By Grace von Mettenheim from Westminster University.
The mountains erupt from the turquoise blue water, marked with patches of snow from the past winter. If you are intentional, you can see the Juneau icefields. They are shy, but they are extroverted with their size and presence. These far away ice-caped valleys and mountains seemed only close enough for my eyes to touch. These are vast landscapes. Overall, they are hard to conceptualize. The dense never-ending forests that coat the mountains that didn’t quite make it to the sky. The sheer mountain faces towering over you, that the ungulates become one with. The braided rivers, originating in the Taku watershed, seep out of the mountains into the ecology that provide us all with life. These rivers, streams, and glaciers, map the landscape with fossils of their existence, presence, and energy that move through these spaces. I like to think of these as veins of the earth, constantly working to keep up with the ambition that is life. This is the big picture. We often get caught up in the grandeur environments that sparks the mortality of us humans. These are easy feelings to have when these sublime environments are ever consuming.
Being within these spaces transforms your understanding of the natural world into one that is cohesive, rather than separate from humans. The awe of being transformed, into a seemingly different world, you zoom into the ever-expanding universe that is the flora of these ecosystems. The plants begin to consume your mind, you walk with your eyes constantly scanning the ground for the tracks of who may have been here before you. There’s this feeling when you began to understand an ecosystem. It is almost as is you start to move through these spaces as if you are one with it, rather than above it.
It’s a powerful feeling when your heart and brain grow together, hand-in-hand within an ecosystem, that’s as rich as the community that embodies them. Learning within place, enriches your ability to begin to understand a space in a way that creates such depth. In a way that only scratches the surface, and by doing so, in such a profound manner. While being immersed within these environments, you get a glimpse of the feelings and understandings of the complex connections that embody these spaces. There’s an understanding that although physically, you may be within these places, and connecting to them in your own personal way, these spaces are not for those who this land does not belong to.
Learning within place offers a powerful experience, that allows a hands-on, and physical understanding of what the ecological complexities look like. This type of learning alone only grows a certain part of yourself, that often is rooted in ways that exclude those who have had the veins of these places’ flows through them and their family for generations. This type of connection to these sublime and introspective environments reaches beyond taking the time to be within these environments. The communities that have listened, learned, loved, and lived through these spaces have an understanding that reaches a depth that we, as visitors, will never truly understand.
If you are lucky enough, you will be able to learn through community. This shows up in several different forms. By those whose connection is rooted into the soil like the hemlocks and fir that coat the mountains. Those whose history is passed down through the stories that have been shared for generations. Only when you allow for the connection of both place and community, learning is where you can start to gain a holistic and rounded understanding of what these ecosystems and environments mean. Only then will your attempt to understand a place will begin to formulate in a manner that will never be full, and that’s okay. These are not our stories to tell, but to listen to, if given the opportunity. These are not our lands to dictate the proper usage of, but to listen to, and act as extra pair of hands for the needs of the communities that understand and live every day within these profound spaces. These two combined, allows for the stark mountain and saturated waters, that feed the flora, which breeds life into every crevasse of these landscapes. Only then can we progress towards a future in which we value and treat these landscapes in the ways that are vital to the conservation of all who rely on the veins that pump the ambition that is life.