Multimedia Story

Why We Protect Utah, From a SUWA Perspective

Initially, this article was going to open with a scenic description of a good-looking location somewhere in Utah. Somewhere like Zion National Park on a fall morning, clutching the chains bolted to the red rock of the Angels Landing trail, worrying if you zipped up your Lululemon fanny pack after you snapped that photo five minutes ago. Making it to the top of the summit, the sun is just rising in the East as you are taking your final steps before raising your head to the view. The fall air swallows you whole, and all you can smell is that brisk winter scent as you look at the dissipating pink hue in the clouds. This article could have started like that, and it did, but that is not the reality for most Utahns.

Most Utahns stay inside all day. You wake up inside just to get inside a box on wheels to take you inside another structure to do whatever it is you do in that building, likely from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and then you take that box on wheels right back inside the place you woke up. And, yeah, you stepped outside on your lunch break, or you walked the dog after work for 23 minutes, but being outside where nature is, is not a part of daily life for some people. But if you’re Greg and you bike to work, good for you. It’s not your fault that you are stuck in the confines of a place. It no longer feels natural to be outside. It feels like you are born inside and you die inside.

Jeremy Lynch has a different perspective. He tries to be an optimist.

“I think it's a very quick thing to forget that these structures that we build of wood, and in particular, the house that I'm in right now is made out of straw, clay, wood and dirt, are actually just elements of the earth that we've repurposed for shelter in this case,” says Jeremy Lynch, stewardship director for Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “I think it is important to hold a wilderness ethos that keeps you in connection with wild places, even if you can't access them, even if that’s physically or by distance or by means. There's a connection between all of it, no matter where you are on the planet, essentially. And that's not something that's taught as readily as the forest is the wild place.”

Being the stewardship director for SUWA, Jeremy Lynch says it is part of the job to be an optimist, even though it is not always easy to be that way. Acknowledging the separation most of us feel from nature is the first step to a sense of reconnection with the wild, explains Lynch; it helps us make those first movements off the couch after our brain rot session and into our shoes to walk outside.

Perhaps the natural world isn’t as out of reach as it may feel. That somewhat unfriendly chill as your bum sits on the porcelain in the morning, you're not just sitting on a toilet, you are sitting on clay and minerals from the Earth. Everything is of the Earth: your iPhone from cobalt, striped socks spun from cotton, Pop-Tarts made of wheat, even the frame around the photo of you and your man is made from pine. Yet, life can still feel processed, void of the wild, natural, rawness of human nature.

In the essence of Alice Roberts’ words from her book Tamed, humans have tamed themselves by taming plants and animals. Humans began to tame the wild out of others, which inadvertently took the wild out of humans. Humans on Earth are no longer nomads draped in bear fur (depending on the climate of a place), trekking around with a spear or collecting tubers and berries.

And now humans must live with being tamed.

Running your hand through a bush planted in the median of a parking lot will not make you wild, but as Lynch suggested, it can push you toward a wilderness ethos. A wilderness ethos, in Lynch’s view, is an acknowledgement of your true place in your ecosystem, and subsequently a lessening of your negative impact.

“I would say that wild, to me, exists because it must, and it does everywhere, even when it's being impacted,” says Lynch.

From India to New Orleans, Lynch has worked directly with communities in a variety of environments. For nearing ten years, he has been working in SUWA to maintain the baseline conditions of Utah landscapes such that they can perpetuate themselves. And he sees the potential of wilderness everywhere.

Besides the walls that separate humans from other

humans and humans from the wild, separation comes

in many forms. Concrete walks that line cities and

suburbia keep you above nature. The ground is

beneath the concrete that you walk atop. The

picture-perfect green grass smothering the side of

the concrete walk, and there is the potential Lynch

sees. It is just a jackhammer away.

Wild is everywhere; there is present wild and there

is potential wild. Lynch is work toward setting free

the potenial of wildness in the spaces of Utah.

Anthropocentrism.

There is almost nothing wrong with acknowledging that humans are exceptional animals, but some could say that there is something wrong with letting that go to that neuron-packed head of yours. The agricultural evolution, the shift from hunting and gathering to farming, changed everything. In about the last 10,000 years, a mere moment in geological time, changed humans' place in the Earth’s grand ecosystem or at least they think it did.

