He’s gone and done it now.

Bush is trying to pass a some piece of legislation that would make it legal to log and build roads through virtually any place in America. Even protected areas.

I can hear the dogwood outside my window stiffen and shiver at the though. That map they showed on television, with the states that would be affected if the governors agreed (46 of them) shaded with green (how ironic!) is imprinted on my brain.

Why was everyone so eager to come to America when it was 'discovered' by the Europeans? Yes, they had religious freedom. Yeah, they could start new lives. But most of all--it was a new country . A land of plenty and of wealth and of every kind of climate and food and natural resource that you could ever want. The Native Americans had been 'protectors of the land' of sorts, in that they weren't wasteful and respected nature probably more than most cultures on earth, certainly more than European cultures. I can't help wondering if that was done on purpose by a higher power, if this beautiful land of plenty had been kept relatively clean and beautiful for just a little while longer than the rest of the world, to show people the power of nature and give them a chance to respect the land that they lived in. And if that's true, a better country couldn't have been chosen.

But apparently, humans have some sort of arrogance that it's impossible to overcome. They carve the faces of some men into a mountain, which I consider the greatest act of vandalism in all of history, and call it a great monument. But wasn't the monument greater before, when it was as it naturally should have always been? A mountain with its crevices and surfaces and natural shapes that was more beautiful and deserving to be carved into the rock than a human's? We cut down the trees, and said that we needed the lumber. It was a land of plenty, after all. There was plenty to go around. We killed the native people, and accused them of committing atrocities against the 'innocent white settlers' who stole their land. But we just needed a place to go, we said. We wanted a new land and religious freedom. This is scarily reminiscent to the situation in Palestine, come to think about it. It's almost exactly the same, as a matter of fact.

And then we come to today. It isn't enough that people don't care about the environment. It isn't enough that we'd nearly killed off the buffalo population and the gray wolves and a million different kinds of birds. It's not enough that we fund logging overseas--in rainforests that hold more diversity in wildlife than all of the rest of the earth put together. We carve faces into our 'purple mountain majesties' and turned our 'halcyon skies' gray from pollution. Our oceans are no longer white, but brown, with foam. And now, when we want to see a picture of the Grand Canyon or the Great Lakes or the highest peak of Alaska, we won't just see the snow and the clear water and the mountains. Instead, the sun will sink over a long, long stretch of highway, between the Appalachians, through the Grand Canyon, across the prairies of the midwest, and circle around Denali park in Alaska, where maybe once upon a time an tribal leader sat and devoutly believed that the Great Spirit, Mother Nature, would forever be omnipresent in the land, not knowing that this belief would be cruelly proved wrong in so short a time.

And don't be fooled when the Bush Administration says that it will only be a road. For convenience , they'll say. For the truckers and the travelers. Truckers need a place to rest at night, too. Even as the roads are paved, secret deals will be made to buy the land around them to build hotels. With hotels, come towns, and then cities. And maybe one day, our grandchildren will look down into the gorge that will be Grand Canyon City, where water once cut through in roaring rivers for millions of years, only to carve the way for cheap motels and houses and smoke.

I only can really, truly, and without qualms love this country completely when I look at how absolutely gorgeous it is. I'm afraid that once this wilderness dies, most of the pride that I have in my nation will die with it. Because land without earth and trees and rivers and mountains is just space without a soul.

I've never been more grateful that I'm going to Alaska this summer. For all you Americans, and even you non-Americans who are reading this: this summer, make an effort to see the untouched wilderness of this country, because it's truly some of the most beautiful wilderness in the world. And I have a horrible ominous feeling that perhaps this is one of the last summers that you'll be able to see most of it untouched.

God, please, please bless America.