Photo from Lava Beds National Monument Park Service

Let’s first consider the evidence and then move on to the issues just mentioned. An article datelined 20 September 2019 by Patricia Cohen appeared in the NY Times: “Roundup weedkiller is blamed for cancers, but farmers say it’s not going away.” Saying that Roundup is “blamed for” sounds ambiguous and timid but considering that the gist of the article hinges on a pair of powerful countervailing contentions, that was probably the most responsible way for the headline composer to put it. On the one hand, Bayer, the German corporation that bought Monsanto and Roundup along with it, has lost several law suits alleging that the deadly potion caused cancer in the plaintiffs (“a substantial factor,” “had caused,” “can probably cause” are among jury conclusions; there were also allegations that Monsanto had known about the danger and concealed or distorted the facts) with the result that the company is now pressed by courts and investors to resolve several thousand suits by several thousand plaintiffs at a cost somewhere in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars range.

On the other hand, according to many farmers, the stuff works, helping them increase crop yields and reduce expenses. Of course, weeds are doing what many organisms do when faced by threats—they evolve resistance, rendering it less and less potent, so that before too many more years Bayer will have to come up with another deadly potion to replace it, and presumably a new seed equivalent to “Roundup ready” seeds that will similarly bask unharmed when poison is applied. But until then Bayer will continue selling Roundup and farmers continue buying it. Both the corporation and the users find it profitable to do so. In 2016 there were 287,000,000 pounds of Roundup spread atop the U.S. portion of the Earth.

As usual when a situation like this erupts, people debate the validity of the scientific studies that address deleterious side effects of the toxin. The World Health Organization’s International
Agency for Research on Cancer reviewed the public studies and concluded that glyphosate, the chemical herbicide that delivers Roundup’s coup de grace to a weed’s presence, was “probably carcinogenic in humans.” Other studies were not so sure, although even these identify it as toxic to aquatic life, and some studies question its toxicity to insects and other wildlife. Bayer Corporation maintains that most studies show it to be safe, although plaintiff lawyers introduced evidence “of Monsanto’s attempts over the years to influence regulators, shape scientific research and discredit critics to undermine governmental pronouncements.” Such activities are obviously not honorable but completely predictable when a corporation thinks its bottom line is threatened, truth and public health be damned. In my view corporate credibility in claiming the virtues and harmlessness of its products approaches zero. After all, when has anyone ever heard a corporation presented evidence of possible dangers arising from its production processes or products admit that it sounded serious and would receive an immediate precautionary response, rather than simply denying the evidence and undertaking a public relations blitz?

Most farmers are apparently sufficiently trusting of the Corporation that Bayer believes it will achieve worldwide sales of $12b. by 2024, which would seem more than enough to pay off a long line of dying plaintiffs. The Times article quoted a few of these trusting agricultural souls. “A fabulous tool,” said one who also indicated the lawsuits would have no effect on his usage. Another said that the dead weeds and growing crop were “just lovely.” Since it does what they want it to do, they’re satisfied. Whether this represents tunnel vision or indifference about side effects, I cannot say.

In fairness, although there is considerable evidence of damaging effects of Roundup on wide swaths of life and so far, every jury that’s heard a case has come down on the side of plaintiffs, no one can claim that the evidence is so overwhelming as to make it an open-and-shut case. Scientific studies of toxicity are highly complex and in our capitalistic world invariably contested by economic interests. Even so, how much poison is too much poison when it comes to the most widely used chemical on Earth both now and historically? Must the case be open-and-shut? Would you send your sons and daughters out into the fields to apply it around plants whose seeds, unlike your children, were genetically modified to withstand its effects? Strictly speaking, Roundup’s toxicity may still be debatable—or at least, is still being debated—so perhaps a few cancer deaths are acceptable in light of the evidential inconclusiveness combined with demonstrable economic benefits. There have been years when over 100,000 Americans died from air pollution and few of us took to the barricades in protest. And around 60,000 die annually from gunshot and we accept the carnage despite the objections of a few powerless individuals. The American way of life is littered with casualties; their causes all have vigorous advocates; we accept that and move on. We believe that living requires trade-offs, these among them. A decidedly grim perspective actually, not indicative of a robust respect for the value of life, but seemingly our own.

