Hubris, Control, and the Death of Beauty

"I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness."

- Aldo Leopold

Maybe you seek beauty in nature. If so, you’d better hurry because the United States government has a very different idea about the “value” of nature, one that has nothing to do with beauty and everything to do with control. The current administration has little interest in protecting our few remaining wild places, nor in helping us learn how to live more harmoniously with the natural world. It has but a single goal: to control nature. Only then can we quantify what it can yield, monetize it, and pillage it for profit. Forget about all the values that nature already freely provides, from climate mitigation to ecosystem services to, well, beauty.

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,” Aldo Leopold wrote. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect” – and thereby save both it and us.

America’s long tradition of protecting wild and beautiful places was codified in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson signed The Wilderness Act, which had taken eight years to get to his desk. Howard Zahniser, its foremost advocate, wrote perhaps the most succinct and poetic definition of the law’s intent: "A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."

These days man is more like an unwelcome guest who grabs all the food and won’t leave. The Trump administration’s environmental and wilderness plans are the opposite of the spirit of the: to underfund national parks, build roads in roadless areas, clear cut old growth forests, and, of course, “drill, baby, drill” – in short, to make short-term and shortsighted economic gain the only value of the natural world.

“To those devoid of imagination,” Leopold wrote many years ago, “a blank space on a map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”

Or maybe you seek beauty in museums and auditoriums, where the works of painters, sculptors, composers, and others have been distilled over time. Here, too, the role of our government is no longer to support the arts; it is to control them: to dictate what gets shown in museums, heard in auditoriums, and taught in classrooms; to ban pictures it doesn’t like and censor speech and thought it disagrees with. Here is a painting, “inspired by Rubens and Valazquez,” that Trump’s administration said proved the Smithsonian Institution is “OUT OF CONTROL.” They don’t like the subject matter.

Rigoberto A. Gonzalez, Refugees Crossing the Border Wall Into South Texas (2020)

Control is precisely the word for Trump’s agenda. Control nature. Control the arts. Control education. Control information. Control the Fed. Too often we focus so intently on the economic aspects of Trump’s policies that we overlook the cultural and spiritual wasteland they foreshadow. When the Nazis gained power in 1933, Joseph Goebbels immediately took over the news media, the arts, and information, and he turned them into propaganda to control the people. He could not see beauty; he could only see power. That is what’s at stake here.

Today, in America, the idea of beauty as a value in its own right – whether in nature or in art – has vanished from the public conversation. It is being removed from museums and bulldozed from the landscape. It is surely not a coincidence that ugliness and meanness of spirit now flourish in its place. For beauty is not ephemeral to our lives, nor to our communities; it is essential to the nourishment of our souls.