Jeremy Lynch | Moab, UT
Jeremy Lynch is the Stewardship Director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance
Why does wilderness matter to you?
The term many of us use today – wilderness – is a reference point on a grander landscape, a way sign pointing at how we evolved, from what, what it is we might be, and maybe even a why. The essence of being wild of compartmentalized in wilderness, just as I lay my thoughts like stones across a creek bed to slow the flow of water.
Wilderness matters as a branch in a tradition of acknowledging our part-ness – that we have roles to play but we are not kings. We happened to stand, learn to run, peel fruit, seer the meat of equally beautiful creatures – but our wildness remains. And wilderness, as an idea, has the capacity to remind us how reliant we are on everything our senses can and cannot detect.
Why does wilderness matter to your community?
Where I happen to live, most residents and visitors are bright-eyed and new to the majesty of a landscape unlike what they were taught in books. This wonder is essentially human, and yet it is a double-edged sword. Amazed, we don’t see the pinyon-juniper forest for the trees – we do not see the lesson for the consequence.
Through decades restoring landscapes via perennial agricultural, ecological restoration, and now hands-on service learning for people who flock to southern Utah, I believe the idea of wilderness must exist hand-in-hand with an ecological mindset, and a basic awareness of the natural world - ourselves included.
We travel far with little trouble, bringing great consequence. Yet it is an opportunity to teach and be taught, to become true land stewards. If we make decisions that acknowledge our needs are not the primary needs of all living creatures, waterways and ecosystems, we will shape the human mind to cultivate the same wonder people feel stepping outside.
Share a story about a special experience you have had in wilderness.
I have known harrowing experiences in wilderness, near tumbles from knife edge precipices, and I have known brilliant moments of observance and listening as evenings gave way to night, the earth to the stars.
But what matters most to me about the wilderness experience are the people. Humans are a social species. My work has long been sharing space with “strangers” with shared goals, if not shared experiences, or belief systems for that matter. Every fireside chat, dry stacked stonewall built, and the conversations and laughter that did the heavy lifting – this is the specialness of wilderness: when one let’s go of narratives of loss, of the imposition of manufactured worldviews and taglines, and people work together on however a small thing so that, when the aromas of dinner first course the air, and maybe the reflected light of the moon first rises above a sandstone tower, we feel accomplished, together, outside time.
What are your hopes for the future of wilderness?
Does wilderness – the place, the feeling, the web of it all - need my hope? Maybe not, maybe so. Wilderness the term needs to be better understood – and not singularly, but expansively. Without erecting statues to its magnificence, it ought be known by its proximity. I hesitate to use the word elevated, but it ought be felt more – not only in the canyons of the Escalante or the lakes of the boundary waters, but within communities. In the curb cuts letting stormwater fill basins dug to grow shade trees over your office-neighbor’s parking spot. In the way we speak of fire regimes – and how we actively manage ecosystems, soils, flora and fauna populations which have been in our line of sight for countless ages.
My hope for wilderness the word, the precedent, the gnarled legal tooth, is that it is known for the evolving symbol it is while – at the very same time – continues to impress deeply how much of it is us.
Let us share the language of the land so long as we are it.
