All of us who volunteer at Henry W. Coe State Park feel a strong
connection to the natural world. After all, that is why we give our
time to the park.
All of us who volunteer at Henry W. Coe State Park feel a strong connection to the natural world. After all, that is why we give our time to the park. We enjoy the opportunity to go out into that wild place and learn about it and support it. And I am sure that all of us would describe ourselves as environmentalists, striving to limit our consumption of natural resources and the pile of waste we leave in our wake.
But most of us come up short. What is the statistic? In the United States, 10 percent of the world’s population consumes two thirds of the world’s energy – something like that.
Anyone who has visited the Third World knows that the wealth we enjoy compared to the standard of living of most people is embarrassing. Things that we take for granted are unimaginable dreams to most people on this earth.
Lee Dittmann was an unusual volunteer at Henry Coe State Park. Lee lived in a small, unheated one-room shack up at the park. He would not own a car, so when he needed to shop or do his laundry, he would load his backpack with dirty clothes and walk the 14 miles to Morgan Hill. When he was through, he shouldered his pack of groceries and clean clothes and walked the 14 miles home.
If you passed Lee on your drive up to the park, you quickly learned that a friendly wave or maybe a short conversation was fine, but don’t bother offering him a ride. He wouldn’t take it.
For a period of time in the mid-’90s, I was on the Board of Directors of the Pine Ridge Association (PRA) along with Lee. The PRA is the interpretive association at Coe Park. Our meetings in Morgan Hill would sometimes end at 11 p.m. I asked him, “Hey, Lee, would you like the spend the night at my house so you can walk up to the park in the morning?” “No, thanks,” he would say, preferring to make the six-hour walk up to the park through the night arriving at around 5 a.m.
Unlike the rest of us, Lee walked the talk. He knew that anything he consumed or wasted left a scar somewhere, and he wanted no part of it. Just because the oil field, the clear-cut forest, the factories and the power plants were over the horizon and out of his sight, they were not out of his mind.
As much as I admired Lee’s commitment to his ethic, I admired even more that he was not a missionary. Let’s be honest. When most of us feel holier-than-thou, the real fun of it is telling everyone how right we are and how wrong they are. He may have done it, but I never heard Lee preach or criticize.
During the 10 years or so that Lee volunteered at the park, he would buy used books (and carry them home on his back) hoping to one day open a used bookstore. A couple of years ago, he hauled his several thousand volumes to Flagstaff, Ariz., where he opened that store. He struggles, but he persists. If you like maps and natural history books, check out his Web site at www.mindbird.com.
We say we are environmentalists, but we fall short. We can’t recycle and vote Democratic, then hop into a Chevy Suburban and call ourselves environmentalists. Few of us could live like Lee Dittmann, but we know that what worries him about our consumption should worry us. Keb’ Mo’s great song, Victims of Comfort, says it: “Everyone likes a party, but no one wants to clean / I’d like to see a change someday, but I’m a little busy right now / I’m just a victim of comfort.”
