As people who love public lands who want to do every thing we can to protect it, it can boggle the mind when we are faced with the reality that not everyone is standing up and carrying the battle as we are. How do others not see the same impending catastrophe that we do? The loss? Why does not everyone hold the belief of the importance of preserving public lands self-evident?
Just like many issues today, our inability to see things from a different lens may be what is preventing real dialogue to occur. Understanding on BOTH sides. Or even more importantly, an understanding that it is not a two sided issue despite what media wants us to believe.
What if it is a three sided issue? A four sided issue? What if there are more sides to count? Do we stop to even consider that there are other points of view beyond our own? What if there are no real sides at all? Note I didn’t say accept or agree with other views. I said consider.
“Why should someone listen about saving someone else’s history when we don’t demonstrate we care about their present?”
What would the benefit be to considering that there are reasons why someone might support the selling off of public lands when you know it only lead to disaster? Now, I’m not talking about why government entities or large corporations might be interested. That is self-evident. I’m talking about your Average Joe who supports what the government or large corporations are doing.
For every person who makes a plea for the protection of public lands, shares what it means to them, their worries and concerns, there is someone else who, also, has worries, concerns and a personal story that defines them. And I hate to tell you, but it is a luxury to have the time and energy to make public lands a priority if you don’t have a home, food to eat, a job, or you simply feel that what is in the best interest of your family and the people who are most important is what you perceive will happen if more public lands are available for something other than simply “being”. Every time we talk about the beauty, how it changed us, saving it for future generations, someone is saying, “Yeah, that is something I’ll never know about because I am worrying about my life RIGHT NOW.” Why should someone listen about saving someone else’s history when we don’t demonstrate we care about their present?
Simply repeating the same message over and over without acknowledging why someone else doesn’t share your belief will do nothing but get you ignored. Or worse, build up animosity and the whole us-against-them thing. Then, nothing happens but a stalemate with two sides pushing back and forth at each other. Now, I LOVE Patagonia and think they are doing amazing advocacy work. But I had to cringe with their ad last December because all I could think was, well if anyone was on the fence they are most certainly not listening now.
Public lands means public lands, and right or wrong, if you believe that there is benefit to you as a part of the “public” to have those lands sold you completely turned off if you saw this ad and thought the “other side” didn’t get it. The legal truth is that the land transferred from federal to state control and was not “stolen”*. Flashy emotional headlines do not help someone see the implications of that transfer, unfortunately. And even if you do, it is hard to tell someone worried about their job or future of their children that instead they need to be worried about the future of a piece of land.
I attended an advocacy training the other day and one thing they shared (mainly in talking with politicians) was, you have to know your “opponent” for lack of a better word in order to have a meaningful dialogue with them and get them to see what is important to you. Once you know what is important to them, you can better address how what is important to you can fit within that.
Yes, I am playing devil’s advocate. And I don’t know what the answer is. As someone who wants to just cry at the loss as our public lands are moved down to a lower level of protection where economic factors can wreak havoc, I wish only to do more. And what I am going to choose to do more of is listen to what “the other side” is saying, what they are worried about, so that hopefully we can come up with a solution that meets all our needs.
I believe that is how we all come out winners, especially our public lands.
This was written in one hour for the #NatureWritingChallenge on Twitter.
*Editor’s note: I was having a conversation with a coworker about undoing institutional racism today and during that conversation it came to my attention that when writing this post I did not acknowledge the fact that the lands we call “public” were, in fact, stolen in the first place from the people of the First Nations. I apologize. That fact is an important part of the discussion of public lands. I do not feel that Patagonia’s ad was in anyway trying to acknowledge that original theft but a way to speak to those who feel that public lands are a right under Constitution of the United States. This, of course, could be a whole other discussion in itself.
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