Such is the evidence, along with a few speculations about the cultural context. I suggested at the beginning that this would tell us something about spiritual health among some Americans. In my view, spiritual health is not merely a matter of one’s relation to his Maker, so to speak, but instead to the whole of existence of which a Maker or at least some mysterious pervasive presence is an aspect. Spirituality implies an experience of being as unity, a sort of brotherhood and sisterhood of life, fraternal solidarity; humans and all the rest are expressions of diversity as momentary configurations that arise from and return to Being. Spiritual health requires our identification with others as fellow-travelers bound together impermanently within our cherished space between birth and death, in mutual respect, accepting responsibility to heal and help as needed and when we can, but at least not to make matters worse. In essence, spiritual health is, minimally, something like the health of a community writ large.

What this has to do with the Roundup controversy is this: The use of Roundup involves spreading millions of gallons of herbicide across hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland (not to mention suburban yards). The chemical is harmful to some degree to many forms of life beyond the targeted weeds. Whether alone or in combination with any of thousands of other chemical toxins discharged deliberately as herbicides and pesticides and as a byproduct of production processes such as those that produce plastics or other chemicals, it is impossible to imagine that it will not sicken a certain number of people and wildlife, including amphibians, fish and insects, some of whom will suffer and die. Because of its ubiquity, it is a major component, to some degree, of the chemicalization and degradation of Nature. In light of one’s spiritual and ethical identification with Nature, with Being, wouldn’t one seek an alternative friendlier to existence?

Change is always difficult, but research and practice on what are called Sustainable Agricultural Practices is not new and information not hard to find. One might begin at https://www.ucsusa.org/food-agriculture/advance-sustainable-agriculture/what-is-sustainable-agriculture, which is the Union of Concerned Scientists’ website, and move out from there. However, one goes about it, I propose that any farmer who doesn’t seriously examine alternatives to his chemicalized practices may have forgotten that even capitalism operates within a more inclusive and richer matrix that mere profit-seeking. There is something that strikes some ears as discordant—and not just those attached to people dying—when farmers who have been presented with jury verdicts convicting a substance of causing cancer respond that it’s “just lovely” and “a fabulous tool.”

But if Roundup accomplishes what its users want it to, how prudent would it be to risk alternatives? From the purely economic perspective, not prudent at all, unless some alternative promised even more profit. But if the perspective is not exclusively materialistic, if it widens to include concern for the Earth and for those who might ingest or inhale glyphosate, and even further if it considers the larger effects of industrialized agricultural practices and industrialized values as a whole on society and Nature, then it seems to me that prudence hits pause while it takes another look. Imprudent, profit-centered practices have brought us to the present highly perilous state of human-caused climate disruption, land and ocean degradation, and vast biodiversity loss, including once again the prospect of an avian “silent spring,” since it’s just been reported that bird populations worldwide have declined by 29% (that’s 2,900,000,000 individual bluebirds, robins, cardinals…) over the last fifty years. Human heedlessness, of which use of Roundup is but one aspect, is making a mess of the world—microplastics are literally everywhere and even Space is so littered with debris of Earth origin that concerns arise about safety of future spaceships and satellites—and who but us can clean it all up?

Questions float through my mind at the prospect of climatic apocalypse—Are we a suicidal species? Or has Gaia determined that, like a diseased and hopelessly damaged limb, Homo sapiens must be amputated for the sake of the whole?

Status of Monsanto Roundup Litigation

As a thought experiment, let us suppose that Creator Universe, whose view we would appeal to, decided to size-up what had become of its creative endeavors? Although Earth is but a nanoparticle in the immensity of space, the Universe may have known 4.6 billion years ago, as our solar system took shape, that Earth had unique potential for a planet in its cosmic region. How had that potential turned out?

