A recent American Spectator article reminds me that it is a bit odd that conservationism and conservatism are not more closely linked. This would not quite be the liberal's conservationism, of course, since the conservative's objectives would tend more to beauty and less to a view of natural objects as gods, and the conservative would, I hope, be less fearful of poor health and more trustful of science. Yet it could be more extreme: the conservative might be less reluctant to say that he'd prefer saving Sequoias to saving starving children. The article is on the Montana landscape:
The only time I've wept tears of awe was when I climbed a high ridge on the Front. Thousands of miles of rugged mountains at my back, tens of thousands of miles of rolling plains 4,000 feet below the cliff.. Beautiful is too easy a word, and ultimately the wrong word. It's gut-wrenchingly awesome! The might of The Lord wrought relentlessly. It's not candy for the eyes but nourishment for the soul. This is precisely where Bud Guthrie, Jr. was raised and lived and wrote the novel The Big Sky, now Montana's unofficial nickname.
Here the western edge of the northern plains meets the young eastern overthrust of an active tectonic plate. It's a stark, jumbly kaleidoscope of ecosystems. The Front stretches roughly 200 miles from Helena north to Glacier National Park and the Canadian border, then a few more hundred on up to Jasper. The Blackfeet called this stretch The Backbone of the World. Walk over it and you too would fear our planet would fall apart without it.
I agree with the sympathies of the author, but the photo has the opposite effect on me. It strikes me as a beautiful photo, and all the more beautiful because of the combination of factory and mountains, each of which adds to the overall effect. No doubt, too, 200 miles of just mountains gets a bit boring, just as one mile of cornfields is beautiful but if you're travelling 270 miles to your parents' farm it's nice to see some farmhouses along the way too.
It's something else.
Presently, efforts are being made to install natural gas well sites, pipelines and "sweetening plants" along the Front. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then click right now on Save the Front, easily worth 3,000 words of my own extended indignant environmentalist prose. This natural gas refining plant is located on the Canadian side of the Front. (Call me biased, but our side of the Rockies is even more dramatic.)
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