Into the Woods

Until the 'ecology movement of the 1960s, concern for the environment was considered a conservative cause, if not outright fascist.

From The European Conservative

By Charles Coulombe, BA, KSS

Somehow, some way, stewardship of the forest and the rest of the natural environment must be snatched from the ranks of the stupid and insane.

It is truly amazing, when one thinks about it, just how deep the grasp of the forest is on the Western imagination. If, during the height of the Depression—or, for that matter, any time from the 1930s to about a decade ago—you were walking down Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, California, you might have found yourself in front of an eatery called Clifton’s Cafeteria. Driven by hunger to enter, you would suddenly find yourself out of the heat, dirt, and smog, and lost among the trees of the north woods. After you grabbed your tray and sat at your table, and your eyes had taken in the details of the dim artificial forest, you would be amazed and perhaps enchanted. It is easy to see why Clifton’s prospered for so long. But if you cast your eyes upward, you would see on the second floor what appeared to be the tower of a very small church, with a touch of stained glass and a neon cross.

Going up the stairs and approaching this odd structure from the back, you might open the door and step in. There was one seat with room enough for two people. Seated, you would find a photograph, and under it, a button with a sign advising you to push it. If you did so, there would be a touch of organ music and then a solemn male voice intoning, “Now, take a parable from the redwood”:

If you stand very still in the heart of a wood, you will hear many wonderful things

— the snap of a twig and the wind in the trees and the whir of invisible wings.

If you stand very still in the turmoil of life and you wait for the voice from within

— you’ll be led down the quiet ways of wisdom and peace in a mad world of chaos and din.

If you stand very still and you hold to your faith, you will get all the help that you ask.

You will draw from the silence the things that you need — Hope and courage and strength for your task.”

Methodist uplift aside (the founder of Clifton’s was the son of Methodist missionaries), the parable of the redwood epitomizes what urban dwellers—especially Americans—see in the woods. In less than a century, the United States was able to subdue and settle a continent. Even while that was being accomplished, naturalists like John James Audubon, Louis Agassiz, John Muir, William Hornaday, and Theodore Roosevelt were calling for conservation of natural resources and eventually the establishment of what has become one of—if not THE—largest networks of national parks, national forests, national wildernesses, and national wildlife refuges in the world. These efforts have since been endlessly repeated at the state, county, city, and even lower levels. 

From virtually the beginning of our country, such sanctuaries were seen as refuges not only from the cares but the perceived “artificiality” of life. Henry David Thoreau set the stage with his book, Walden, which commences with the lines endlessly repeated since: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Of course, it helped that his grandmother paid all his bills while he was spending that year in the cabin by Walden Pond. Between his memory and that of frontiersmen like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, generations have since followed him into the woods. For the sake of those who could afford to stay in them, the United States National Park Service and the Canadian Pacific Railroad created splendid retreats for those so inclined—even developing architectural styles for these lavish lodges: ‘National Park Service rustic’ and ‘Canadian Pacific chateauesque.’ For those of us unable to afford such things, much of our youth was spent in the Boy Scouts; I am supremely grateful for it!

But it must not be supposed that this fascination with the wilderness is an American invention—far from it, for our attitudes were brought by our fathers with them from Europe. On the one hand, the forest was the refuges of saints and hermits, such as the Cistercians and Carthusians who sought them out, although their abbeys quickly cleared the land. But the saints and hermits did not go out to the woods simply in a quest for solitude; they also took the opportunity to banish the evil spirits of whatever locale they settled in.

Indeed, the role of the forest in European folklore cannot be overestimated. Consider the tales of Sherwood Forest in England, Broceliande in Brittany, the Ardennes and the Black Forest, the Vienna Woods and the Waldviertel in Austria, Bialowieza in Poland and Belarus, and so on. Elves, fairies, and all sorts of uncanny folk lived in their depths—but the human inhabitants, robbers, poachers, and charcoal burners could be just as frightening. So too with the larger animals—wild boar, bear, and wolf—the last being the most fearsome. Usually, such places in the Middle Ages and later were reserved for monarchs and nobility to hunt in—and to this day, the hunt has not entirely lost its aristocratic tone in Europe. The forest and hunting certainly continues to play a huge part in the imagination of Central Europe, as trachten and the ever-present antlers in rustic restaurants and even in cities remind us.

Of course, part of the anti-hunting animus of the present is reverse snobbery—one remembers Wilde’s bon mot about foxhunters being “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” Certainly, this was at the foundation of Adolf Hitler’s and Tony Blair’s outlawing of hunting with hounds and horses in their respective countries. In recent years, a number of royals have been criticized for hunting—and the former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was not permitted to engage in the traditional French presidential hunts. It is perhaps just as well that Archduke Ferdinand von Habsburg has taken to auto racing—it requires the same physical courage and mental acuity that hunting does, without any of the opprobrium. Given the shrieking that the hunt inspires in the current tenderized public (in an America mentally softened on the topic by repeated watching of such as Walt Disney’s Bambi), it is ironic that our greatest conservationist among our presidents was also the greatest hunter, namely Theodore Roosevelt. Certainly, a leadership class that does not hunt is as out of touch with nature, as it is with every other aspect of reality.

