Gifts that Keep Giving from the Urban Wilderness

When the LDS Pioneers reached the Salt Lake Valley in July of 1847, many saw the valley floor as an “interminable waste of sagebrush … blistering in the burning rays of the mid-summer sun.”  But President Young seems to have had his eyes on the future.  On August 7th he is quoted as lavishly praising the “beauty and convenience” of the site where a vigorous creek emerged from the foothills — where houses and gardens could be “abundantly supplied with cold water from the mountains” — and where our city would rise.

Young’s inspired vision gave the new community easy access to several distinct geologies and ecologies, and to the many different resources offered by each.  Astounding success and growth soon followed.  One result is that the “interminable waste of sagebrush” has been replaced all across the Salt Lake Valley by non-native grasses, shrubs and trees.  Yet in the foothills that ring the valley, there remain large tracts of the original wild ecosystem that includes thousands of species of plants, animals and microbes, still living there much as they have for thousands of years.  Does any other major urban center, anywhere in the world, have so much intimate and accessible contact between fully 21st-century city life and nearly intact ancient wilderness?  

If we can keep our remaining “wild city” more or less as it was, then it will continue to provide many irreplaceable opportunities to enhance individual physical and mental health, as well as collective awareness of our history.  It will also provide many ecosystem services including pollination and carbon sequestration (the native perennial grasses are good at that), and it will demonstrate many consequences of climate change.  As we strive to conserve water by landscaping with plants that need little irrigation, it’s likely that we’ll want to invite many components of the “waste of sagebrush” to reoccupy their former haunts, where they’ll again do well if we learn how to make them feel welcome.  Having pieces of the original ecology still intact, just a few miles away, will make this process easier and much more interesting.

By Jon Seger