Life appeared 3.6 b. years before today in a single celled form called prokaryotes and since then has evolved increased diversity, beauty, and fascination. It even endured setbacks that wiped out most of life but bounced back and moved on, eventually in better shape than before. 3,599,700,000 years after life’s beginning (give or take a few millennia) the species Homo sapiens showed up, Homo having appeared a bit over two million years earlier. The Universe may have suspected early-on that a species with such a brain, consciousness, and range of capacities represented an evolutionary gamble. But perhaps it did not fully appreciate the extent of that risk. It does now.

It isn’t just that scattered over the Earth are groups of various ideological, religious, and economic convictions slaughtering other groups with their own convictions, and that in the doing of this children and other noncombatants die as remorselessly as those wielding weapons. Nor that this sort of thing has been going on for thousands of years with Homo “sapiens” never having learned its futility and evident impetus toward repetition. Nor that, along with our intra-species depredations, we came to operate toward the natural world in the same manner, taking and taking and taking with hardly a thought toward what we left behind and its condition. Materialist man did not care, as long as he got what he wanted.

The Universe had known we were a species prone to self-centeredness (as a species relative to other species and as individuals and groups relative to other individuals and groups), to anxieties over real and imagined prospects of loss or threat, and a low threshold for aggression when either desire or fear were evoked. But humans might have evolved and learned to control and redirect these oft fatal inadequacies, even to supersede them through better judgment and measures of selflessness. But not so, alas.

Which raises the question: Does humanity deserve to survive? To put it more clearly, if we manage our extinction, or its near fulfillment, and the collapse of civilization as we’ve known it through the predictable consequences of our own choices and actions, is that any great loss to the being of the world? Would a tragedy or an injustice have occurred? Losses there would be, yes: instances of selfless love, compassion, art and other creative expression, community engagement and many meaningful endeavors, the joy of being alive for those who noticed it. But are these enough to justify our habituated forms of life negation, our willingness to risk it all for a foolish pride and trivial yearnings? I have raised this question in other essays related to the irrational willingness of our species to gamble with the good Earth’s future, including the future of ourselves and other life, by way of nuclear annihilation and catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. Here I will look at the considerations involved in responding to that question. But I must reiterate the seriousness of our situation first: except for most of the members of a single American political party, almost everyone else on Earth is aware of the threats portended by human-caused climate change and the massive disruptions that will come from that, and even members of that benighted American party acknowledge that a large-scale nuclear exchange between any two countries would make for a very bad day and future. Yet we live as if oblivious, or rather, allow governments to act as if they were. Which is remarkable; one imagines the last looks we would give one another as Armageddon descended, looks of spurious surprise and disbelief.

The question once again: Would human extinction be a great tragedy and loss to existence? Does humanity deserve to survive the Earth-altering consequences of its behavior?

The affirmative:

1. Evolution led in humans to a unique form of consciousness and reasoning abilities. These are distinctive and perhaps irreplaceable.
2. None but humans have the capacity for artistic, scientific, and intellectual creation. Aided by our technological ingenuity, we have investigated the quantum and the cosmos and developed a vast array of methods and devices that support our health and well-being and deepen our understanding of the Universe.
3. Every problem we created we have the potential to remedy. Even the vastly life-altering, life-ending prospects of nuclear weaponry and climate change will yield to human cleverness.
4. With our intelligence and associated abilities, peace, justice, and better ways of life may in time emerge.
5. Without humans, all of the unique and special experiences and possibilities that only we have would never be realized again.
6. God loves us.

The negative (beginning with response to the affirmations):

