¡Colores!; 222; The Sky's the Limit

Tonight, John Nichols, author of the Milagro Beanfield War, shares with us his love of the Touse Mesa, and a defense of the Earth. Okay, you see this cloud? Now if a hamburger were to drop right out of that cloud, we could call it a Macloud. That's tonight, on Colores. Right about now is the best time to fish out here. I'm using a spruce matuk on my line, and that's the best for the diamond back rattlers. If I want to catch lizards, I just put on a little size 10 atoms.

There we go. No. All right. If you want a coyote, you have to put on a muddler minnow. The coyotes just love the muddler minnow's, and the horn toads, I always put on a got a size 14 irresistible. Look. See? Now you can just see there's a little horn toad, right? Damn it. I missed them. All right. Let's try. Once the horn toads strike, they very rarely strike again. Good morning, all you people out there in Tows Radio Land. It's a bright sunny day in the land of Enchantment, and our smogometer has a reading of 11.5, which means that it's safe for people between the ages of 18 and 45 to go out without a gas mask. Hooray. Of course, if you're going shopping with grandma, grandpa, make sure you take along their

asthma, inhalers, and adrenaline injectors, and if you're driving the kiddies to school, remember to put on their raccoons, a lot of the surplus gas masks, because today's pollution light is coming out of us from every direction. Creatures from outer Detroit. And now let's switch to live with open eyes in the sky. Come on light. Let's go. Change. Here we go. All right. We're going out to the mesa, gonna walk around all day long. We're gonna have a good time with him, we're gonna see his son, or where we hate developers. We're gonna run him all down.

Until we make town, surreal, safe and clean town. Don't expand the airport, tell the sheriff's to go away. Don't expand that airport, tell the sheriff's to go away. We got a nice little village, and we don't want it to go to our home. We're going out to the mesa, we're gonna walk around all day long. We're going out to the mesa, we're gonna walk around all day long. We're gonna have a good time with him, we're gonna sing all these songs. We're gonna bury him in cars, we're not gonna medirate him no more. The six hottest years in the past century have been in the 1980s.

The earth is beginning to overheat, the atmosphere is polluted, acid rain threatens our rivers, lakes and oceans. Various holes in the ozone are widening, and population continues to expand around the globe. Almost a decade ago, when I first picked up a camera and headed for the mesa outside town, I had no specific vision in mind of either how to take a landscape picture or why. The places through which I meandered were all personal haunts, outdoor nooks and crannies that per years I had loved, worked in and adventured through. At first I had a hard time taking photographs. Then one day, my 80 year old friend Andres Martinez took me over to a small three summit mountain, which rises from the middle of the mesa. 11 years ago, I climbed this mountain with my friend Andres Martinez. I was 40 at the time, and he was 80, and yet he got up here twice as fast as I did.

I remember we reached the top of the mountain, and there's three peaks, and I said, we don't have to climb the peaks, and he said, oh no, he said, I want to climb all three. And he went up to one on the left there, came running down, went in the middle, came running down, went over in the one on the left, came running down. And he was still going strong at the end of the day, and I practically had a heart attack. During the first decade of the 20th century, Andres herded sheep on that mesa. As we progressed, he pointed out landmarks, auroyos, old sheep camps, the haunts of his childhood. His stories imbued the land with a precious history. He remembered friends who had lived and died in that sagebrush expanse. He plucked small medicinal herbs and called my attention to beetles, heramons, tarantula wasps. Without fear, he approached rattlesnakes and studied those guardian spirits of the mesa.

Well, you take a rock like this, which, you know, some of the environmental estates and the Nambi-Pambi, save the earth kind of people would say, you know, we ought to leave it like it is. But, you know, I could take this rock, I think about 12 sticks of dynamite. We could blow it up, get it out of here, and I could put a poor concrete foundation here, and I could really build myself a nice little aframe, you know, and with microwave oven and electric heating and things like that. And it'd be beautiful. I mean, I'd have this whole incredible landscape that I can look at. I would build a little, a little deck all the way around this aframe. I could sit out with my walkman, you know, I could listen to some mellow music with a couple of course silver bullets. And you don't have, there's not enough people around here. You don't have to worry about waste disposal. I can just put a pipe in a little on my sewage, go down into that dolly down there, right? And it becomes fertilizer. It'll grow, get grass for the deer.

