Protecting Sacred Spaces
We sat down to talk with the author of The Emerald Mile about Colorado River conservation efforts & threats to the Grand Canyon.
Kevin Fedarko has traveled the world, writing for publications including Outside, Esquire, and National Geographic Adventure. He served as a Grand Canyon river guide for six seasons, experiencing the stunning beauty and immersing himself in the wild nature of our country’s most iconic national park.
Fedarko’s first book, The Emerald Mile, won the 2014 National Outdoor Book Award and most recently drew attention to two looming threats that could do permanent harm to the canyon’s unrivaled sanctity and grandeur.
We caught up with Kevin and got some of his impressions on Colorado River conservation efforts, threats to the Grand Canyon, and reasons for hope emerging from these often disheartening subjects.
Having spent time in the Grand Canyon, both as a river guide and as a journalist, how do those experiences inform your feelings about threats to the Grand Canyon today?
Deeply and emphatically — in every way and at every level. During those six years that I spent as a whitewater guide, I came to learn the “world below the rim” from the bottom up: the layers of stone that surge toward the sky in terraced, pastel-hued bands; the light that drops into the abyss each morning and smoothly claws its way back out at night; the moods and cadences of the river as it pushes through the canyon.
The descriptions of the river corridor in my writing — the rock, the light, the colors, the weather, the birds and animals, the feel of the place, and above all and always, the magic and the brutality of whitewater — all of those things arose directly from my experiences as a boatman. And together, they opened a series of doors that helped me to understand and come to terms with a place that is not only profoundly beautiful, but also fragile and filled with mystery.
In many ways, that world is as much a cerebral wilderness as a physical one — a place whose boundaries extend far beyond the borders of the familiar and thereby reshape the sensibilities of those who bind themselves to it. When you connect with a landscape at that level, the prospect of seeing it harmed or destroyed by development produces a response that is visceral, blunt, and encapsulated most succinctly by a single word: outrage.
As an aspiring rafting guide, was there one moment so moving, so euphoric, that there was no other option than to share the story of The Emerald Mile with the world?
Not really — although your question suggests that perhaps there should have been such a moment. But the path of my own thinking — not unlike the Colorado itself — tends to meander back and forth a bit as it heads downstream. It took many evenings around the campfire listening to veteran river guides share river stories before I finally realized that many of those tales either revolved around or traced back to the legend of The Emerald Mile.
Having said that, I should also acknowledge that when it finally dawned on me what a tremendously exciting adventure narrative this was, I knew enough about the history of the canyon to appreciate that the story of The Emerald Mile was more than a turbo-charged anecdote about a speed run. In addition to being that, it embraces the larger story of the canyon itself: its discovery and its exploration, as well as the complex and fascinating narrative of the Glen Canyon Dam. All of those elements came together — quite violently, as it turned out — during the spring of 1983, when the runoff on the Colorado achieved a size and a level of savagery that had not been witnessed in generations.
The speed run braids those elements together in a manner that I find irresistibly compelling. I don’t know of another Grand Canyon river story that encapsulates everything about that unique and special place as succinctly and as powerfully as what Kenton Grua and his companions set out to achieve aboard that little wooden dory.
American Rivers’ President, Bob Irvin, was recently quoted in your New York Times piece, saying “if we start building gondolas and other forms of development, we lose much of what makes the Grand Canyon so special. It would be a devastation, a sacrilege, to build that structure there.” That makes the Grand Canyon seem like a truly holy place. Why do you think the canyon holds such power for Americans — even people who haven’t been there, but just know about it?
[Credit: Daniel Luke Holton — www.trustedphoto.com]
Although it is neither the first, nor the largest, nor the most popular of America’s national parks, the Grand Canyon is nevertheless regarded as the touchstone and the centerpiece of the entire system. And rightly so. Because nowhere else on earth has nature provided a more graphic display of its titanic indifference to the works and aspirations of man.
The walls of that abyss are comprised of 22 separate strata of stone that plunge more than a mile beneath the surface of the earth. The bloodlines of that rock extend seventeen million centuries into the past — more than a third of the planet’s lifespan, almost one-tenth the age of the universe itself. Within the shadow of those ramparts, visitors are reminded that when human affairs are refracted through the canyon’s negative space — the twin pools of deep time and geologic aloofness — not a single beam of light escapes. In relation to the forces that have shaped the cosmos, we are tiny and irrelevant. And thus we would do well to live humbly — and with a sense of balance.
That message may well carry a special relevance to us as Americans, if only because we tend to be so impressed with our own noise — the shock and awe that we generate as we go about our business.
In this sense, although the canyon may belong to the entire world, we as Americans belong particularly to it. The place has things to say that we, perhaps more than anyone else, need to hear.
Whether or not we’re conscious of this fact, I think most Americans, at some fundamental level, understand this. That’s what makes the place holy.
A developer says they want to improve access to the canyon so all abilities and ages can experience it – how would you respond?
First, they are conjuring the solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist. At the moment, there are abundant ways for people of all ages and every ability level to experience the canyon, whether it’s hiking the trails, riding to the bottom and back on a mule, sightseeing in the sky above by helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft, or traveling the length of the canyon by boat. As those examples illustrate, we have, if anything, too much access because a number of these services — in particular the air-tour industry — are already creating profound disruptions to the wilderness corridor inside the canyon.
