, the very idea of wilderness permits us to evade in some degree a recognition of the real starkness of precisely the kind of abuse most liable to occur outside the reach of political and economic constraints, where those who have isolation at their disposal can do as they will.

Utah is holy land to a considerable number of American people. We all learn as schoolchildren how the Mormons, fleeing intolerance and seeking a place where they could live out their religion, walked into the wilderness, taking their possessions in handcarts, wearing a trail so marked that parts of it are visible to this day. We know they chose barren land by a salt lake, and flourished there.

It is a very pure replication of the national myth. So how did we make the mistake we made, and choose this place whose very emptiness and difficulty were a powerful proof to the Mormons of the tender providence of God — how could we make Utah the battleground in the most furious and terrified campaigns in our long dream of war? The choice kept casualties to a minimum, which means that if the bombs were dropped in populous places the harm would have been clearly intolerable. The small difference between our fantasies of war and war itself would be manifest. As it is, there are many real casualties, and no doubt there would be far more if all the varieties of injury were known and acknowledged.

This is a potent allegory. It has happened over and over again that promised land or holy land by one reckoning is wasteland by another, and we assert the sovereign privilege of destroying what we would go to any lengths to defend. The pattern repeats itself so insistently that I think it is imbedded not merely in rational consciousness but also in human consciousness. Humankind has no enemy but itself, and it is broken and starved and poisoned and harried very nearly to death.

Look at England. They have put a plutonium factory and nuclear waste dump in the Lake District, a region so beautiful that it was set aside, spared most of the marring burdens of population. And what a misfortune that has been. Relatively small populations result in relatively small bases for interpreting public health effects, so emptiness ensures not safety so much as deniability. Wilderness and its analogues seem to invite denial in every form. In Utah and in Cumbria, it was the urgent business of years to produce weapons capable of inflicting every extreme of harm on enemy populations. Do they harm people who live where they are made and tested? If the answers “no,” or “not significantly,” or “it is too difficult to tell” were ever given in good faith, then clearly some mechanism of denial had come into play. The denial was participated in at a grand enough scale to make such answers sufficient for most of the public for a very long time, even though one effect was to permit methods of development and testing that assured widespread public contact with waste or fallout, and that will assure it into any imaginable future.

Denial is clearly a huge factor in history. It seems to me analogous to a fractal, or a virus, in the way it self-replicates, and in the way its varieties are the grand strategy of its persistence. It took, for instance, three decades of the most brilliant and persistent campaign of preachment and information to establish, in the land of liberty, the idea that slavery was intolerable. Strange enough. These antislavery agitators were understandably given to holding up Britain’s ending of slavery in her colonies as the example of enlightened Christian behavior. But at the same time, British slave ships used the old slave routes to transport British convicts to Australia. Every enormity was intact, still suffered by women and children as well as men. Of course the color of the sufferer had changed, and it is always considered more respectable in a government to ravage its own population than others’. To this objection, I will reply that the arrival of the British was an unspeakable disaster to the native people of Australia and Tasmania. Slavery and genocide were only rechanneled, translated into other terms, but for the American abolitionists, and for the British abolitionists as well, this was nothing to pause over. It is understandable that Americans should wish to retain all the moral leverage that could be had from the admirable side of the British example. Still, this is another potent allegory, something to unriddle, or at least to be chastened by. After our terrible war, the people who struggled out of bondage, and were won out of bondage, found themselves returned to a condition very much resembling bondage, with the work all before them of awakening public awareness, in the land of the free, to the fact that their situation was intolerable.