I think it's wonderful. I think this is the most beautiful place on earth, and I intend to develop it from my heart. This land is my land, from Palo Verde, to the three-mile island, from Black Mesa Strip Mines to Love Canal Poisons. This land was killed for you and me, as I was walking in the polluted desert. I saw dead ravens and starving eagles. I saw coyotes that had been poisoned, as this land was killed for you and me. Once we were atop the small mountain, we could see for over a hundred miles in all directions, the landscape of Andres' homeland and of his history. He detailed how the land had nurtured his people. He emphasized that as one of the last undisturbed areas of the valley, it must be protected.

The first step was simply convincing people that the spare wild territory was sacred. And it was at this moment I determined to share my friend's legacy of that land in hopes of keeping it vital, undisturbed, and intact. To the extinct condors and for corners, yeah, this land was killed for you and me. When I first walk out upon the mace in the evening, it's difficult to acknowledge the menace to our planet. For the landscape around me seems healthy, at ease serene. Nevertheless, I know the air I breathe is full of poisons. Chernobyl radiation actually showed up in nearby Santa Fe and lakes in the mountains above my home are beginning to show signs of the acidity which has already killed so many bodies of water back east in Europe and throughout Sweden.

Although I had grown up influenced by the aesthetic graces, I seem to have little preconceived notion of how a camera might contribute to political art. I found when I first began to poke at the world with the lens, what interested me was not an easily recognized beauty coherent to any casual observer, but rather a statement of my personal mood. I rarely thought of universal implications, and many of my landscapes weren't truly photographs per se. They were nearly empty, devoid of structure. I wanted absolutely no confusion. I took hundreds of pictures of the same unassuming subject matter, nasa, clouds, sky, weather. I recorded skimpy, nearly invisible distant ridge lines of fuzzy mountain ranges completely dwarfed by enormously incontroversial skies. The peacefulness inherent in the monotony of open spaces became my holy grail. I did not know it then, but I understand it now.

That spade of picture taking saved my life. I could unwind where my unwinding was allowed to unravel across the deserted plains forever. I find that just the maces in the flatland and the lack of trees, the lack of people, the lack of everything is in a certain sense drained of emotion until you learn that there's another very, very powerful emotion mixed in with it. By and large, most people drive through the landscape out in the sagebrush and stuff, and they just can't wait to get to something that looks better. All they see is just desert, and I find that I really gravitate towards places where nobody else wants to go. That's where you can really find some kind of outward piece surrounding you that can lead to, not to be too corny, but a piece inside of you also. So sometimes there's really nothing that I'm inspired to do out here. The light doesn't feel right.

And so I don't do anything. I just kind of lay around waiting for something to happen, and that's when I often enjoy it more than anything else, when there's nothing to do. It's where there's another one. Final stone. If I can get this one between those three stones there, I win $100 million. See, I just want $100 million. I'm going to buy up this whole mesa, and I'm going to put a great big fence around it, and I'm not going to let anything in here except antelopes and ravens and lizards and rattlesnakes. Then it'll be my kind of place, and especially no TV people.

The good news is, we still have air to breathe. The bad news is, we may not have it much longer. Today there is five times more chlorine in our atmosphere than there was in 1950. And two-thirds of the ozone over springtime Antarctica isn't even there anymore. Carl Sagan says that by destroying the ozone, we are tugging at a planet-wide biological tapestry, and we do not know whether one thread only will come out in our hands, or whether the whole tapestry will unravel before us. All pictures in the following essay were taken on the mesa, most three locations fairly close together. I have my special spots, and I return to them regularly.