It was also from the ranks of the hunters that the militaries would traditionally recruit sharpshooters and light infantry: hence the green tunics of the riflemen and the presence of ‘rangers’ in English-speaking armies, and of chasseurs, jägers, cacciatori, cazadores, caçadores and vânători in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian-speaking armies. All of the European languages used the adjective ‘hunter’s’ to describe gravies, sauces, soups, stews, salads, and other dishes made with game, mushrooms, and other woodland products—and I shall never forgive the Campbell’s soup company for discontinuing its Pepperidge Farms Hunter’s Soup, with its beef, turkey, eight vegetables, and Burgundy-infused beef stock!

In any case, the anthropomorphizing of animals—and indeed of nature herself as ‘Gaea’—is as great an error as the idea that animals and nature have no value. They do indeed. But it is not because they are somehow superior or even equal to man. On the one hand, wanton cruelty to animals is wrong not because they have rights, but because it is demeaning to the practitioner of said cruelty: look at how many serial killers get their start by torturing defenseless animals. But this is precisely why hunting has such rigid ‘sporting’ etiquette—why, for instance, if the quarry is merely wounded, the hunter is honor-bound to pursue it, and end its suffering, ignoring much easier prey while doing so.

With nature as a whole, there is a twofold issue. The first is that exhausting natural resources means that when they are gone there is nothing left for us or future generations; this is simply imprudent. The second is that, as nature was created by God for man’s use, it is man’s obligation as His steward to use it wisely and well. In other words, nature’s value springs first from its Divine Creation, and second from the purpose of that Creation—our use of it. To be sure, that use is fruitful: forestry and wildlife management provide useful products and generate a great deal of jobs and profit; the maintenance of wild areas additionally provides recreation and inspiration to untold numbers. In the United States, at least, the various state parks and fish and game departments are often the best run in the given government: indeed, in my native state of New York and my home state of California they may well be the only ones. But again, they are an essential means to a humanistic end.

Those who deify nature today would reverse the work of St. Boniface; when he came upon the Saxons worshipping and sacrificing to the sacred oak of Donar, he cut it down. But he then did more; knowing their love of trees he dedicate a pine to the newborn Christ—the first Christmas tree as it were. He guided their basic human instinct to revere the nature in which we are all born and aimed it at its proper object.

So, it is today, that the topic of ‘rewilding’ has come up—that is, returning unused agricultural land or single tree forests into their original wooded states, and/or reintroducing to it or existing forests animals that have been removed, such as bears, wolves, and so on. At the more extreme, some of these proposals range from the insane to the highly imprudent, such as from cloning and bringing back dinosaurs to the world, ala Jurassic Park, to releasing grizzly bears into the California countryside. That having been said, as large areas of both the European and North American countryside are depopulated, nature is reasserting herself—not least in the return of bears and wolves to places from which they had long been absent. While it is an ongoing symptom of the slow death of family farming, it does show that the environment does regenerate.  Beyond that, there are excellent examples of successful intervention to save endangered species, two of the most notable of which were the European Bison and the California Condor.  

As with all issues today affecting interaction between man and man and between man and nature, madness is never far behind. For at least a decade, we have been told that ‘empire’, ‘racism’, and ‘sexism’ have damaged the environment—basically, the history of the world is merely the oppression of women, people of color, animals, and plants by white males who must be shamed for their outrageous history and continuing existence. Now we are being told that democracy is threatened by overpopulation: there are too many people, and the numbers must be reduced if either the environment or democracy are to survive. 

The stupidity redolent in this stuff is equaled or surpassed only by that of those in positions of power or influence who push it. Governments, universities, schools, and media outlets continue to pump this poison into the world’s mental bloodstream. During the rioting subsequent to George Floyd’s death, as NGO after NGO rushed to take the knee, environmentalist organizations like the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, and Wildlife Conservation Society fell over themselves to condemn their founders. The now coed and pansexual organisation formerly known as the Boy Scouts of American renamed the William T. Hornaday Awards to escape the co-founder’s taint. Perhaps the most disgusting was the American Museum of Natural History removing the statue of that arch-conservationist Theodore Roosevelt, to the applause of his eponymous great grandson—who should really change his own name, to escape the odium.

The bleating of such environmentalists over the alleged misdeeds of their founders decades or even centuries ago, while thirsting for more infanticide and euthanasia in the present, is truly sickening. Somehow, some way, stewardship of and concern for the forest and the rest of the natural environment must be snatched from the ranks of the stupid and insane. It is as important a task as any other sector of the culture wars and has implications for all of them, ranging as it does through religion, culture, politics, and economics. From hunters and fishermen on the one hand to unwoke rangers on the other, there are allies to be found.