The fact that these islanders did not have an advanced written language rendered them, in the eyes of their supposedly wiser white neighbors, unlettered and so merely primitive. But they possessed, unknown to most outsiders, a rich and powerful oral tradition, and that very tradition provided them with sufficient a supply of wisdom to outrun the deadly waves that December day. Their survival briefly reminded the outside world that it was those who lacked such prescience who lost their lives. They turned out simply to be too clever to understand the inherent dangers of a wild and capricious Nature.

  As with the Andamanese, so with Australian aboriginals. The academic paper spoke admiringly of these long-unrecognized skills of theirs, and of the pressing modern need both to respect and to pass on to others what they knew, and we did not.

  Aboriginal people have occupied northern Australia for at least 40,000 years, and over this period have developed a rich culture of law, ceremony, oral history and detailed ecological knowledge. Despite nearly two centuries of European colonization, large areas of northern Australia remain in Aboriginal ownership or have recently been returned to indigenous management and control. A high priority for Aboriginal people is to record and revitalize their indigenous knowledge and practices to meet stewardship obligations and to ensure they are available for younger generations of Aboriginal land and sea managers. In recent years there has also been increasing recognition by non-indigenous peoples of the value of applying such traditional ecological knowledge and practice to contemporary land management.

  In late November 2018, a group of aboriginal fire crew members were found conducting a traditional coldfire burn close to a country town even farther south of Sydney. A few days beforehand this community had suffered horribly from a disastrous blaze which had torn through three thousand acres and destroyed more than a hundred houses. But where the indigenous teams were working, five miles away, teams were patiently using their ancient techniques on a stretch of unburned gum-tree woodlands, setting small fires here and there to clear away the underbrush, smearing the fire onto the underbrush, stamping out the flames if they ever became too intense, and doing so with almost Zen-like calm. No shouting, no panic, no heavy machinery. Just a shaggy-bark firelighter and a sense of casual purpose, each member of the team seemingly working at one with the woodlands, at one with Nature.

  One young aboriginal firefighter, George Aldridge, spoke almost lovingly of the surrounding landscape as he applied his torch to patches of grass here and there, watching the flames grow and then die away, after which he would sift through the warm black soil left behind and imagine how soon fresh grasses would grow back. “I love land management and looking after my land,” he said, kneeling among the wisps of fresh and fragrant blue smoke. “The land is my mother, our mother, and she looks after us, and so it is only right that we look after her.”

  Except that, all too often, we do anything but.

  6

  Parks, Recreation, and Plutonium

  I live not in myself, but I become

  Portion of that around me; and to me

  High mountains are a feeling, but the hum

  Of human cities torture.

  —LORD BYRON, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, CANTO III, ST. 72 (1816)

  Cities are where land comes to die. Maybe this was not so at first, back when the gatherings of large numbers of people managed to enjoy a coequal existence with the countryside around them—in early centers of civilization like Ur and Babylon, Haarlem and Taos, and Angkor and Teotihuacan. But come the late eighteenth century, and the Industrial Revolution, and the massive global transmigration of populations from rus to urbs, so the land itself began to vanish, the soft beauty of nature devoured by the hard manifestations of man. Some few mourned. “They paved paradise,” went their song. “And put up a parking lot.”

  In a legal sense the land continued to exist, of course, if now largely underneath and invisible. And in terms of its value or its cost, and even to some its worth, land became in cities a thing of very much greater price. But what had long made land land was now steadily changed, with city land rendered into an entity quite different in style and substance. Today, where great cities stand—Tokyo, Mexico, Shanghai, London, New York, Cairo, Los Angeles, Chongqing, Seoul—pastures and forests have been replaced by asphalt and concrete, green has given way to gray, embanked streams have become tiled sewers, burrowing animals have become subway trains, valleys between mountains are now car-clogged canyons separating skyscrapers.