1. Yes, the level of human consciousness and reasoning is unique and, one might have hoped, conducive to good lives in good societies. But it has not had that effect. Those capacities are double-edged swords, and dramatically so or the question we are addressing would not have arisen. Furthermore, reason in the 21st century appears degraded, turned chiefly to materialist and ego-driven gratifications, which themselves feed the risk at the center of this discussion.
2. Indeed, humans have much to be proud of. We have learned a lot about physical reality and have generated music, literature, and arts that are admirable and occasionally ethereal. But the technological virtuosity that produced computers also developed “the bomb” along with an ever-growing array of new versions and new ways to kill each other more effectively. Even nonviolent civilian electronic devices pass the point of genuine usefulness and become trivializing obsessions at the service of moneyed interests and citizen complacence. Technology that could open one’s world instead shrinks and distorts it.
3. Regarding the matter of nuclear weapons targeted on people around the world, there is no evidence we will find a remedy and little indication that anyone is really trying. And for climate, it may already be too late. Those with money and power and no obvious interest in much else choose to deceive and obfuscate while the citizenry that could challenge and hold them accountable chooses complicity and the easy way of not thinking critically.
4. There is, again, no evidence that humanity will ever use its intelligence in a sustained and perceptive manner to make and maintain a good world. To accomplish this we would, among much else, need to face straight on human nature, identify its fatal weaknesses (such as a generalized inability to handle wealth and power responsibly), establish ironclad controls, remain alert and informed, forbid backsliding…and do all this forever since the vulnerabilities and weaknesses are unlikely ever to go away and protection of a better world is a never-ending struggle.
5. It is true that human extinction means the end of those experiences that only humans can have, it is a sad and unfortunate consequence. Of course, none but humans put the biome at risk either, and those cherished experiences have not penetrated denial of the risks and costs of other unique human capacities, those rooted in desire, anxiety, and ignorance of humans’ true Good.
6. Assuming that God and Universe are closely associated, even identified one with the other, its love of humans must be sorely tested by now and balanced against love for Earth and its other life forms, none of which threaten the whole of existence. The common assumption that Universe/God created everything merely to serve as resource for humanity is yet another belief without foundation, not to mention fatuous.

A reminder: The query about humanity’s deserving to survive arises from recognition that for seventy years it has held a fatal sword over Earth life, one that hangs from a startlingly tenuous thread, considering the possible losses. To this threat humanity has added a present probability of climate change and associated environmental disruptions that on the present course will reduce the diversity of life by well over half and our own numbers by perhaps hundreds of millions or more. It does this knowingly and with remedies at hand but largely disregarded owing to the inertia of what is and has been, and short-sighted greed on the part of those who profit from that inertia. The risks that have been willingly incurred are momentous and implacable. An Earth was granted to us of astounding beauty and richness, we have treated it with disdain, and we may lose it all, deservedly.

The query is a moral one—does one species that puts itself and all other species at great peril have a moral right to survival? How can we not be disturbed, even changed, by the knowledge that humanity constitutes a moral pariah amongst another Earth life? Answer: Those who can ignore or deny the jeopardy in which some have placed human and other life can ignore or deny anything, particularly something as ineffective as moral condemnation. Even so, the question itches for response.

1. Human numbers are at 7.25 b. now and increase by the minute despite the propensity toward intra-species killing. Above all, we are fertile. (At 0 A.D. population was about 200 m. and the first billion was reached only in 1810.) Quality of lives may suffer but quantity marches vigorously onward. No such luck for most of the rest of life, by either measure. Consider these deleterious human effects on the biosphere (I’m not aware that there are any positive effects), representative but by no means comprehensive:

1. Depletion of clean freshwater resources
2. Climate change (destabilized and dramatically endangering)
3. Human population explosion
4. Soil erosion and decreased arable land availability
5. Depletion of “resources,” i.e., natural richness
6. Biodiversity loss
7. Degradation of oceans and forests
8. Toxification of water, air, and land

So, we cannot but recognize that the instantaneity of nuclear apocalypse or, failing that, the disruptions and degradations of eventual climate induced calamities, are only more dramatic versions of daily human practice under presently accepted economic assumptions and aspirations along with associated militarism. We live for chimerical purposes, valueless, and consider life itself irrelevant except sentimentally and instrumentally.

Thousands of years ago humans appear to have marveled at life and to have sought understanding of its ways and meanings out of wonder more than utility. To this many added a wish to live appropriately in relation to existence as they came to understand and experience it. Life was good but serious (deep, nontrivial), and death perplexing. One view of how this organic sense of human engagement with life declined has it that the more humans presumed to control the conditions of their existence and to become preoccupied with its material aspects, the less they experienced the beatitude of pure, deeply mysterious being and its inherent joys and satisfactions. The less there became of conscious mystery and wonder as humans turned toward immediate gratifications, the less there was of respect and reverence.

