A New Form of Beauty: Glen Canyon Beyond Climate Change by Goin Peter; Friederici Peter

Author:Goin, Peter; Friederici, Peter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Arizona Press

THE UNCHARTED

What are we supposed to do with our knowledge that we live at the end of nature, that the driver of the Earth’s powerful cycles has become us as much as it is the other thing?

We have to grieve, of course. And celebrate.

Celebrate is easy for me to say because it is hard to feel bad when you are messing around on a small boat, even when that boat is spinning around in murky and uncertain currents under a too-bright overcast sky on what might fairly be termed the embodiment of the biggest slow-motion disaster that has ever faced humanity. We might celebrate because that is what we do when we mourn a loved one, or even when we mourn a part of our own past that is gone: because grief alone amounts to despair, and takes on resonance and meaning only when it is fused with the joy of what has gone and the joy of what we can carry with us from the past. We might celebrate simply because we are alive and are all collectively entering a sort of place—or many places—that John Wesley Powell would have recognized well: uncharted terrain.

To know not: we’ve got that covered now, for better or worse.

Let us put aside for now the worry about where the water is going to come from, even if that is one of the things we really do not well know. Thirst is a powerful driver. As the Colorado River dries—and not just the Colorado, but numerous other arid-lands rivers in the western United States and around the world—people will find water, whether through conservation and wise use or through violence and unwanted migration. Maybe the green lawns of Phoenix really will go away at last, or the lettuce fields of Yuma. How that will happen is a question of critical importance that I am not going to answer here. My concern is broader: how do we reimagine a landscape—every landscape—that is changing to something new?

It was a thought much on my mind as we paddled up the side canyon and away from the river: about three miles, an easy glide across slack water, and we camped that night on a comfortable sandy beach below broken cliffs whose white pallor showed exactly how much water had withdrawn. How dark would it have been here under seventy feet of water, I wondered. Would there have been any glimmer, or even a memory of what light had looked like on the surface? There is always something a bit creepy about exploring what was once buried so deep: Lake Powell’s withdrawal exposes sunken boats, and the detritus of camping and fishing, and always I have the uneasy thought that there must be long-sunken bodies lying around somewhere too.

Maybe not here. It was a sweet camping spot. The night was calm. The moon rose. Coyotes howled. Maybe they fed on the fish that kept jumping and landing back in the water with vigorous, always startling slapping sounds. The beach

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