Seeing Vega and Getting Sirius

One of the most awe-inspiring experiences I've had with nature was on my family's recent trip to Yosemite National Park when I got to see the sky light up. It had already been an amazing day: biking all over the park, seeing incredible monoliths and beautiful waterfalls. After dinner I was set to go on a bus to one of the highest peaks in the park and observe the stars. We drove for about an hour and a half, seeing spectacular views of the park on the way up and hearing about all the different species of plant and animal that were present in and around the park. Like any park, Yosemite was proud of it's relative biodiversity.

Once we finally made it to the top (we were held up by road construction and traffic) it was almost dark. We all settled down into a stone amphitheater and began to watch as stars flickered on one by one. Before long the sky was brighter than Broadway. There were more stars than I even knew existed. I was, quite literally, star-struck. I had always loved the stars but I had always been close enough to some lit up town or city that they would lose some of their luster. But here there was no light anywhere nearby. The stars had the stage and it was quite a show.

I realized as I was sitting there that our human sprawl is not only threatening the biodiversity of our lands, but it's threatening the sky as well, at least our ability to enjoy it. Because of all the light pollution in the world, I had never really seen the stars until I was nineteen years old. That's unacceptable for something so incredible and accessible.

Sadly, even our national parks, areas we've set aside to preserve natural beauty such as this, are being affected by human activity. The sheer number of people I had observed in the park that day could not have passed through without causing an effect. There were trash cans, bathrooms, and food carts placed all over the park. There were roads and bike trails etched throughout. I mean, for goodness sake, we got stuck in road construction and traffic while driving a huge gas-guzzling charter bus to the top of the peak (which, if I may mention, was in no way full of people).

While I would never say we shouldn't be concerned about saving nature, I wonder if that is the wrong mindset for us to have. The natural world is incredible. It would be a devastating loss if it were completely gone, and it is already devastating how far gone we've let it get already. But I wonder if we give ourselves too much credit in our ability to intervene and "save nature." Wasn't it the human hand that got us into this mess in the first place? While we could certainly work towards making our impact on nature good rather than harmful, do we really understand this other world well enough to know how to do this effectively? While I certainly have faith in our ability to try to save the non-human world, I envision all sorts of unintended negative side effects that could arise from our interfering.

Maybe a better focus than saving nature would be for us to work on completely reducing our impact on it. Remove ourselves from the equation and let nature govern itself again for awhile (it was doing just fine long before we showed up). While there is certainly an argument for us helping to save it--people who say that we have harmed it so much that it's too far gone to revive itself--we need to at least stop harming nature before we can think about trying to help it