A Flower, For Now: Particulars of the Coulee
Little Cottonwood Canyon, The Gondola
This article has been featured in Save Our Canyon's Newsletter and Ogden City's newspaper.
Count the number of leaves on an oak.
Peel them off one by one, and it might take you a while.
Though soon you’ll be down to the very last one, and not realize how quickly you got there.
There’s no way to count the number of leaves on each tree, animals in a canyon, or rocks along the dirt.
But we’re well into pealing them off the earth, one by one.
Soon, we’ll be down to the very last one, and not realize how quickly we got there.
The leaves, rodents and animals, rocks and dirt - they’re all details.
Constantly looking at things as a whole, we miss the whole point. The details become noise and we’ve skewed our perspective.
We’re depleting our earth of its details one at a time.
A flower alone,
a tree alone,
an animal alone,
may not hold very much significance.
Eventually one flower leads to a field, one tree becomes 900 million each year, to 75% of earth’s land degraded.
The land and its beings.
Approximately 3 billion beings each day. For agriculture, for food, for research, for more land.
One by one, the details add up. They either create the whole picture, or we eliminate them all and are left with what once was.
Estimated to significantly alleviate traffic and back up along the canyon road,
a short 37 minute trip,
a huge tourist attraction,
increasing access to the canyon to over 1,000 people per hour,
profits from vehicle tolling,
and more.
To be fair, I don’t know that I can counter those facts, those benefits with similar financial, economic or convenience gain.
Perhaps that’s because in the whole picture we do not recognize the significance of the loss
of detail.
Over 120 species of plants,
4 different species of shrews,
9 different species of bats,
5 different species of hares,
over 36 species of rodents,
17 species of carnivores,
elk, Wasatch moose, mule deer and mountain goats are all found in Little Cottonwood canyon.
20 towers, 2 angle stations, a Snowbird station, and an Alta station, are required for the gondola. This amounts to over 10 miles of degraded land in the canyon.
For now, there’s always more. More trees, more animals, more air, more resources to pull from and build on.
But as we continue to deplete our earth of its details, what’s left?
Crouch down and view it from a flower’s point of view. Maybe perspective will change from a focus solely on you.