  In the suburbs beyond the urban limits, the degradation of the land has been more insidious, its demoted status often cunningly disguised. Such land as appears to exist is mostly artifice, a simulacrum of countryside, the greenest of its expanses available at great expense to the golfer or more ironically to the members of what for the past two centuries have been called country clubs. These last are institutions placed well beyond the real country they seek to resemble and offer a reminder—for a considerable annual fee—of the rural dreamland that some old-timers recall went before.

  The public spaces of cities, where they exist, have long been an acknowledgment of this loss, presenting a substitute. The agora of ancient Greece recognized the need for a space where all could come, to hear the addresses of their leaders, to meet with one another, to indulge in politics, or to offer merchandise. The agora was, in effect, the public commons; and in the centers of some cities still common land remains preserved, religiously: in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in northern England, for example, there is the Town Moor, more than a thousand acres of preserved agricultural land far larger than the great artificial parks of London and New York, and where some may graze sheep and cattle, course rabbits, and, at one time, take off in small aircraft.

  Stanley Park in Vancouver is almost exactly the same size, and it enjoys with the Town Moor the benefit of being essentially unaltered by human agency: it was once a military reservation, bought by the city in 1886 and left as the small garrison of artillerymen kept it, a wild forest of cedars, spruce, and hemlock standing between the city and the sea. The city has seldom employed landscapers to prettify the park: it can almost lay claim to being an island of the rural original, now circumscribed by the new and the man-made.

  Municipally owned and landscaped parks are by far the more frequently encountered: the two great Napoleonic hunting grounds, les bois of Vincennes and Boulogne on the eastern and western edges of Paris, respectively, are still suggestive of real countryside; the great parks in Los Angeles and San Diego, as well as in Richmond in London, have been carefully maintained and sculpted to help calm the nerves of the frantic city dwellers nearby, though the notion that they are in any sense common land, fully available to all, is misleading. Richmond, Bushy, and Greenwich Parks in London all have considerable populations of deer, both red and fallow, but they are far from being as wild as they look. The animals’ forefathers were introduced there for sport by King Henry VIII, and the lands on which they now flock are properly examples of what may once have been common land (Bushy Park enjoyed that status six hundred years ago) but are technically part of the nation’s royal estates, and such animals as live there belong not to the common folk, but to Britain’s reigning king or queen.

  And then there are the maidans of eastern cities, large expanses of meadowland that act, literally and metaphorically, as urban lungs, offering well-ventilated respite from urban congestion and in older times, the risk of tuberculosis. Some of these—the Kiev Maidan in Ukraine and Tehrir Square in Cairo—have lately become notorious as centers of political activism, where police and protesters have been joined, all too often with lethal result. Others, like the Maidan in Kolkata, which stretches unencroached and cherished between the Chowringhee district and the Hooghly River, have a more curiously postcolonial standing, seen by today’s Bengalis almost as a compensatory apology for the foreign imperial authority that went before. Its vast expanse was constructed by the British when Calcutta was their Indian capital, and it once doubled as a parade ground and, more sinisterly, as a free-fire zone that protected the Indian army’s Fort William from the threats of bandits—soldiers would in theory fire down from the high fort walls at any approaching rebels. Now, though, and with the imperialists gone, the thousand acres have been returned almost to wildness, with grazing goats and cows, with vultures and kites and kite fliers, with cricketers and soccer players and strolling lovers. The land still all belongs to the army, though naturally, since 1947, it is the army of independent India. The land could have been subdivided, with houses provided for some of Calcutta’s teeming millions. But it remains untouched, almost penitent, a poignant reminder of what for Indians were unhappier times. Except that, curiously for visitors, the Victoria Memorial, an enormous and triumphal confection of marble made on the orders of Lord Curzon, still stands untouched on the Maidan’s southern side, one of the few memorials to colonial times that survives in modern India. Its sheer existence, unscarred, somewhat mutes the pleas for forgetting and forgiving that the Maidan otherwise suggests.

  Originally established by the British military to protect their Fort William barracks, Kolkata’s Maidan offers blessed rural relief for the millions living in one of the country’s most overcrowded cities.