How should a person live if he would achieve a good and noble life? —the ancient and most vital philosophical question of all, and it has no contemporary purchase. If humans survive, what would they survive for?

The answer to our query is clear. If humanity went extinct all the rest of life would figuratively applaud and breathe sighs of relief. Even those of us who love life and grieve human failure would, as our last, impotent gesture, feel compelled, resignedly, to join the applause and wish Earth a better future without us.

Postscript

To ask, in seriousness, whether humans deserve to survive, which is to say, if we go extinct, as 99% of species that ever existed have, will it matter, would the Universe grieve? The asking does not arise out of misanthropy or nihilism. Present circumstance renders it utterly appropriate, a very natural question, even if only in the form of a moral thought experiment. Ethical theorizing loves quandaries and a popular one these days deals with the rightness of taking a single innocent person’s life if it would save those of several other people (and there was no option other than doing nothing). Humanity is not innocent, even if relatively few are blatantly guilty and the rest merely complicit, but the theoretical dilemma is similar existentially.

The question’s appropriateness derives from this: Humans could go virtually extinct under present conditions either in a day or a century, and crucially, from a moral perspective, not from an uncontrollable event (asteroid collision, mega-volcanic cataclysm) but from our own conscious, deliberate actions. And rather than suicide of only one species, it would more closely resemble ecocide, the killing on a vast scale of entire ecosystems and families and orders and classes of life. In short, a sixth great extinction, differing from the first five in its conscious perpetration.

If you were the Universe, what would you think best from the higher perspective? You might wish for a more selective, targeted way to brush humans off the Earth than generalized destruction by nuclear conflict or climate change. Human infertility, perhaps. But this is idle. In all probability when we go we will take multitudes with us and it will be at our hand and none other. When we go we cannot blame fate and we cannot honestly imagine it tragic, and we can recognize that the Earth will be a better, more flourishing place with nothing left to sorrow over. We would not have deserved anything better.

What does it mean to “deserve” something? We know that humans are infused and shaped by genes and experiences, conditioning, and circumstance, so that free will and autonomy are mostly fantasy. We may even ask if what has been called the “vicious circle principle” has us in an inexorable grip. But we are not automatons; a measure of freedom exists with which to exercise reason, moral character, and objectivity. Desert, then, lies in how we use this freedom, in what we demand of ourselves and what moral imperatives we honor. Modern humanity’s choices are evident, as are the results. Alternative choices, on the other hand, choices that made better use of that freedom and based on humility, moderation, respect, and gratitude would have led to a vastly different present—one in which the question of humanity’s desert would never arise since the answer would be implicit in its more virtuous ways of life.

The common response to this discussion will be consistent with the dysfunctionality under discussion—it will say that humanity has no need or obligation to justify itself. It is, after all, atop the great chain of being and dominion over Earth its birthright. Mistakes will be made, have been made, it will say, but human exceptionalness is such that they will be overcome and progress lead unceasingly toward a better world tomorrow. But who can believe it?

I had been wanting to camp at Lava Beds National Monument for the past six months but the coronavirus kept it closed until a few months ago, and before I could arrange to travel north, wildfire set in and closed it again. Fire burned 70% of the Monument, meaning over 32,000 acres; I don’t know how much burned outside its boundaries. A few weeks ago, like a battered boxer up against the ropes, it gathered itself to try once more and reopened. I am pleased it did and am now camped here.

Fire burned completely around the perimeter of the campground and in places leapt in and took out trees, brush, signs, and picnic tables but left it about three fourths intact, due apparently to a fortuitous combination of light wind, the encircling roadway, and valiant firefighting. I bow in gratitude to both humans and Nature on the assumption it was a collaboration to preserve this green island in the dark sea surrounding it. I’ve found a fine little campsite and recognize the flipside of fiery tragedy is that it keeps the crowds down. I practically have the place to myself.

