The writer begins: “With 3 million lakes, more than 3,000 rivers, and 17 of the country’s 20 tallest mountains, Alaska is vast, beautiful, wild — and largely empty.”
“Empty?” I choked. With all those lakes, rivers, and mountains, you call it empty?
What the writer meant, of course, is that the state of Alaska, which covers more physical space than most countries, is largely empty of humans.
Setting aside the question of whether that lack of humanity might, in fact, be a good thing, I’m most struck by the human-centered pridefulness and arrogance of calling the place “empty.” It’s as if an eagle flew over Manhattan and wrote, “Except for about 850 wooded acres near its center, the island is largely empty.”
I’ve never been in the Alaskan wilderness, but I can pretty much guarantee that it is far from empty. It teems with life. That life is just as lively as human life except that it doesn’t write magazine articles completely discounting the existence of other species.
I know that Alaska teems with life because of my own back yard. Check your own neighborhood, winter or summer. In winter, New England teems with life, though a lot of it — with the exception of us, a few other mammals, and some birds — has the good sense to be more or less asleep. But in the summer — look at all that life! Ants, beetles, spiders, worms, caterpillars, toads, frogs, snakes, grasses, wildflowers, berry bushes, growing trees, all those heretofore sleepy mammals, and back-from-the-south birds. Thousands of species, none of which would appreciate, if they spoke English, being called “nothing.” (Dictionary: “Empty: containing nothing.”)
Science and travel writer Hannah Holmes recently spent a year intensely studying wildlife in her tiny urban yard, two-tenths of an acre including the house, in South Portland, Maine. She describes her experiences in a lively, moving book, Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn. She writes on her Web site, “I dug into the home turf - and found it every bit as weird as any other place I've been. All the creatures and plants we disregard on a daily basis proved to be utterly absorbing, once I observed the details of their behavior. (And make no mistake, plants behave. They also misbehave.)”.
I have not knowingly witnessed plant misbehavior in my own yard. But I’ve watched a crow family teaching their baby — I called him Fred — how to get along in this world. I’ve watched baby squirrels practice their climbing high in a blue spruce when they were too young for ground travel. I’ve visited a dozen jack-in-the-pulpits blooming every year in a tiny suburban patch of woods. I’ve watched monarch butterflies stop on their way south to feed in wild asters.
So don’t tell me that the Alaskan wilderness is empty. Moose to mice to microbes, Alaska is my back yard multiplied by a zillion zillion.
Cities and suburbs often contain bits of land that people call “vacant lots,” but they’re not truly empty. They’re full of life; it’s just life that doesn’t happen to live in buildings.
When we label a piece of land “empty,” sooner or later some person feels compelled to fill it with buildings. Then the eagle would say, “Now it’s empty.”
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