  Forgiveness would also seem a proper plea for the planners of all too many other of the world’s cities, however. For while there are legions of truly grand and beautiful cities—even if so many today are greatly ruined by the press of tourism, with Venice and Dubrovnik at the head of the league—they are very much a minority. The greatest number of those cities where the world’s millions are now compelled to live, most of which are new and have been built in response to population growth and upon land quite recently pristine, can fairly be described as awful.

  These are today’s cities of “dreadful night,” as James Thomson’s poem once described mid-nineteenth-century London, and which Gustave Doré so memorably drew. For every properly planned and hopefully built would-be utopian city—Welwyn, and Port Sunlight, in England; Chandigarh in India; Islamabad in Pakistan; even New Harmony in Indiana—there are a score of ugly, overcrowded, and ill-conceived aggregations of humanity, with few redeeming features and all too few reminders of the natural landscape they replaced. There are over one hundred cities in today’s China that have populations above one million souls: most have been occupied in the last half century, few in all candor can be described as pleasing places in which to live. Similarly, India: of the world’s fifty most polluted cities, fourteen are in China, and one each in Mongolia and Bangladesh, but the remaining thirty-four are in Pakistan and India. Not that the west gets away scot-free. Many will recall the truly shocking conditions of the housing for America’s urban poor—the unutterably terrible Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, for example, now mercifully torn down, or the contrasting city miles of Jefferson Avenue in Detroit—with until lately utter urban wreckage at its western end and then, once over a canal bridge, the mansions of Grosse Pointe where one could live only if one’s “degree of swarthiness” was found acceptable.

  The generally no longer legal practices of redlining—where credit is limited to certain neighborhoods—and of restrictive covenants, legal fictions that discourage people of certain races or habits from living in certain places, are features of the recent urban world that are well beyond the scope of this account. As are the principles of eminent domain—compulsory purchase, in the phrase beyond America—which can quite literally allow the bulldozing of inconveniently placed houses (homes to some, of course) in the questionable name of progress, as for the making of a highway overpass or the building of a commercially important shopping mall. Such practices have savaged many parts of many cities, too. But all these legal maneuvers, if outside the scope of these pages, still serve to remind us that all are constructs of modern, civilized, western man: no such limitations were ever a feature of Native American life, nor were they or are they to be found among the Yanomami or the Fuegian or the Bantu, the Inuit or the Ainu. What we do to ourselves as humans we tend to do most egregiously in our cities: though we behave poorly out in the wilderness—think the wholesale confiscation of Indian lands, the annexation of vast acreages for purposes of which in hindsight few of us can be proud—it can be argued that the sheer presence of landscape inhibits our baser instincts to pollute, to make ugly, to ruin. At one time or another, one imagines, even the coldest-eyed lawyer and most stone-hearted developer might stop to consider the view of a range of hills or a glade of trees or a flight of passing geese and wonder: Do I truly need to make this here, and spoil so much that was once so fine?

  A sixty-acre parcel of land in St. Louis was set aside in 1951 for the creation of one of America’s largest public housing projects, the Pruitt-Igoe Apartments, which were considered such a crime-ridden social failure that all were demolished after little more than twenty years.

  It is easier to do this in, or near to, our cities. They are already ruined, so why not add another layer and make still more money while the going is good? One particularly egregious example of such behavior is to be found in the so-called Mile High City, Denver, in the pretty eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

  Nearly every American city of any size is encircled by a highway originally designed to help speed traffic around its central metropolitan area. London has the M25, Paris its Périphérique. But most commonly such roads are an American phenomenon, and some have become famous, part of the national lexicon—Washington’s Capital Beltway being a fine example, political sophistication within it, costly suburban sprawl beyond. Similar circumferential highways are to be found across the country, from Atlanta to Fort Worth, Minneapolis to Charlotte, St. Louis to Louisville.

  But there is not such a roadway, as any map will show, around Denver. Although there is a toll road, Route 470, that runs around the city’s northern, eastern, and southern sides, and which as it circles keeps more or less a dozen miles out from the office towers of downtown, it inexplicably vanishes on the Rocky Mountain side of the city. From the air, and on maps, it looks rather like a cake with a triangular slice taken out, and for years those living in Denver have been frustrated by two huge yellow signs proclaiming “Freeway Ends,” one at the northern edge of the cake slice, at its junction with the Buffalo Highway in a suburb called Broomfield, the other in the pleasingly preserved former mining town of Golden.

