During the years I worked as a wilderness guide, I spent many more nights sleeping on the ground than in my own bed at home. Three months in the field was followed by about a month spent at home, and apart from the occasional visit to our base camp for re-supply, all of that three months was spent outdoors. In the winter months if you spend enough time outside, your body becomes remarkably acclimatized to the cold. Fifty degrees is shirt-sleeve weather.
There were adjustments to make during the time spent at home after an extended stay away from technology. The bed was too soft so I slept on the floor (and my back has thanked me ever since.) The television was rarely on: after weeks of natural sounds, quiet conversation and silence, the mindless chatter was insufferable. Electric heat made the house too hot and stuffy, and the electric bill for the month after a return from the wilderness was among the lowest of the year.
Throughout the years that I lived closer to nature and less dependent on technology, I was not particularly aware that I was living as the majority of the world's population lives. This morning an unlikely source brought it home to me when I woke up to see Spanish moss hanging outside the bedroom window of this rented vacation home.
During the 1990's the wilderness school which employed me ran expeditions for adjudicated youth down the Ocmulgee, Oconee and Altamaha River systems in the winter months. Our canoes, which put in just south of Macon, Ga., would travel over 300 miles through some of the wildest and most remote areas of the southeast to our takeout location near Darien, Ga. Spanish moss is a constant companion in the blackwater swamps of South Georgia, and for groups of unruly teenagers unaccustomed to budgeting time, energy or industrially produced paper products, it was often a replacement for those paper products when they ran out.
For a moment this morning when I woke up and Spanish Moss was the first thing I saw, as has happened so many times from inside a sleeping bag, the memories of the past were incongruous with my king sized mattress, the television left on all night, the sound of the coffee maker coming from the kitchen and the behemoth heat pump humming outside, just on the other side of the thin shell separating me from the great outdoors.
The shell that separates us all from that great outdoors is thinner than most of us realize, and we fight to maintain it. The battleground extends from boardrooms to the halls of Congress to the deserts of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and about 140 places around the world where we have military bases. The fight is about oil, minerals and raw materials that we forcibly extract from the earth to be consumed in the bonfires of our vanity. The fight is about maintaining at all costs the cancerous philosophy of growth and consumption which supports that thin shell, and we are destined to lose this battle.
The war (and notice how much of our language is framed in terms of struggle and violence) may yet be won. In our own rural area I read headlines of solar farms online and under construction. Innovation is alive and well as new technologies make our energy consumption more efficient. But as in all wars, there will be casualties. Not to single out a particular automaker, but our "ram tough" insistence of compensating our sense of powerlessness with giant hauling and pulling conveyances which brag about getting a measly 20 mpg - is ram stubborn and ram stupid, and this attitude permeates our entire energy economy. Additionally, we have an aging population less able to adapt to change. Personally, I would have a hard time returning to a tent and a sleeping bag and I am just as fond of comfort and convenience as anyone else. Our parents fought to preserve freedom and to give their children better opportunities. We will do the same, but my own generation will also fight to keep the air conditioner on and the gas tank full, and this fight is not going to be pretty.
