Liberation From Purity, by Patty Limerick

At long last, we are positioned to embrace the muddled state of human nature, and therein lies our greatest opportunity for conservation. 

Pure virtue and unambiguous principle, history shows, have struggled to keep their footing and stay upright when they descend from the heavens and try to touch the earth.  When we depart from the zone of principle, reality instantly tosses our neat and pure categories around like last fall’s dry leaves caught in a wild spring wind.  There are, for instance,  businesspeople in the field of natural gas who take every opportunity to hike, raft, and ski, who would much rather shoot wildlife with cameras than with firearms, and who believe, to the core of their souls, that natural gas is the bridge to the renewable energy future.  And, whenever any of us sits down to a meal or fills a glass of water from a faucet, we are all drawn into and made complicit with an infrastructure of agriculture, transportation, and water diversion that we might otherwise be tempted to denounce and condemn.

 So it is time to launch into a massive scavenger hunt.  It is time for everyone to head out into the habitats in which our opponents are known to thrive, and then, tossing all assumptions and expectations to the omnipresent Western wind, to see if those opponents might actually be allies.

If this proposal does not persuade you, then we must take a trip to Grand Teton National Park, where we will contemplate, first, a stunning and unobstructed view of the Tetons.  And then we will contemplate an equally stunning and unobstructed view of the fact that it was John D. Rockefeller, Jr., heir to a famous fortune based on oil whose philanthropy preserved the unobstructed view that remains to lift our spirits.

Patty Limerick is a History Professor and the Faculty Director and Board Chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado.