Scars and Regrowth

We go to the outdoors to find healing, to find resilience. But how resilient is the natural world on its own?

I often think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem God’s Grandeur when I reflect on the earth’s power to renew itself and its ability to come back to life. He writes:

“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; 

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; 

And wears man’s smudge, and shares man’s smell: the soil 

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

Everywhere we look, we see humanity’s smudge on the earth. Mountain tops leveled in West Virginia. The toxic, gaping wound of the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, once so poisonous it supposedly lured birds to their death. The Climax mine between Copper Mountain and Leadville, its deadly chemical pools abandoned in place. Every time I fly into Salt Lake City, my eyes move from the snowy Wasatch peaks across the valley to the Kennecott Copper Mine—the largest human-made excavation, and the deepest open-pit mine in the world.

When I worked for the Forest Service, I saw roads everywhere: timber roads, dead-end roads, roads that haven’t been maintained in decades. Agencies already lack the resources to care for the massive road networks within national forests and BLM lands, yet the current administration has even proposed rescinding the Roadless Rule to carve new roads into untouched places.

And yet some of these places recover.

I used to drive past vast clear-cuts near Island Park, Idaho. Stumps scattered across flats, signs marking the year of harvest. The scars of the Targhee National Forest, right on Yellowstone’s border, were so stark they could be seen from space.

In the ’90s, when I was building trails for the Forest Service, my crew was thrilled to learn we’d be working on the Continental Divide Trail. We imagined the remote Centennial Mountains. Instead, we were sent into Island Park’s clear-cuts, laying trail through boggy, barren land where only a few trees had been spared. At night, we’d escape to Yellowstone’s edge, wandering among nameless lodgepole forests with no paths, just to be reminded of what nature could be.

Those clear-cuts stuck with me as a symbol of what destruction looks like. And yet, thirty years later, I’ve driven that same road between Jackson and Ennis, Montana, and seen the forest regrow. Slowly, imperfectly, but alive again. The damage isn’t erased, but it gave me hope.

I grew up on the Jersey Shore, which might not sound like a place of great beauty but it is. Sand dunes, holly forests, shifting barrier islands. Naturally, those islands should form and reform with the ocean, but we’ve pinned them in place with jetties. In the 1970s, the beaches were filthy: garbage on the sand, red tides, raw sewage closing the water.

That has changed. The Jersey Shore is cleaner now. Dolphins return to its waters. It may not yet resemble the paradise Henry Hudson first encountered or the homeland the Lenni Lenape built on the bounty of ocean and forest, but it’s coming back.

We can restore damaged places. There is hope.

Here in Colorado, wolves are finally being reintroduced. Conflicts with ranchers may arise, but they can be managed. Wolves were exterminated in the past because it was the easiest solution for commerce. Understandable but as Aldo Leopold realized the moment he shot a wolf in Arizona and saw “the green fire dying” in her eyes. Too late, he understood he had destroyed something the world needed.

Amid the doom and gloom, it’s worth focusing on the positives: protecting land, rewilding landscapes, closing unnecessary roads, bringing back wildlife, and finding creative ways to coexist with nature. Even in cities, there is progress. The New York Times recently reported on micro-forests—tiny, dense green spaces planted in urban landscapes better known for concrete than trees. These oases not only help people breathe and reconnect, but they also foster thriving soil ecosystems and biodiversity.

If we can do this on a small scale, we can do it on a large one. One of my heroes, biologist E.O. Wilson, argued that we must preserve half the earth for other species. It sounds impossible but it isn’t, if we find bold, creative ways to reintegrate wildness back into our world.

Doug Schnitzspahn's Opened Container is a weekly column that highlights Doug's unique point of view on the intersection of outdoor culture, policy, business, politics, and conservation. To hear more, listen to Doug's podcast Open Container by clicking here. Let's get some.