In comes technology, from stone tools to iPhones, then culture, agriculture, and the state. And somewhere in all that rapid change, humans lost what it meant to be an animal and began placing themselves above all. In the first sentence of Melanie Challenger’s book, How to Be Animal, she states that “[t]he world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal. And the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn’t want to be an animal. This matters.”

Challenger further explains that humans are a breathtaking example of how life can evolve, but humans “... can end up with the mistaken belief that there is something non-biological about us that is ultimately good or important.”

An unpleasant thought to some, but persistent nonetheless.

However, this illusion of human exceptionalism is precisely what others are trying to confront.

Through her teaching and work, Diana Haro has been trying to combat the larger narrative by instilling a different perspective, a different way of looking at the natural world where humans aren’t the center of everything.

From 15 years of being an educator to transitioning three years ago to being the Latinx community organizer for SUWA, Haro’s narrative has remained the same. Be intentional.

In her own life, being intentional and decentering herself meant taking a critical look at the way she lives her life, her own choices and how she contributes to society. “Comfort and commodifying things has led to putting a value on everything. What can it do for us? What comforts can I get? Continuing this perspective of taking and taking and taking. So the outreach that I do now is about being reciprocal, like we recreate on these lands and they give us so much. We definitely can do more to get back,” says Haro.

She envisions human’s place in nature to be similar to what Indigenous peoples have been doing for thousands of years; stewarding the land and only taking what is necessary, but because America runs on a capitalist model, the change will not be quick, but she does believe it can happen.

Humans’ complex brains and bipedalism and sophisticated language and hairless bodies (?) do not mean you can take advantage of everything and everyone around us, according to Haro. The word respect drew from her mouth effortlessly and without pause when describing what needs to change, not only in America but across the Earth.

In Haro’s work, she sees a connection in the treatment of center communities and the land. “Especially within the Latino communities, and even immigrant refugee communities, I see the exploiting of their bodies and of their lives is the same way that is being done to the land,” says Haro.

“I'm talking literally about the people in my own family. They come here to try to have a better life. The only jobs to get are the ones that are very labor-intensive, low-paying, disregarded, overlooked, but necessary, right? Because when we don't have those manual jobs, those jobs that are taking or that are the foundation of our society, then things really are bad,” says Haro.

Exploitation wears countless disguises. From a mountainside stripped bare to meet a quota to a forest gutted of all its native vegetation. But it can also look like Latino and immigrant workers being funneled into a grueling manual labor system, where bodies are treated as expendable inputs of a system that values production over people.

Haro’s aim is to help Latino and immigrant families reach higher tiers on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy pyramid of needs. From just physiological and safety needs, the bottom two tiers, to love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization, by bringing these families to spaces in Utah like Grand Staircase. That is how you get people out of the daily stressors of life and to a sense of connection to Utah’s land, she explains.

But encouraging that connection with nature also means confronting the realities of Utah lands.

“Seeing how blatantly these lands are exploited, seeing the greed in our politicians’ eyes and the disregard for the health of the land, and the ripple effects that mismanagement has. And that mismanagement will have for so many down the line,” says Haro.

For her, these aren’t isolated issues in Utah. What is decided about Utah’s lands reverberates across the West. Policies made here, subjectively good or bad, can become templates for other states. Haro argues that reconnecting with nature is not just emotional work, but political work. If humans can become more intentional and respectful of the Earth and all the species that inhabit it, they can begin to see its intrinsic value not just as resources to be priced, but as living parts of a larger ecosystem. See themselves as part of that ecosystem. And once that connection is restored, it is harder to accept choices that treat land and people as expendable.

Into the woods.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms . . .” wrote Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden; or, Life in the Woods.

Published in 1854, Thoreau wrote this book while living in a simple cabin by a pond named Walden in Massachusetts. It seems absurd that even in 1854, without a flat-screen TV or a crockpot in sight that people, like Thoreau, needed to know what it is to be free from the constraints of modern life even then. And even more than that, to know what it is like to live with nature as one and see what it says to you.