I am never bored. Elliott Porter once said, I photographed the same old things over and over again. It's a little different each time. It's infinite. There isn't any limit. You can't exhaust a subject. And I agree. All my life I had venerated the natural world. Yet it was a camera finally that forced me to take it seriously at deeper levels. Nature ripened immeasurably full of flaws and pressed vegetation when I began to inspect it and freeze it through a lens. It led me by the hand through miracles to which I had never paid much attention. One of the places I came to all the time was this stockpunt. Sometimes I had a lot of water. Sometimes it just has a little bit of water. Sometimes it's just dry, that kind of thing. But I discovered so much life that I never knew existed. I mean, when there's a little bit of water in here, you've got spadefoot toads by the hundreds of thousands. It rains. These frogs start mating.

The whole area sounds like Times Square in New York City with frogs grunking like that. I am shrimp, fairy shrimp, all kinds of little things running around in the water. Migratory birds, ibises, curl use, that kind of thing. And I went to sit here with my camera, night after night after night. And after a while I realized that there's as much life in a little dry pond like this as there is, you know, in an Amazonian rain forest. You just, people don't pay attention to it. Some reason when I began to bring a camera out here to kind of capture it and look at it, I started paying attention to it. And I discovered a universe that, you know, has become a very sacred kind of universe to me. Wonderful universe. The oxygen we breathe is a chemical cocktail. Furens or dioxins, for example, both byproducts of incomplete burning, have been detected in seals from Sweden, snapping turtles from the Hudson River,

and cows milk and Michigan. Toxapine used to kill bull weevils and Mississippi has been found in an Arctic codfish and in Canadian polar bears. I do not voyage comfortably any longer. In areas of the country where space fails to extend in all directions for at least a hundred miles. I get crazy if horizons are interrupted by buildings, forest hills. I need to see a head behind all around me. I cannot abide pollution. I am not charmed by a red photochemical sunset beyond the majestic silhouetted spires of Manhattan. I tend towards prairies everlasting, especially where there's too much wind, plenty of snow and a pan-a-vision sky. Anything less, and who can breathe? Sometimes, glancing up at all that invisible trash, I get a trifle frenetic and I think,

oh gosh, we've poisoned the waters, we've leveled the forest, we've eroded away the topsoil, and now the air is even difficult to breathe. And if we run out of air, it's all over. The sky is very beautiful today, but the sky is the limit of our resources. There's nothing else to wreck once all the air is gone. Sometimes I wonder how long this beautiful place is going to last. Sometimes I wonder how long this wonderful place is going to last. Because sometimes it seems that wild country is disappearing mighty fast. I used to walk around out here, I never saw another man.

It evolved then that I began to show my simple pictures as a way of saying to others, wake up and fly right before the earth is gone. Many of my photos a matter of daily habit to me were, for most of the planet's citizens, already wishful thinking. In much of our world, my kind of mesa is memory already extinct. I often consider that I live in a sort of Galapagos Valley. The scenes my camera captures are iguanas, turtles, tiny finches, all of them perched on the brink. I remember there were antelope up and down the mesa. When a human being is moved to record on film or on canvas or in a novel, some piece of earth that momentarily shines enough to stir their imaginations.

There's is an act of both aesthetic and political conscience. And there were eagles nestin' in the coach. And hawks everywhere you looked. It is a way to forge within the cultural memory of all races, the possibilities for a continuing evolution and enduring future. The Sierra Club understood this long ago. Today all landscape photography is an act of conscience and commitment. Each photograph is a voice raised in protest as well as a hosanna for the planet. More than 70% of us in this country now live in urban areas and have little Congress with a biological capital upon which our lives depend. Pictures of this sweet earth then are important to everyone's education. They have become part of a language that must be learned of the futures to be hopeful. But now everything's changing. Real estate signs are everywhere.

Any photograph of unsullied terrain contains within it a message to halt population growth, redistribute wealth, ban pesticides and other toxic waste, save the dying whales. There's an urgency to even the most peaceful and bucolic landscape impossible to deny. The invisible underside of the iceberg and any portrait of the earth is always the strip mining bulldozers just out of frame, gearing up to plunder. This area right here is where they're going to put in the Las Yeras subdivision which is going to be I think 300 condos and 18-hole golf course, a shopping center, a major league shopping center. And all this rural area here going way down towards Everangitos will be nothing but kind of double-knit slacks and electronic golf carts. Look at this. Land, land, land, panoramic views. Ten acre lots, $15,000, $40 acre lots, only $45,000.

