At the southern edge of Yosemite National Park, Mariposa Grove is home to many giant sequoias, among these the so-called Fallen Monarch and Grizzly Giant. Their names speak for themselves. Between these majestic lords stand many princes of their kin, and together they tower over the firs, pines, and cedars; and lupines, wild strawberries, willows, and dogwoods occupy the understory. But there are also many blackened stumps and stakes. Dead trees dot the landscape, and the effects of fire follow the trail.
That so many of the wayside exhibits focus on the role of fire in this ecosystem suggests that our natural inclinations have not changed much from colonial settlers of the nineteenth century who felt the need to put out all fires, even natural ones. There is a rather striking exhibit which shows three photographs of the same spot in the Upper Grove in the years 1890, 1970, and 2000. The giant sequoias which naturally dominate in the first are crowded out by other conifers in the second. Whereas periodic fires would have cleared out the understory, dried out sequoia cones to loosen their seeds, and helped with germination, a hundred years of suppression favoured smaller, more shade-tolerant vegetation. Since realising this, the National Park Service has conducted prescribed burns to pattern natural fires. Thirty years later, sequoias once again command the landscape.
No doubt these prescribed burns are quite controlled, and I should guess that certain spots—the ones for which visitors like myself come—are carefully managed. Far from allowing nature to run its course, we have sought to mimic its ways such that what we wish to see remains there. The natural fires are still suppressed. Humans still dominate Mariposa Grove, controlling it even more tightly than before. If John Muir’s “wilderness” tradition which established Yosemite values nature as something untouched and undegraded by human presence, it has ironically collapsed on itself. Restoration is domination. Such a dichotomy between nature and civilisation fails, anyway, to do justice to history. Pristine, untouched nature is an artifact of a Western or peculiarly American cultural imagination. But Sierra Nevada and other regions have been shaped and managed by indigenous peoples for millennia. To speak of the “natural,” one is left wondering, which one? Pre-industrial, pre-Columbian, pre-agricultural? When did nature become tainted?
The conservationist who denies a simplistic nature-culture dualism must appeal to alternative grounds, whether biodiversity or the intrinsic value of non-human life; or more anthropocentric values such as sustained ecological benefit or simply beauty. All of these require judgments of value, and they surely lead to different outcomes. As for me, I am interested in developing a well-grounded, theocentric understanding, of this extraordinarily beautiful creation and our role within it.