I have been here a week and plan to stay at least one more. The trails are closed (“protecting the resource” is what it’s called—an unholy phrase that is too often used about natural things. I’d like to scour it from the tongues of “resource professionals” as thoroughly as the fire did the ground; “resource” degrades whatever piece of Nature it refers to), but with the roadways barely traveled I can walk them to observe, take pictures, and experience the aftermath of what fire does to a landscape. Pre-fire what you saw here was rolling country to the north with remnant volcanoes and other hills and buttes separated by flatland covered mostly in bunchgrass, sagebrush, and rabbitbrush. The middle third where I am retained most of the grass and shrubs and added juniper, which is said to have flourished during the decades of fire suppression. I’ve never lived anyplace where juniper was appreciated—it is the pigeon of the plant world—but the wildlife and I like it, especially the species around here that grows upward rather than just outward (as the Ashe Juniper in Texas where I once lived did) and makes finely shaped trees, though not nearly as tall as the few ponderosa pines found well-spaced among them. They are migrants, or remnants, from the southern side of the Monument, which is more elevated and thus favorable to the pines.

Many areas are still almost exclusively lava field with only occasional plant growth, although it always surprises me to see large trees and bushes that found a way to root and flourish within lava’s gnarly midst, seemingly against the odds in this arid country. Ironically, the lava that flowed out of the volcanoes sporadically for over 100,000 years in molten luminosity has once again been burned and newly blackened even if not liquefied. Born in fire below, it easily endures it here on the surface. I wonder how long it will take for the lava to break down and become part of the soil.

Since junipers were the predominant tree, their dark deaths are most apparent. I say deaths but can’t help wondering if there’s a chance some could come back. I see on the trunks of those that were chain-sawed that the fire damage was only superficial, barely penetrating, and sometimes only scorching the bark. On those still standing, the leaves on most are all burned away and on others roasted in place. Grab a handful and it turns to organic dust. Could new growth return next year for any of these? I’ve seen flowering trees bud early in the spring only to be crushed by a late freeze and still come back. Can these junipers perform similar magic? Doubtful, I imagine; their foliage and high oil content make them too thoroughly burnable even when heartwood appears sound.

I see many shrubs where new growth is already emerging from the roots. As a source of inspiration, the sprigs of green foliage arising from blackened, burnt roots and standing beside the dead limbs of their forebears can hardly be matched. I was surprised by the first ones and then suddenly I saw them everywhere. I will be interested over coming years to see how it all comes back, the stages and sequences and species. If it does come back. Reality impels us to realize that many ecosystems around California will not return to their pre-fire condition, that forests will become grasslands, for example, owing to climate changes that have altered for the foreseeable future rain and temperature patterns that were the historical environment in which forests prospered. This Lava Beds land was already arid so what happens when it becomes more so? The answer for many of the natives is probably that the collection of plants and animals that flourished here were able to do so only conditionally and the terms were narrow and may now have been exceeded. Hot and dry was fine; hotter and dryer may ask too much.

A burnt landscape is invariably grim, black, and death-filled, abundant visible evidence of loss and mental stimulus for imagined losses. How did the snakes and lizards manage hiding underground? How many mule deer were brought down by smoke and then incinerated? Coyotes and rabbits and ground squirrels? It seems quiet—have the birds mostly left for food and safety? No, some are still around. The only specific news I’ve heard was from a ranger who said the rattlesnakes had become quite active, which I surmise is out of desperation. Presumably, rodents also managed to hide underground but what happens to the predatorial dance when there’s no cover? What are the rodents eating while waiting to be eaten themselves? Who, if any, benefit from the fire while all await new growth? I picture a lot of death and adjustment over the interim. Even so, I saw a hefty bobcat scurry into a rocky depression as I walked this morning and am reasonably sure that during the night coyotes yipped. Animals are resourceful creatures and know more than we about what it will take to resume their normal lives.