Some folks agree that it is a privilege to be outside in the natural world; they say things to friends like ‘go touch grass’ or ‘wake up and smell the flowers’ to encourage them to re-center themselves with nature. And you might say to yourself, ‘What, am I supposed to go to Sugar House Park? Sugar House Park isn’t the wilderness; that grass is probably from Kentucky and those ornamental trees that line that road have been orchestrated there.’ And you would be right, the park is manicured and the grass is probably imported, but it has potential, like Lynch said, and could lead you to seek out other spaces in Utah.

The cliche gestures at reconnection but falls short of capturing what nature can truly offer. For some, stepping outside isn’t just a token reset but a profound encounter with a space.

That is exactly how Nicole Milavetz describes it, she could talk about her experiences with nature for hours.

“The Canyon Country completely has my heart. I feel the most like myself when I'm in these deep canyons. And, yeah, there's just something about this landscape that is so welcoming and loving and rejuvenating to me. It helps shape my life in such a tangible way,” says Milavetz. “Wilderness just teaches you so much about yourself. It is a really good gauge on where you're at in life. It's a really good gauge on the person you want to become. I think it does a good job of stripping away everything and showing you where you're at.”

Milavetz is the Utah Grassroots Organizer for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. Working for SUWA has been a big dream of hers to be at the forefront of protecting public land and vital ecosystems.

It has been over 62,000 days, or 170 years, since 1854. And in that time the climate crisis has grown into a sweltering heap of bleep on Earth. It is no longer enough to just live, laugh, love with a natural space, explains Milavetz. Loving a thing is an early step in the process of protecting land.

Milavetz's steps start with getting on outside, and the viewer will swoon at the sight of a place like Bears Ears or the Grand Staircase National Monument. Second, have fallen in love with a natural space. Three, let that love and care for a space carry you into action. SUWA and workers like Milavetz’s aim to empower you through the steps and into leadership roles.

Small actions to lessen the imprint of your ecological footprint on the Earth often are made to feel futile; they can be diminished by others and even yourself for the small-scale of the action. Whether that is turning off the water while you brush your teeth or attempting to buy plastic products or planting a home graden. Even if you are not thinking about your footprint on the Earth yet or have not followed the basic steps toward taking action, Milavetz believes there is a place for you in wilderness protection.

“I always tell folks with anything they present to me, we can work with it to help protect the land. If you're an artist, there's a place for you. If you're a political organizer, there's a place. If you have a legal background, if you have a data background, there's always somewhere we can plug you into the quilt that is the movement of wilderness defense and protection,” says Milavetz.

Advocacy has multitudes the same way humans have multitudes, as Milavetz sees it. Land protection is an invitation, her metaphorical quilt stitched together by many hands is ongoing and depends on people’s ability to recognize their role in the land’s future. In their own future.

The edge.

In spite of the passion from these three individuals, each currently dedicating their lives to Utah wilderness protection and advocacy, a thought could still rumble below the surface for some, these activists included.

The tension under the surface is not shifting plates or a sour stomach, but something far more human. How can humans be expected to care about anything beyond human life when the human world, their individual world, already feels so overwhelming?

That is not an easy question. And a response does not come easily.

Consequentialist utilitarianism offers a perspective. If you are a consequentialist utilitarian, you judge actions based on their outcomes, or consequences, and the utilitarian part means you will choose the action that causes the least amount of suffering or maximizes the most happiness. Having healthy ecosystems, happy animals, and intact landscapes could be an extension of human life rather than thought of as separate.

Yet, it is understandable if philosophical tools become devoid of meaning when they are up against the heaviness of real life. Which is why in this paper, there are easter eggs from each person in SUWA, Jeremy, Diana, and Nicole.

Jeremy Lynch advises you to hold onto a wilderness ethos, to keep you in connection with wild spaces. Diana Haro explains the roles of intention and respect in your shared life with nature. And Nicole Milavetz reminds you to get outside and learn to love your ecosystem enough to want to act on its behalf. The messages differ, but the similarity they share is: life is connection. Together, their perspectives insist that connection is not just a way of seeing the world but a way of living in it; one that demands presence, responsibility, and a willingness to let the land shape who you can become.

At the point of reflection, at the edge of humanity, is an opportunity to consider how individual, community, and environmental well-being intersect and entangle.