It’s not hard to feel out in the wilderness when you’re out in the wilderness. What about when you’re surrounded?
Recent Supreme Court rulings that insist women must have babies while corporations cannot be regulated (say that five times fast, then barf in a gutter!) create a bad kind of wilderness: one in which people are left alone to falter while corporations grow fat and smoky, burning little bits of themselves up in the atmosphere but not so many they can’t still be profitable.
There’s still wilderness out there: I encountered some recently, the Desolation Wilderness west of Lake Tahoe. I camped for three nights near lakes, swatted mosquitoes, lost the trail, felt perhaps overly relieved that there were still patches of snow up high and water in the lakes, proving that everything isn’t decimated yet.
And yet—driving out to the wilderness, we passed the area ravaged by the Caldor Fire last year. Black tree trunks surrounding lonely chimneys, sole witnesses to houses that used to be. The destruction was extensive yet random: five houses in a row gone, another still there, green siding, surrounded by children’s toys, a perfect place to grow up.
We are building ourselves a wilderness, the Supreme Court is building ourselves a wilderness, not the nice kind where we enjoy hiking and marvel at views, but the bad kind where we are pitted against each other. It’s hard to say we don’t have to listen to them—after all, in the wilderness there is no law but nature. Part of society is agreeing on systems that, at least in theory, make things better for everybody. Make our water safe to drink, our air clean to breathe, our bodies free to live without bearing unwanted fruit.
What do we do when the people in charge aren’t practicing good stewardship? Do we usher them out, a practice for which there seems to be no clear precedent? Do we turn our backs? Do we simply do our own thing, cut down the trees that are dying, make some sunlight for the seedlings growing up in ash?
“If you don’t have regulations, then the only people who will benefit will be those who, with no rules, will make more money,” Marietta Robinson, a former Obama appointee on the Consumer Product Safety Commission who teaches about administrative agencies at George Washington University’s law school, told The New York Times. “But it will be to the great detriment to the rest of us.”
We are in the wilderness, but we are not here alone. There are others. We can make our own rules. To survive, and thrive, together.