Bald Eagle subdivision, a file subdivision, seller financing, low down, easy terms. Boy, this stuff is hard to mow. Look, realtor bones. This is the rib bone of a condo developer and this is the femur bone of a resort developer. 13 years ago, I bought 160 acres right over here. My whole theory when I got land out here was that it would be real nice to just leave it alone, maybe pass it on to the nature conservancy or something like that. Two years later, there were real estate signs all over here.

I mean, people are buying it out, people are bulldozing, people are building, coming in from everywhere. And I thought, here's a place where you can get away from everything that no one will ever come in here because it's too harsh. I guess it just goes to prove that there is no place on earth that is so inhospitable that somebody won't want to come and build a city there. I picture in 10 years that this land will probably have 100,000 condos, the Tao's Mesa condos, but they won't be able to get any fresh water, but that's not a problem because they'll buy an iceberg in Alaska. They'll park it right down there in Pilar, stick some pipes into this iceberg and they'll get plenty of fresh water for 300,000 condos, a golf course, a health spot, a dog racing track, you name it.

This place is going to bloom. Pictures of the natural world have become poignant and a man are almost unbearable at times. They remind us of the building tragedy, but also I hope they encourage us to take sides to take part in the revolution that must happen to change the downward slide. Because ultimately it's going to be a traumatic trade-off, my automobile to save that mountain, your VCR to save my lungs, their flush toilet to save that river of trout. Isn't that wild? Look at there, like here's something that could only happen in Tao's. And I can't believe it. This whole Mesa out here is totally empty. The only thing that stands up that could hurt anything flying is my little itty bitty sheep trailer. So what does this stupid sparrow hog do? I mean, it flies down the chimney. You know, I was probably looking for some sort of shelter from the wind. And I figured it's like people here in town. They want to expand the airport here to bring in jets.

They want to build a huge golf course and condo complex called La Sierra's. I figured they're falling in the same kind of trap. You know, they look real good on paper. They think it's more jobs, more security, but in the end it's going to kill us. You know, hey, I figured it's better just to keep on living with the wind. Oh, I love this little puddle. Even as the Mesa's tranquility up lifts my spirit, it also increases my anguish. At its most peaceful, the panoramic land sets my mind racing through the world situation, which I know can bring down this Mesa in a minute. I cannot bear the idea of losing this place. I'm very thankful for Ansel Adams and Laura Gilpin and Ray McSaveney and all the other great landscape photographers. Their work and that of many others has become the foundation of a case that needs to be made for planet Earth. Landscapes have become the conscience of our survival,

the measuring devices of how well or how badly we are doing. There's a religious element in all of them in that they offer hope. To consider as anything less a photograph of that exquisite place or of this tree or of those rocks and clouds is to miss the point completely. Last night I had a dream. I dreamed everything was as before. Last night I had a dream. I dreamed that everything was as it was before. It was empty again and my dream seemed like a miracle to me. I wish people would learn to leave well enough alone.

I wish people would learn to leave well enough alone. After all, this is probably the world's most beautiful home. In this day and age, you need a sense of humor just to stay sane. I guess I've learned to laugh in order to survive the Holocaust. Today, humanity everywhere on Earth is, you know, we're implementing another final solution which will be,

every bit is emphatic, believe me. Oh my God, I've got, all right, wait a minute. I remember that Emma Goldman once said, if I can't dance, I don't want to be in the revolution. Well, I love to dance and I sure want to be in the revolution. And I believe deeply that laughter and dancing are also real important weapons. We need them to keep our spirits up during all the life and death struggles to come. Well, you know, I guess that's just showbiz. You know, I don't want to be in the revolution, I don't want to be in the revolution, I don't want to be in the revolution.