Are Parks Essential Business?

In the span of two months, most of my routines and expectations about work, leisure, and community have been uprooted. The Coronavirus has dealt an unbelievable amount of change to American society in less time than it takes for winter’s snow to melt off the Bitterroots. 

In some ways, health crises of this scale are unimaginable to a society accustomed to modern medical magic. But look back a few decades—my Great-Grandmother lived through the Spanish Flu, and a century later pandemics still happen.

I am an essential worker, to the Government, at least. The question of who and what is essential has become politically charged. 

In all of this discussion of utility, serious discussion about public land has been scarce. Are parks essential business? 

The main story about public lands during the pandemic has been about leisure. National Parks have given free entry to the quarantined public, some have been overwhelmed by visitors, and some have been closed for public safety. 

In a moment of catastrophe, Americans are turning to the outdoors for peace. I get it. Rotating between working my essential job, complete with masks and gloves and social distancing, and my locked-down apartment has been lonely and exhausting. So my partner and I slipped out of town to Kamiak Butte, a park operated by Whitman County in Washington for a hike.

The park is an island in more ways than one. A long spur of ancient quartzite forms the mountain, rising hundreds of feet above the meandering Palouse hills. The rocks of this ridge are over 300 million years old, the last of ancient mountains obscured by 15 million year old basalt lava flows and even younger Palouse hills. 

Even more remarkable is the diversity of plant life that occupies such a small space. The cooler northern face supports deep, dark woods, full of Douglas Fir, Ponderosa Pine, Larches, Maples, and Oceanspray.

The warmer southern face of the mountain supports the largest intact piece of Palouse prairie in the world, a now critically endangered ecosystem that only began to be plowed en mass when my Great-Great-Grandmother was on her way to the United States at the twilight of the 19th century. Less than one percent remains. 

Through the hike, we gobbled back and forth with turkeys, dodged the mad chase of romancing squirrels, and followed the idyllic flights of bumblebees through the flowers. 

By elevation, by age, and by ecology, Kamiak Butte is an island. To the species atop it, including us, it’s a refuge.  

But is it essential? The foundations of the economy should be meeting human’s basic needs. Clearly, sustainable management of natural resources falls in that category. You can’t hoard toilet paper without logging, after all. But what about a public land without marketable economic value?

What about wilderness?

To think that this remarkable place is “inessential” is sacrilege. Even if none of the trees were logged, or any of the trails hiked, or the ore mined, or the pastures grazed, or the flowers photographed, or the winds felt, the infinite labor of a creative universe would still be at work, it’s magnitude and complexity hidden from observation – but not lost.  

“What is essential,” the Little Prince would say, “is invisible.”  

I am exhilarated by these hills. I feel humbled by that one percent of prairie that remains. And as someone who felt my world shift in only a matter of weeks, I think I can empathize with the experience of a natural world so suddenly and immeasurably changed, like a prairie plowed under.

And just to please the utilitarians reading, consider this:

It is suspected the Coronavirus originated in the natural world, through the wet markets of south Asia. Contact with bats seems to have spread the virus to humans, which has killed tens of thousands. 

Bats, it should be known, have taken far more suffering than they have dealt. Millions of bats have perished from White Nose Syndrome in the United States in the last 20 years, which has been spread by uninformed cavers carrying invisible fungal spores on their clothes. So it goes both ways.

Pandemics will happen forever. An ethical relationship to the natural world might just help bats, prairies, and ourselves make it through a little easier.