This leads to the second point, which is that striving to provide universal access to a fragile terrain where beauty and solitude still flourish almost invariably diminishes the qualities that make that place special. Part of the lie that these developers are now peddling is that quick, easy, cheap access to the heart of the country’s premiere national park is not, in fact, benign and it certainly doesn’t constitute an improvement of the park. Nor, it must also be pointed out, is this kind of access a right that goes with American citizenship. Rather, it is a privilege that must be purchased through some measure of effort, with some expenditure of time, with care taken to ensure that harm is not done to the very qualities that make the place so alluring — and, I would add, so profoundly difference from place like, say, Niagara Falls, where every form of access imaginable has been granted.
Although these developers would have you believe otherwise, there is nothing in the National Park Service’s Organic Act which mandates that the government is required make it easy or convenient or fast for people to see the country’s wonders. What is required, by law, is that those places are protected and preserved, which often requires not opening them up to the masses in a manner that transforms our national parks into amusement parks. So access is a false standard and a bogus justification. Which leads to the third and final point.
Although the developers behind this scheme are doing their best to conceal their motives behind a fog bank of lofty-sounding ideals — opening the canyon up for children, for the elderly, and for anyone else who might not otherwise easily penetrate into its deepest reaches — the true driver behind this project is a more basic (and considerably less noble) force: Greed.
Imbedded within the proposal for the Grand Canyon tramway — a cable-driven gondola system that would deliver 10,000 people to the bottom of the canyon each and every day — is a credo that most ordinary people find repugnant. It is the belief that a tiny circle of entrepreneurs have the right to line their pockets at the expense of everybody else by destroying a piece of the commonwealth — a landscape that is not only the birthright, but also the responsibility, of every American.
You’ve written quite a diversity of stories over your career, but I’m curious – what are the three most influential books in your literary past?
For fire and beauty, Edward Abbey, especially Desert Solitaire, his beloved homage to the canyon country of the southwest.
For a willingness to drill into nuance and master complexity, John McPhee. There is no better testament to the geologic history of North America than his monumental petrology, Annals of the Former World. And no writer has ever produced a more eloquent airing of the arguments for and against the Glen Canyon Dam than Encounters with the Archdruid.
Finally, when it comes to a reverence for history, storytelling, and character, along with an indelible love for America, any book by David McCullough, who attended the same high school I did in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and who remains the gold standard for me when it comes to integrity in the craft of writing.
You’ve been around the world, from Croatia to Afghanistan and back again – if you could have been part of one historical exploration, what would it have been?
That’s an easy one. The greatest exploratory odyssey in the Grand Canyon was, of course, John Wesley Powell’s seminal river trip, which was the first expedition in recorded history though the length of the canyon. One of the most noteworthy aspects of that venture, however, is that it actually represented the closing chapter in the exploration of the American West — an extended, 65-year-long encounter with the unbroken wilderness that stretched between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean.
That remarkable era began with Lewis and Clark in May of 1804, and it reached it point of closure in August of 1869 when Powell and the surviving members of his crew passed through the Grand Wash Cliffs at the far end of the Grand Canyon, thereby filling in the last blank spot on the map of the continental United States.
Everything that unfolded between those years was a drama whose wonder we can now guess at, but never touch directly. And perhaps the most remarkable part of the whole pageant unfolded as the members of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery made their way by boat up the Missouri toward the villages of the Mandan and the Hidatsas.
The Great Plains during those years were an American Serengeti, alive with great herds of elk, antelope, and buffalo, as well as the predators that trailed them. The endless sea of grass was still unplowed and intact. And far ahead, of course, lay the rivers of Montana, the great mountain wall of the Rockies — and, finally, the Columbia tumbling toward the sea.
I would give almost anything to have been a part of that expedition and witness the opening moments of perhaps the greatest adventure in American history.
Do you have any words of advice for people who are fighting to protect Grand Canyon, or other wild places?
This isn’t the first time this has happened. Nor will it be the last.
Back in the 1960s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation came within a hair’s breadth of constructing not one but two colossal hydro-electric dams inside the Grand Canyon — a project that would have transformed the most magnificent stretch of the Colorado into a series of stagnant reservoirs teeming with house boats and jet skiers.
The fight to block those dams was spearheaded by David Brower and the Sierra Club, but the battle enjoined citizens from all over the country. People from places as diverse as Maine and Alabama and South Dakota. People who might never have set foot in the Southwest, much less have seen the canyon with their own eyes. All of those people rose up to express their outrage, and together, they won. Which illustrates a key principle that’s worth keeping in mind in light of what is happening right now.
Conservationists often lament the inherent unfairness of a fight like this. After all, developers can afford to lose campaigns indefinitely: following each defeat, nothing prevents them trying again. But for those who love wilderness, the loss of a single engagement can spell the end of the war, because landscapes that fall to development will never return.
If you care about places like the Grand Canyon, there’s something inherently wrong about that. But there may be something inherently reaffirming about it, too.
Thanks to the unevenness of the playing field, each generation of Americans is called upon to fight like hell on behalf of our natural wonders — and in the process, to reaffirm our conviction, as a nation, that wilderness is an asset whose worth may be difficult if not impossible to quantify, but without which we would be immeasurably poorer.
What the Grand Canyon offers, in many ways, is the supreme test of that principle.
Every fifteen or twenty years, it seems, the canyon forces us to undergo a kind of national character exam. The stakes of that test are not only immense; they also pose questions that penetrate to the very center of who we are as a people.
If we cannot muster the resources and the resolve to protect this, perhaps our greatest natural treasure, what — if anything — are we willing to protect?And do we even deserve such richness in the first place?
I’d like to think that we’re still capable of meeting the challenges posed by those questions.
To become involved with this issue, sign our petition to support Grand Canyon Superintendent Dave Uberuaga in defending the canyon from these and other threats to the sanctity and wildness of our nation’s most iconic National Park.
