Celebrating the Grand Canyon

 THESE ARE SERIOUS MATTERS*

(*this is a first, very first, rough draft, to get ideas down)

Two Surprise (Near Simultaneous) Destructive Floods

Balancing Living As We Do and Human Impacts

Consider: The Grand Canyon is revered (protected?) and enjoyed as a world-spanning environmental icon -- a place that reminds us of how gorgeous this world we evolved in is, and therefore a place "saying" to us: You MUST do differently how you live in the world, or we will all hang separately.

The vexed question of fire and how it is to be handled, and prevented, and as a natural force, let be; its effects, especially the stripping of vegetation and disturbance of the landscape that allows other natural forces, esp. rain, to exacerbate the impacts of a burned-over forest. Vexed, and long debated, fought over, had inconsistent decisions made regarding, fire and water here are not inimical, but cooperative destroyers -- no, landscape shapers, actors.

That the Grand Canyon and the Kaibab Uplift into which it has dug have been treated by us, not with reverence and care, but heedlessly and with multiplicative destructive impacts, ought to be, in a world of beings desirous of caring for and prolonging the health of the environment that supports us, keeps us healthy and happy, a crime with great penalties. Not so, but we are seeing the penalties visited on  us anyway. The great Dragon burn of 2025 was not just devastation, it created the elements of even more devastation--multiplicative, as I said. 

Consider the visuals of the human artifacts in Bright Angel being wiped out (and be thankful, there were no drownings). Dramatic testimony to our failure to honor the Canyon, our icon. And the fire, intense as it was, roaring and running, taking out landscape and our artifacts both; a sign of the penalties we inflict, because we have NOT honored what the icon tells us.

And then, half a world away, but only a few hours previously, an immense piece of an immense glacier located in  the immense Himalaya Mountains, detached and hurled itself into a narrow valley, into a bursting mountain river that grew into an immense destructive force, the visuals of which are not believable.

Those Himalayas are icons of our environment too, though enough harder to grasp that they burst imagination's bounds, as that great flood burst through human artifacts and collections of human, laying great waste.

Comprehend these two: Evidences of our false belief that our environment is our toy and reward. It is not; it is our support, making life even possible. We have, and continue, to ignore these evidences. We gape, and we gawk, and go on, accumulating the materials and conditions for more, and even more, environmental insults and injuries.

So, unconnected (not really), world-spanning these two floods could be whacks upside our heads. But, sadly, not. And that is the life question that seems so vivid to me at this point, at the same time that I am reading, confronting, another undeniably vidid, life question: When and how do each of us, as we age, and wear down, confront (even if we cannot answer) the question of when is it time to go, to be done with this living business. 

An article, a book chapter, can present the question(s) vividly and forcefully, even though they cannot demand an answer. That is unlike a Grand Canyon fire & flood, a Himalayan glacial collapse and inundation of local civilization. To me, their coincidence puts the individual question back in the shades of Not Yet, Not Yet. The time when we are ready to let go, of course, does not go away. However, the awareness of the magnitude of the disasters we are visiting on ourselves (and all the other creatures and elements of Earth) causes an emotional resonance, a conceptual reverberation, that almost pacifies the tremors of back-and-forth consideration of individual existence:

HOW CAN IT BE THAT WE HAVE BEEN, AND GO ON BEING, SO CARELESS, SO CONTEMPTUOUS EVEN, of what the iconic existence of the Grand Canyon tells us: If you ignore what you do, if you wave away such tocsins as the simultaneity of the gigantic devastations of Himalayan human-prompted glacial devastation, and the no-less impactful erosion and flooding of a human-modified Grand Canyon landscape, inflected by our works and carelessness, you, we, will suffer, and you, we, will destroy the environment that supports and gives us life, existence, and joy.