Freedom at Malheur

As the last of the militia remaining in Malheur National Wildlife Refuge set up defensive perimeters and mock the FBI, their supporters around the country continue to invoke the one word most used to defend the militia’s action: Freedom.

For the militia, freedom means using the public lands at Malheur and the surrounding area for ranching, logging and mining. Theirs is the freedom to consume nature or the nonhuman world, to the exclusion of those who want to be free to restore Malheur’s natural ecosystems, the habitat of plants and animals, for all to enjoy by observing rather than destroying.

And whose freedom should win out?

The answer may lie in what Senator Frank Church of Idaho said in helping to pass the Wilderness Act of 1964, that “without wilderness this country will become a cage.” Church and other wilderness proponents saw nature as freedom from others, the self-control, ascendance and actualization Thoreau wrote of in Walden. It is freedom as the absence of other people’s influence, manifested as the nonhuman world around us, realized as a place we can go but should not change. It is the freedom environmentalists restoring wilderness, and animal rights activists liberating animals, fight for every day.

This freedom of wilderness stands opposite to the militia’s and others’ view of freedom as the ability to control and consume nature and the nonhuman world by ranching, logging, and mining, by trophy hunting the animals that live in nature, by profiting through caging and exhibiting those animals, and by promoting the “free” marketing and consumption of cruelly raised animals. This form of freedom, the “free-for-all” to do whatever one wishes to animals, nature, and the nonhuman world, ultimately fails because it results in all of us being caged. As Church feared, in a world of human influence, surrounded by the Bundy’s cattle, the empty mines, the logged forests and missing wildlife, and now degraded and quickly warming atmosphere, we are all less free.

Yes, Malheur is a struggle for freedom, but not in the way the militia’s supporters believe. What’s at stake is a truer form freedom, one that will take humans and animals out of the cage together.