But it was realized that this hydraulic enterprise was not sustainable without the rainforest that prevented erosion and silting from filling up the lakes. Vast tracts of the rainforest
needed to be preserved in order to make Gatun Lake possible.

The environment of Panama today is not the same as that which existed prior to the Canal. It is a meticulously engineered and maintained machine designed for one purpose only, keeping the Canal operating. But it still is a wilderness, not the original wilderness, but wilderness nonetheless. I’ve been through the Canal twice, going both ways. Great ships sail through a tropical rainforest, the tree canopies on a level with their bridges and mastheads. Monkeys howl from the trees, and flocks of parrots fly over the decks. It is a triumph for humanity.

We knew how to do this, even a century ago. But we are cutting corners now, not preparing the foundations of our buildings because we are too lazy, too cheap. and too greedy.

You’re right, we devastate the land for a short-term, often pointless benefit, and even the most sincere efforts to conserve and restore are often impossible. Wild landscapes are not capable of recovering if just left alone, or even if “managed” back to health. These wild places are the end result of a long and complex history which cannot be repeated, even if we knew how. Even the few remaining wildernesses on the planet are not the original wilderness that was there, they are just the scar tissue covering some ancient wound.

I love nature, but I’m not sentimental about the wild. If we need to dam the Grand Canyon and fill it up with water in order to irrigate the farms needed to feed the world, then I say “So be it”. We have the technology now to turn this planet into a garden, but tended gardens are not the rain forests or tundras they replace; the natural environment may have to take a back seat to productivity and human needs, and we will need to implement costly environmental work-arounds to replace the essential natural landscapes we’ll have to sacrifice.

But to divert even one mountain stream just so some asshole can play golf in the desert is a crime, and we will pay dearly for it someday.

This is something I have had in my head for a while. It needs to be fleshed out quite a bit and tightened up at the same time, but I’ll share a first draft with y’all while it is on my mind.

~~~~~~~~~~~
“Other Skylines to hold you.*”

I’m sure I’ve mentioned my affection for The Rampart Range, the steep fronted rolling hills northwest of Colorado Springs, part of the Front Range of The Rockies. For many years I spent a lot of time there, hiking, biking, camping, getting my little Bronco 4×4 stuck in creeks, and studying the geology in college and grad school. It’s a beautiful range, full of dark secret valleys, sunny aspen glades, and enormous granite core stone boulders. Exploring here, one comes across old cabins, old pipelines, outhouses, and the remains of old, overgrown, narrow roads. Also, old stumps of spruce trees with diameters bigger than anything growing now.

Over time, I came to learn the history of Pike National Forest, one of the oldest national forests in the nation. Settlers began to come to that area in a wave during the late 1850′s as part of the Pikes Peak or Bust gold rush. (Somewhat of a misnomer, but that’s another history tale.) What these early settlers were really good at was cutting down trees. For mining, for buildings, to burn on those cold Colorado winter nights.

In only a handful of decades, the forested slopes of the Rampart Range were stripped bare. So much so that the residents of the growing towns found it grotesque. So, the activists of the time rallied their cries, and the land was turned into a protected, managed forest. This was around the first world war. Along with that, a tree research station was established, called the Manitou Station. They studied the area, started samplings, and basically replanted the forest. Most likely some of the huge Engelmann spruce that I pitched my tent under were from this amazing planting effort. But the research station closed, and the forest was left to its own. Nothing was done. I used to hike through areas that were so choked with downed trees it was hard to traverse more than a few meters without having to clamber over another horizontal trunk.

Ten years ago tomorrow, someone caused a fire at the very southern end of the range. Over the next week or so, the fire raged so hot it sterilized the ground. 18,247 acres (29 sq mi; 74 km2) worth of forest is gone. And so too the green skyline of my youth. Honestly, when I find myself down in that area, it’s hard to look at now.

(image from Wikipedia)

At the time of this writing, I have not done a deep dive into what is being done to restore the forests of the southern Rampart Range. I’m sure they’ve done a bunch of erosion control, as you know the clast laden floodwaters off a burn area are a big problem. But planting? I don’t know. But I know that it is not being done at the scale of the old Manitou Station days. And you can’t just go running around planting conifers everywhere. There are microclimates that have to be considered. Plant conifer saplings on the sunny south facing slopes and they’ll die in a year or two without an aspen grove to shade them. Plant aspen trees on the cold north-facing slopes and you are wasting your time. Well, at least that was the old concept. The lessons learned in 1922 may no longer apply to 2022.

Instead, it may become a very different ecosystem. As it turns out, Colorado Springs is known to be the northernmost extent of the Pinyon Juniper woodland that is characteristic of Northern New Mexico. It is my belief that what returns to the Waldo Canyon burn scar will not be the towering spruce and fir, the sturdy red barked ponderosa, or the quaking aspen. It will instead come to resemble Santa Fe more than the forests of my memory.

*Jon Anderson and Steve Howe, “The Remembering” on the album Tales from Topographic Oceans, 1973