Back in the days before people understood the prescience of Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring, and the word “environment” was uttered as infrequently as the word “computer,” it was possible for artists who had deliberately turned their backs on stodgy old painting and sculpture to gain praise for art by wreaking havoc on the environment. Artists like Michael Heizer, James Turrell, and the late Robert Smithson discovered in the 1960s and 70s that the wide-open expanses of the West offered the perfect terrain for bulldozing earth, carving out craters, and piling up huge boulders — all in the name of a new art form known as “earthworks.”

Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (completed in 1970, its eponymous name tells all) is the most famous of the American earthworks. Jutting out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and built of rocks and earth, it’s 15 feet wide and runs 1500 feet in length. When it’s not submerged under water (the Great Salt Lake rises and falls according to rainfall, and the jetty can be visually wiped out when the water level is high), visitors are welcome to stroll out onto it. For all the messing with nature that it represents, viewed from the air, Spiral Jetty stamps the landscape with the same grand and artificial human splendor of Machu Picchu or the Great Wall of China.

Looking back, it’s easy to see that building Spiral Jetty was a fairly destructive thing to do to the natural wonder of the Great Salt Lake. The thing would never make it through even the planning stages in today’s environmentally conscious world. Yes, an artist like Christo may still be wrapping buildings, or hanging a bunch of orange flags in Central Park. But we have developed a general resistance to permitting even well-intentioned artists to impose their visions on the already battered natural world that wasn’t present when Smithson built his work.

When it comes to oil companies, however, imposing visions is the name of the game. Guzzle, guzzle, guzzle requires enacting their vision of drill, drill, drill — everywhere and anywhere. As the editors of The New York Times point out in in their January 18th editorial arguing for the protection of Spiral Jetty — as well as the numerous bird species that breed in its vicinity — a Canadian company’s plan to drill for oil off from two barges parked five miles away from the earthwork “is not much different from drilling through the heart of Smithson’s earth sculpture.”

A lot of us would like to see the magnificent Spiral Jetty protected from Big Oil. Nevertheless, there’s an irony in all of this. Smithson’s work, which he extensively documented in photographs and expounded on in his own published writing, was deeply connected to his ideas about entropy. Nature will eventually break down the Spiral Jetty, with or without man’s help. Why, then, make a fuss over drilling for oil, even if it entails destroying Smithson’s work, when its destruction is inevitable?

Nesting birds and contemporary art turn out to have something in common with one another. When nature destroys them, it’s in the order of things. When man does it, it’s a purposeful and stupid act. The Times is right. Halt the plan and permit the Jetty to die its own natural death.