  If you want to get from Golden up to the Buffalo Highway you have to navigate through a maze of more or less back roads that wind their way through the front slopes of the Rockies. If you think the reason for the lack of any connecting superhighway is down to Colorado’s well-recognized sense of environmental kindheartedness, with green-minded tree huggers refusing to impose asphalt and iron on the virgin acres of the front range, you would be horribly wrong. There are rafts of complicated reasons that the road has never been built: preeminent among them, however, is the fact that much of the landscape in this corner of otherwise agreeable-looking mile-high suburbia is heavily polluted with one of the most lethally unpleasant elements known: the silvery and highly radioactive metal first discovered in 1940, plutonium.

  The expressway surrounding the city of Denver, Colorado, sports a large gap in its northwestern quadrant, largely because of fears of plutonium contamination in the soils.

  For forty years, from 1952 until 1992, this was the secret and tightly guarded site of the Rocky Flats Plant, a sprawling factory which manufactured components that would be assembled into atomic weapons. Specifically, the factory and its five thousand workers were charged with making plutonium pits, each one the bowling-ball-sized heart of a nuclear weapon. Plutonium pits are to be found in all three kinds of atomic weapons: the standard fission weapons that have been used since the first tests and their subsequent employment in Japan in 1945; the boosted fission weapons that were tested during the five years after that, through 1950; and the two-stage thermonuclear weapons of terrifying power that were first tested in the Marshall Islands in 1952. In the first two types of weapons, the plutonium pits were the exploding parts of the bombs; in the thermonuclear weapons, the pits were the triggers, whose detonation would produce massive explosions in themselves, but explosions that would in a split second activate the fusion component of the bomb and create the final almighty detonation. Once the technology for these types of weapons had been refined, it became clear that huge numbers of pits needed to be made—and a strategic decision as to their manufacture was made.

  This decision held that the various parts of America’s enormous arsenal of nuclear weapons should be made in factories that for security reasons would be widely dispersed across the United States. The plutonium itself would be made in Washington State, at the Hanford reservation, or later in Tennessee, at the Oak Ridge plant. The weapons would be assembled at the Pantex Plant in western Texas. The pits, made of metal produced in Tennessee, would be machined here at the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado, to critical tolerances displaying near perfect precision, and to designs that had been created in the two principal government nuclear laboratories, in Livermore, California, and Los Alamos, New Mexico. Once the pits were machined, they would be taken, under conditions of heavy security, to the Pantex Plant near Amarillo—and the finished weapons would in due course be sent, in convoys of booby-trapped and highly secure tractor-trailers, protected by legions of soldiers and airmen and overflown by helicopter gunships, to the various bases—naval or air force—where they would be loaded onto their various types of delivery systems, to be then armed and ready for action.

  The Rocky Flats Plant was established to deal with the dirtiest part of atom bomb production—the molding and machining of the truly horrible and impossibly dangerous radioactive metal that lay waiting to fission, the black heart of the weapon. The site on which this work would be done, 6400 acres of gently undulating foothills countryside some fifteen miles northwest of Denver—almost exactly where a beltway should eventually be constructed, but never has been—was acquired by the government in 1951. The Dow Chemical Company was hired to operate the first buildings where the plutonium would be smelted and forged and machined. Within six years there were twenty-seven buildings on the flats; by the 1960s, there were twice as many. All the tasks required to fulfill the needs of the armed forces would be carried out under conditions of the tightest military security and with supposedly hermetically airtight environmental controls. No terrorist should ever be able to lay his hands on an American atomic bomb component. Not even one microscopic morsel of plutonium should ever be allowed to escape from the buildings that were now sprouting up all over the site, and make it into the atmosphere, onto the ground, or into the water. Much would be doomed if ever such came to pass.