Reading Rick Bass' Caribou Rising
Last summer, the arctic was on fire, at least most of it that I saw. I got a truck in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and headed north, past the mammoth trap at Carmacks (think a series of giant rabbit snares strung high in spruce trees), and north to Dawson City. Last summer, more land burned in the Yukon than had burned in all of Canada the year before. Driving into Dawson, there were places where the smoke was so thick I couldn’t even see the front end of my own vehicle. It disappeared into a black cloud, and all I could do, while my lungs burned, was listen to the way the tires hit the road, navigating by sound.
At Dawson City, you couldn’t see the top of Midnight Dome; you couldn’t see across the Yukon River, or the Klondike, where the gold miners had pinned all their hopes in the great rush of 1898.
So I went further north, taking the road to Inuvik. The smoke finally cleared at the Yukon/Northwest Territories border, when, from the top of a mountain pass, the world fell away into a stretch of kettle ponds and tundra.
Caribou country.
Just a few miles away, across the border in Alaska, the Porcupine herd has its calving ground. Caribou are marvelous animals, better geared to migrate than maybe anything else on earth. There’s an extra ligament in their ankles that snaps the foot back up to the forward position, so each step only takes half the energy most animals require.
The Porcupine herd calves in the middle of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the place of George W. Bush’s wet dreams. There’s oil there, a whole six-month supply, and he’s anxious to drill. And as Bass writes, “if Bush and Cheney and the energy industry lobbyists succeed in opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, it’s not just the caribou that will vanish, nor the population of polar bears that winter there, but the Gwich-‘in culture, and perhaps even the Gwich-‘in people themselves, being snuffed out finally and quickly like tendrils of smoke rising from the tundra.”
Bass heads to ANWR to hunt with the Gwich-‘in, to try and understand what the caribou mean to them, and, perhaps more importantly, what this last wild place should mean to us.
“I think,” Bass writes, “that one of the things we might love most about the Arctic is the fact that it might—barely, now—be one of the very few places that still lies beyond our reach, beyond our control.” Is it, he says, “among the last places that exist still separate from our needs and desires.”
Forget the destruction of a culture that has lived on the land since before recorded time. Forget the declining caribou population, ignore the thousand miles of road that have already been cut through the arctic in the need for oil. Bass takes on the politics, but the central issue may be one raised years ago by Gary Snyder: “the world is watching: one cannot walk through a meadow or forest without a ripple of report spreading out from one’s passage. . . . Every creature knows when a hawk is cruising or a human strolling. The information passed through the system is intelligence.”
As Bass points out, we are the world’s consumers. Five percent of the world’s population using up a quarter of its resources. We owe it to ourselves to leave a corner untouched, a place where the clicking of the caribou ankles is the only sound.
Stay home one day a week. Read a book. The energy you save saves a caribou.
In the Northwest Territories, I walked out onto the tundra. A grizzly on a far hill looked at me only long enough to be sure that he had no reason to look at me. I picked up a rock that probably wasn’t a mammoth bone.
Right now, the landscape still goes on forever.
At Dawson City, you couldn’t see the top of Midnight Dome; you couldn’t see across the Yukon River, or the Klondike, where the gold miners had pinned all their hopes in the great rush of 1898.
So I went further north, taking the road to Inuvik. The smoke finally cleared at the Yukon/Northwest Territories border, when, from the top of a mountain pass, the world fell away into a stretch of kettle ponds and tundra.
Caribou country.
Just a few miles away, across the border in Alaska, the Porcupine herd has its calving ground. Caribou are marvelous animals, better geared to migrate than maybe anything else on earth. There’s an extra ligament in their ankles that snaps the foot back up to the forward position, so each step only takes half the energy most animals require.
The Porcupine herd calves in the middle of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the place of George W. Bush’s wet dreams. There’s oil there, a whole six-month supply, and he’s anxious to drill. And as Bass writes, “if Bush and Cheney and the energy industry lobbyists succeed in opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, it’s not just the caribou that will vanish, nor the population of polar bears that winter there, but the Gwich-‘in culture, and perhaps even the Gwich-‘in people themselves, being snuffed out finally and quickly like tendrils of smoke rising from the tundra.”
Bass heads to ANWR to hunt with the Gwich-‘in, to try and understand what the caribou mean to them, and, perhaps more importantly, what this last wild place should mean to us.
“I think,” Bass writes, “that one of the things we might love most about the Arctic is the fact that it might—barely, now—be one of the very few places that still lies beyond our reach, beyond our control.” Is it, he says, “among the last places that exist still separate from our needs and desires.”
Forget the destruction of a culture that has lived on the land since before recorded time. Forget the declining caribou population, ignore the thousand miles of road that have already been cut through the arctic in the need for oil. Bass takes on the politics, but the central issue may be one raised years ago by Gary Snyder: “the world is watching: one cannot walk through a meadow or forest without a ripple of report spreading out from one’s passage. . . . Every creature knows when a hawk is cruising or a human strolling. The information passed through the system is intelligence.”
As Bass points out, we are the world’s consumers. Five percent of the world’s population using up a quarter of its resources. We owe it to ourselves to leave a corner untouched, a place where the clicking of the caribou ankles is the only sound.
Stay home one day a week. Read a book. The energy you save saves a caribou.
In the Northwest Territories, I walked out onto the tundra. A grizzly on a far hill looked at me only long enough to be sure that he had no reason to look at me. I picked up a rock that probably wasn’t a mammoth bone.
Right now, the landscape still goes on forever.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 9:16 AM
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