Knowing that most ecosystems have incorporated periodic fire into their repertoire since their time began consoles and reassures me that no matter how ravaged it appears now, it will return surprisingly quickly even if altered. But future promise does not negate present loss. I love the characteristic look and smell of this landscape, especially when the rains have come, and now I look out from my roadside walks and it is gone. Yet I also notice that each day I am less affronted by its grim visage and become more comfortable with its new format. Bare skeletal branches weave shapes that weren’t visible before, graceful sometimes eerie lines reaching black wands toward blue sky. First impressions of end time desolation begin to give me the sense of transition rather than mere ending, of landscape pausing to draw new breath with hints of things to come in the hopeful green sprouts.

It is one thing, of course, to understand fire as normal and that new green growth will return, life and time will march forward. But we may never be able to think that way again; for now and centuries to come we will live under a weather regime that will dance to the tune of an increasingly disrupted climate—more heat, drought, flood; more extremity and unpredictability; more species losses and forever altered ecosystems; more calamities of water and food shortage. After each catastrophic event we will wonder if and what it would have been like if we had had the sense to do what was necessary to preserve the climatic way things were. That loss, and the guilt that accompanies it, is an analogue for the grief I feel amidst the relatively emptied landscape before me.

Perhaps it’s just my fading memory but I don’t recall being struck before by the land being so thoroughly scoured of life and organic detritus by fire. Because so much that grows in aridity isn’t even head-high and visibility thus extends to the horizon, it is easy to forget how much grows here. But because most of its growth is low it burns readily and once gone leaves a peculiarly mottled gravelly patina, desolate to the eye. Apocalyptic may be the word. It reminds me of battlefields after trench warfare or of Hiroshima after the bomb.

There are more fires to the west, I hear. For most days over the last week smoke has dominated the sky. The morning sun can be looked at almost directly and is a beautiful deep orange circle painted by smoke. I can barely smell it but don’t have the most acute olfactory so it may be stronger than I realize; my eyes however tell me that if it gets much thicker it will be time to leave. The horizon is obscured and the buttes little more than outlines themselves. Paternalistic as the rangers often are, this is one time they say we’re on our own to decide. They don’t measure air quality and it’s up to us to determine when it is no longer acceptable.

After twelve days I am forced to leave; the smoke has grown heavier and I don’t want to subject my lungs to further assault. The experience of being here after fire has been different than when I’ve been here before, but I am sorry to leave. I have adjusted to the changes and can even sense that the fire was cleansing and has opened space for renewal in new combinations of arid lands flora. Park Service employees had periodically, here-and-there, thinned the juniper during recent years, which means their jobs become easier as, instead of that, they can monitor new growth and eradicate saplings where they return too eagerly, too prolifically. I don’t know enough about the natural history of this place, and how much of a genuine problem the juniper is, to judge but I hope they will follow a light touch regime. Decisions about what should and shouldn’t be allowed to make their place within a landscape ought never be done without careful thought, for considerations of both ethics and ecosystem dynamics.

Leaving I think about how I am drawn to volcanic regions. Here in Lava Beds there are none of the more energetic signs of subterranean unrest as there are south of here in Lassen Volcanic National Park: the boiling, vaporous mudpots and springs, steaming fumaroles, and sulfurous ponds. Here there are only the signs of what once was: lava tube caves, remnants of cinder cone volcanoes, and ground sprinkled and often immersed in the rough dark lava of congealed basaltic flows. At Lassen there is a spot on the east side of Boiling Springs Lake where I always spend time for my imagination to be stirred by the odorous, turquoise colored two to three-acre pond where steam rises from fissures along its banks. What is happening below, I wonder, and does the pond wash away in snowmelt floods and refill, slowly to resume its sultry, quirky presence surrounded by pine and fir forest? The toxic brew will not permit trees or other plants to grow along its shore, but I’ve never noticed floral damage along its summer-dry downstream bed.

Here in the less dramatic, superficially quiescent region of Lava Beds it is primarily the sage-juniper landscape with its lava intrusions that hold my attention. As my predilections have changed with age, I am drawn more to places like this where I can see the horizon. The lava speaks decisively of change and a violent history and the near certainty of eventual renewal of volcanic disturbances. Volcanic regions remind me of transience, which is always well to remember. Today’s smoky atmosphere seems to strike a fitting note as I drive away.