Tread Lightly

In the predawn chill of Chile's high-altitude desert, our caravan of four-by-fours departed San Pedro de Atacama and wound through sand dunes to the El Tatio geyser field. As the first tendrils of light snaked over the volcanoes, the privately hired guides released their tourists to meander around the steaming geyser holes with only a few simple admonitions. Don't get too close. Tread lightly.

Eighty-degree-Celsius water courses below the thin crust that scabs the earth around the geysers. I'm not a particularly daring person so I hung close to the vans and listened to the guides compare burn marks and recount the tale of the Spanish doctor who, blinded by the primordial steams in pursuit of a photo op, tumbled into the maw of one geyser and was nearly cooked alive.

Compare El Tatio with Yellowstone National Park in the United States, where the camera toting multitudes can troop through the geyser fields and around the Grand Prismatic Spring on wooden boardwalks. The boardwalks prevent visitors from wandering into harm's way while also guarding the fragile thermal areas from innumerable footfalls. Both geyser fields could serve as case studies in infrastructure and accessibility. But they also raise the question of which provides the best infrastructure for a different kind of access: to the awe of nature, to an awareness and acceptance of its dangers and to a celebration of its beauties.

Progress, American-style, has a bevy of incumbent stereotypes: Manifest Destiny (and its post-colonial revisions); stronger better faster (safer); the inexorable march forward. Then of course there are the hybrid-driving, Whole-Foods-frequenting types that have matured under Schwarzenegger's California sun¬ -- the contentious offspring of Henry Ford and Rachel Carson.

Old ways mean both 19th-century meat-packing plants as well as backyard-grown heirloom tomatoes, and so it's difficult to see the fault lines of progress -- where safe living cleaves away from sterilized living, where our unease with the human-made dangers of the industrial world ends and our fear of potentially harmful but inevitable natural processes begin.

The shelves of Trader Joe's speak to the brave new world where even Manhattanites can have pesticide-free produce without going to the fields to pick the corn themselves. Recently, though, an op-ed in the New York Times announced that an eat-local mentality may not be more environmentally friendly than purchasing imported foodstuffs, depending on how the food is produced. All of a sudden moving toward the oldest ways in an attempt to counteract the old ways is bringing us further from progress -- all in the name of farm-raised lamb shanks.

Geysers and lamb. Tenuously related, perhaps, but both speak to a re-evaluation of our expectations from our surroundings. Progress toward sustainable living may mean examining the comforts of our life more closely, even those that come in an enviro-friendly wrapper. Maybe it means working harder while expecting less, instead of learning about nature from nutrition labels or from behind safety rails; maybe it also means approaching the creek behind your house with the same mixture of guardianship and deference with which you would visit Yellowstone, a plane ride away.

Last April I found myself at the Gaia Eco-village in Argentina, participating in an introductory course to sustainable living. Alongside 12 other program participants and the eco-village's eight adult members, I spent mornings mixing together mud for the community's cob-walled seed bank and afternoons discussing latrine construction and the politics of genetically modified crops over gourds of bitter Argentine mate. Most of my fellow participants were Pink Floyd-loving Argentine males, but they also included an Argentine sign painter from the provinces, a Canadian couple fresh out of art school and two women planning to open an eco-school following the Waldorf model.

Over the weeks we surrendered to mud on our clothes and swarms of mosquitoes. We listened to our hosts tell us to chill out but work hard. Think big but live small. Have another vegan Gaia burger. While the founders of Gaia reject the hippie label, they also reject the idea that cities will ever be sustainable. They perceive their small community as a model for an alternative way of living, one that strives to mix technology with the "wisdom of the ancients." Three windmills and a solar panel array power everything from the computer to the refrigerator, but most of the farm tasks are done on the strength of human power alone. Community members stressed that their goal is to "be lazy" and let nature do the hard work. They seek to maximize energy efficiency by experimenting with planting, building and cooking methods that work with natural processes, not independently of them -- or against them. But they are able to maintain a comfortable lifestyle because they have scaled back their dependence on the accoutrements of the modern world.

I had a wonderful time at Gaia, but I left wondering how one might apply their community practices to a larger portion of society. There isn't enough farmland to accommodate the world's city dwellers, and even if everyone had the opportunity to learn the correct skills, not everyone is physically capable of employing them. Beyond the practical considerations, there are philosophical ones. Charles Dickens' novels emerged from the fogs of 19th-century London and the Beatles' songs from the poverty of Liverpool's industrial docks; maybe both are part of a decayed and destructive imperialist system, but both offer life and joy and compassion.

Maybe your pleasure is salsa dancing, or a Red Sox game. How much power does Fenway Park use? How much trash does it generate? Trying to find the root of our needs, to separate ancient ones from those encouraged by capitalist avarice, is a complex task. Most of the world gets along fine without crackerjacks, but most of the world was never given the choice. For those of us who do have the choice, not just to frequent baseball games but to live at an Argentine eco-village, how many of our spiritual and physical needs should be jettisoned for the sake of the world? Where does deprivation end and simplicity begin?

Of the volunteers at Gaia, one, a Jamaican who owns a floor restoration company in Los Angeles, came because his Canadian wife signed them up for the course. She wanted to start an eco-tourist site in Jamaica. He was cheerful and supportive and wheel-barrowed mud with the best of them but he drew the line at getting muddy himself. Unlike all the other volunteers he'd grown up on a farm. And unlike the Gaians, he had no desire to revisit that lifestyle.

During an elegant Cambridge dinner some months ago, a mathematics professor to my right inquired after my master's dissertation, which dealt in part with my experience at Gaia. Upon hearing my brief description of their work he leaned over and confided that environmentalism, "you see, is all about reasonable prioritization." I uneasily declined to pursue the politics of reasonable prioritization over our velouté of asparagus with poached quail egg and watercress puree.

Yet I couldn't deny that I quite liked my pretentious asparagus as well as the beef tenderloin that followed, just as I like British rock concerts and Brussels by night and New England's fall foliage from a car window. I can wax poetic about embracing nature and opt to swim in jellyfish-frequented waters, but I've never faced a typhoon or an avalanche.

Late August 2005 found me inching along a precipice in Poland's Tatra Mountains, terrified of the scree but as yet unaware that Katrina was pummeling the Gulf coast. I hesitate to give up my life for a trowel and a pair of gardening gloves, but I like stable weather patterns, thank you very much, and it's chilling to count how many people in my post college travels have commented that "the weather isn't usually like this," from Argentina to Slovenia and in many of the over 20 countries in between. The United States outstrips them all in energy use and resource consumption, even though we also have the tools and capital to plant the seeds for a more sustainable present.

Yet it was this tiny farm in Argentina that I felt addressed the new paradox of modernity, albeit with more challenges than answers. Some elements of the infrastructure meant to halt our destruction of our environment -- from geyser walkways that help the masses appreciate the beauties of nature, to hybrid automobiles and biodegradable water bottles -- also threaten to buffer us from nature's harshest realities. They imbue us with a perhaps unwarranted confidence that technology and innovation will compensate for our unchecked demands on resources. The challenge posed at Gaia was not only to seek more sustainable methods of fulfilling human needs, but also to radically re-examine what constitutes necessity versus what constitutes privilege in American visions of progress.


Flora Lindsay-Herrera is a native of Washington D.C. Her undergraduate degree in History from Harvard University included a semester abroad in Chile. She then opted for a series of short-term jobs, including teaching English in Poland with WorldTeach, before reading for an MPhil in Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge—a degree she just completed.