The missus and I trekked up “Little Si” on Saturday, the hill that adjoins the mountain of “Big Si,” a few miles east of here.
What I saw was the spectacular face of “Big Si,” some lush, green forest, and the sweeping vista to the south toward Cedar Falls and Lookout Mountain.
What I also saw was that people love their outdoors around here. By the time we got to the trailhead at about 11a.m., the car park was pretty much full, and all along the trail we bumped into people who had had the same idea we did.
Most of those we saw along the trail were about the same age as Debbie and I, mid 20s to mid 30s, plus a couple of teenage runaways and maybe two or three more mature specimens. The fact that most of the hikers were pretty young took my mind back to a meeting I went to last week.
I was lucky enough to cross paths with the Foothills Branch of the Mountaineers, in the form of their impossibly energetic spearhead Fran Troje. Fran invited me to their weekly meeting, and I went along.
That night I listened to a talk given by Craig Romano, the author of a number of books on hiking and the environment in Washington, in which he expressed his concern that a number of state parks are in danger of being closed by legislators who are not convinced of their worth. He said that it was up to the new generations of trail users to make their voices heard to ensure the future protection of important parks and scenic lands.
“How many young people are here?” he said, looking around. Not many, was the answer; perhaps one or two under the age of 40 in a room of 50 or so people.
On top of Little Si I started thinking, “how do you judge the worth or importance of parks and trails like this?”
Our society is one that has almost perfected the dubious art of assigning things a monetary value. Diseases and disasters are evaluated by how much they will cost to remedy; a carbon footprint unit costs “x’”dollars to offset; the worth of an education can be formulated against projected future income.
But what is the Little Si trail worth?
It might sound like an esoteric question, but it isn’t when governments begin to consider what better use could be made of such real estate. How will nature’s defenders describe its worth to economists?
Nature is a modern anomaly, in that it is often free to enjoy, but it isn’t free to maintain. We have expertly assigned dollar amounts to things also based on what they are worth to those who want them. And so, while a DVD rental costs about $4, watching a movie on the big screen costs about $10, due to the economists equation of satisfaction of wants.
While the fact that nature, parks and wilderness have somehow slipped through this system is one of its great merits, it may also be its essential weakness, in that it makes it hard to argue for in a language that modern society understands best.
This week we saw a $9 million tag attached to the reopening of the Iron Horse Trail.
When the future of some of Washington’s wilderness areas come up for discussion it will be interesting to see if those young people I saw on Little Si make their way into the meetings and boardrooms to discuss whether or not nature does indeed have a finite value.
