The Golden Mean (A Basic Question - A Starting Point)

Where is it?  How many would agree where it is?  How many would agree we’ve overshot the mark?  What is the ideal human environment?  What is “quality of life”?  What is our GOAL?

At one extreme is the way our predecessors 10K+ years ago found California (and the whole Western Hemisphere) when they first fetched up on its hitherto unpeopled shores.

The other extreme is the state other place as it is now.

Newly “discovered” land without previous human alteration we generally call “unspoiled” or “pristine” when we are trying to sell it, or “wasteland” or “desert” or “nothing but . . .” when we’re trying to sell what we’ve done to it.  The word “wilderness” used to fall into the latter category, but it has gradually migrated toward the first since we’ve begun to value the “before” category because of its increasing scarcity.  

The Indians who came before us settled on their notion of the just-right amount of “development”—their “Golden Mean”—and were at a relatively stable point in that regard when we Europeans showed up.

We took the state of affairs as we found them to be not the product of millenia of human-nature interaction but the “pristine” or “wilderness” condition.  And we all know what we’ve done to alter things since [clean up and expand on this whole idea—it is central].

It is natural for any pioneer to dream of greater comfort and convenience in his “wilderness,” and to welcome any such “improvements” or development”—up to a point.  But these comforts must be bought at some sacrifice of other aspects of your overall “quality of life”; and at a certain point, to use one example, we have a state-of-the-art superhighway system to take us speedily and in comfort to anywhere—but the cost of the highway system has been to make those places scarcely worth visiting—i.e. it has eaten up all its destinations in the process of its construction.

But individual lifetimes are too short to see the ultimate absurdity and destructiveness of blind “progress” and “development.”  Even in our own lifetimes we have observed the increase in traffic, for example, but none of us has seen or fully known the great, sweeping changes we have wrought in our “natural” landscapes over even so short a time as a century or two.  How many of those first “pioneers” would applaud how far we have gone in changing things; how many would actually be appalled?

It seems to me that to find out what most of us consider to be a good measure of what constitutes a “just right” marriage of humans and “nature,” we need only look to Madison Avenue.

For example, an automobile commercial showing a solitary car on a bucolic country road or Christmas cards showing a cozy cottage in a  showy bucolic farmscape or, or, or, any number of such images designed to appeal to our sense of the perfect human environment.

And, surprisingly?, this is also pretty much the preferred kind of “habitat” for most of the more “attractive” or “desirable” among other species as well—for example you will find far more birds in bucolic family-farmscapes than you ever will in the “wilderness.”

Of course there are those among us who seem to be natural-born urbanites.  Not doubt we love whatever environment we were raised in, up to a point.  But at a much deeper level, our species grew up in a certain kind of environment.