I rarely watch television, and if I do, I make a superhuman effort to avoid advertisements. I happened though to catch a few of the recent Stanley Cup games in a Denver restaurant in which I controlled neither the channel nor the volume, and one commercial for a Toyota 4Runner stood out to me. It featured said machine (shiny and new of course) blasting up roads in a natural setting, with a deep male voice narrating something or other, and generic guitar riffs in the background.
 
It culminated with the 4Runner at a scenic view with the massive words “Keep it Wild” plastered across the screen overtop the vehicle and scenery. After some internet searching, I discovered that Toyota has been running this campaign for around 10 years, if not more.
 
I have no specific beef with Toyota (well, besides their financing of Big Lie supporting politicians and mixed environmental record). I actually own a Toyota—a 2000 Tacoma to be exact—a real truck if there ever was one. It’s less than ideal in terms of gas mileage and for city driving (I try to drive it as little as possible, choosing to bike, bus, and carpool instead), but it delivers for camping and getting into the mountains. I suppose that is the point of the ad campaign.
 
Nevertheless, Toyota’s slogan sits somewhere between irresponsible and insulting. If the wild is anything, it is beyond the limits of motorized access. To be clear, the wild is in a sense everywhere—the weeds in your driveway, the moon looming above a city skyline, the hummingbird flitting by your window—each are wild things that all of us experience every day.
 
But the real stuff—intact landscapes where a variety of creatures, large and small (including predators), can live their lives more or less as they have for eons with minimal human interference and influence—and, once entered by humans on their own two legs or with paddle in hand or on horseback, know that this is a realm apart from their usual world—a place that commands respect in part because it is dangerous and is not theirs to command—a place that overwhelms sense and sensibility with an order apart.
 
More practically speaking, wilderness means in part a specific form of land designation that legally bars road development and mechanized and motorized intrusion. The 1964 Wilderness Act was motivated largely by the threats that these created to the last remaining undeveloped federal lands—usually in the most rugged mountains or most remote deserts.
 
I for one am bounteously grateful for the foresight of those over 50 years ago to leave some places protected as such—a respite from the noise, emissions, and consumptive ease of the everyday. Presently, around 2% of all the land in the “lower 48” is protected as wilderness. The rest is within striking distance of a road and otherwise converted for human uses.
 
But even with a variety of protections in place against motorized incursion, it is often regarded by land management professionals as an ongoing threat to Wilderness and other public lands, though not among the largest threats to Wilderness.
 
The late environmentalist and author Edward Abbey famously railed against “Industrial Tourism” in the National Parks in his best-known work, Desert Solitaire, arguing among other things that the experience is diminished by being confined to an automobile:
 
“A man [or you know whoever] on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles...Those who are familiar with both modes of travel know from experience that this is true; the rest have only to make the experiment to discover the same truth for themselves.”
 
More important than the quality of the experience of nature is the pressing need to increase the size and interconnectedness of protected landscapes to stymie and reverse biodiversity loss. This will certainly entail decreasing road access in some areas. While slowing climate change (including its profound impacts on wild nature) requires decreasing fossil fuel consumption, which will necessitate—among many other things—slowing the production and dissemination of personal vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine.
 
It is therefore more than a little Orwellian that an automobile company in an SUV ad should help itself to language to which it is totally unentitled.
 
Toyota’s slogan undoubtedly sells 4Runners, but it certainly doesn’t “Keep it Wild.”

#wild #wilderness #TOYOTA #keepitwild

The Taj Mahal is a contradiction. It is easily one of the most superb human creations to ever grace our planet—gorgeous, immaculate, perfect—everything they say and more. It is an exquisitely proportioned aesthetic wonder—a national treasure, a world treasure, a living treasure.
 
It is also a hulking monument to the dead—the tomb of an emperor’s favorite wife.
 
And in a country that has long struggled with poverty, the Taj Mahal was built at great expense; and it is at great expense that it continues to be maintained for the benefit of the millions of tourists who visit it year-round.
 
The most striking contradiction may however be that this new seventh wonder—the subject of the world’s adoration and fawning—sits next to one of the world’s most polluted rivers. The Yamuna River is so polluted in fact that it is considered dead—an open sewer of industrial and human filth. The main sources of pollution are untreated sewage, pesticide runoff, plastic litter, and waste from leather and jewelry manufacturing facilities. It has long been considered by experts in India to be unsavable (in contrast to more recent hopeful assessments).
 
The contrast between the immaculateness of the Taj and the abysmal condition of the nearby river could not be more striking. And nested within this contradiction is another: the Yamuna is considered by Hindus to be one of the holiest rivers.
 
So, to recap, we have a monument to the dead, adored by the living, on a dead river, revered by the living.
 
It might seem that there is a moral here about human priorities gone awry: a charismatic human construction prioritized over an element of nature. Perhaps this is true, but there may be a deeper story in all of this.
 
For the Taj Mahal is also succumbing to decay—some due to the inevitably of time—much however due to local pollutants, including airborne industrial contaminants. The most obvious symptom is surface discoloration, but crumbling of the façade, and possible structural concerns with the foundation are others. Maintaining the Taj is a painstaking and time-consuming process, incorporating, among other techniques, the use of mud baths.
 
The longstanding prominent theory of acid rain from sulfur dioxide emissions as the main culprit of exterior degradation has however recently been supplanted in favor of hydrogen sulfide emitted from the highly toxic Yamuna River. It is also now thought that the Taj is gravely threatened by the decay of its foundations due to the dropping water levels of the Yamuna.
 
The state of the Taj Mahal is therefore deeply entwined with that of the river and the surrounding air. The primary moral lesson then may be the deep intertwinement of the natural and the cultural—each dependent in many ways on the other. Our lives and those things we treasure most cannot persist without looking after the most fundamental aspects of our existence.
 
The truth is that great effort has gone into working to preserve and restore both the Taj Mahal and the Yamuna River. A final lesson is thus that actualizing our ideals and working through complex problems is at times frustrating and heartbreaking and not always successful.
 
I still hope against all odds that the Taj will continue to sit in magnificence, but on a renewed and restored Yamuna like the one that Shah Jahan and the people of 17th century India once knew.

 I hope in other words that we the living can supplant death with life.