A Pundit’s Nature
Note: Hacks of media companies have surfaced previously unpublished op-eds. Here is one written by a well-known pundit for a major American publication.
Now that it’s summertime, I reunited with college roommates to tour America’s national parks. Traveling and camping with your oldest male friends somehow gives you a rare opportunity to think about nature.
Walking through Yellowstone, for instance, I noticed that, in nature, there are two kinds of running water. We might call them “brooks” and “rivers.”
Brooks are brief flows of water whose shallow, rocky beds cause them to babble. In forests, they move swiftly, their currents barely remaining in any one place for too long. Their water meanders around deeply rooted trees and heavy boulders, hardly touching them, as if terrified of being overwhelmed by their depth and gravitas.
Brooks can also be found in marshes, entangled, by their own devising, in grasses and currents that bring their water to a standstill, unable to move forward, to engage with a larger body of water. And they dimple shorelines, projecting inland just slightly, not too deeply, as if not wanting to upset the landscape by making strong demands of it.
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Rivers, on the other hand, do run deeply. They slice through the earth to create new landscapes — carving up bedrock, moving massive boulders, and uprooting ancient trees. Sometimes they may move slowly, as if knowing how much time it takes to have a profound impact, to leave the world a very different place from what it had been. Compared to brooks, the flow of rivers is abundant, moving immense amounts of water forward to feed oceans, bodies of water of great depth and magnitude that rely on that abundance. And in their passage from mountain to ocean, rivers provide the water so vital for plants, for animals — for life.
Sometimes, if we scan brooks quickly or from afar, we may mistake them for rivers. From a distance, we don’t notice their shallow bed and so think their waters must move deeply, transforming the terrain they pass through. But up close, we see their bottoms lie just below their surface. We notice that the rocks that brooks move are little more than pebble-sized, frequently get stuck in place, and do not combine to make a greater landscape. We see that brooks lack the heft to do anything more than float the lightweight detritus of nature that has fallen onto their surface.
What do brooks and rivers tell us about how to live as a society? Rivers suggest we need to think new thoughts, to feel confident in our ability to take charge of our destinies, to not be afraid of upending conventional wisdom and the institutions that rely on such thinking.
But the lightness with which brooks pass through the landscape suggests that society cannot be changed all that much, or at least that brooks cannot — perhaps should not — have much effect. They seem to say that, like boulders and redwoods, the impoverished and the wealthy will always be with us. And that recognizing and accepting this is a good thing.
Let’s not be rivers, brooks seem to imply. Let’s avoid having their ambition to create radically new landscapes. Whatever is exists for good reasons, even if we don’t know or understand those reasons, and so should be left untouched.
And yet, wisdom lies in our combining the two, just as nature does. Somehow.
