The Wilderness Problem: The Need for a Modern Reevaluation

A Wilderness Scene from Denali National Park

The Grand Tetons, the geysers at Yellowstone, the African Savanna, the Great Barrier Reef, the Southern Alps of New Zealand; wilderness areas like these have become cherished in the popular mindset of recent years.  Tourists and adventurers flock to them in order to witness breathtaking views and rare ecosystems.  Environmentalists use them as lightning rods for their causes, citing the damage and threats to these places to push through legislation and protection.  We treasure wilderness now.  We use it to define our nations and utilize them for once-in-a-lifetime experiences of self-discovery.  It was not always this way.  The wilderness used to be thought of as a place of horrors, of danger, and of the other.  It was where children went missing, where monsters loomed, and where Jesus was tempted by Satan.  But, beginning in the 19th century in America, wilderness began to be thought of a finite resource and one worth celebrating.  It became a way to escape the pressures of modern society and this escape was being threatened by the ever encroaching mechanisms of industry.  The American frontier was disappearing and the protection of the few remaining pockets of wilderness became a desperate cause.

Eventually what emerged from this shift in attitude was the environmental and conservation movements.  Natural resources were no longer only to be exploited.  Wild places were to be preserved for their own sake.  Yet the otherness surrounding the wild remained.  Humans extolled the virtues of wilderness and nature, but they remained something apart from us that we could only ruin.  We created a dichotomy between the natural and the artificial or human.  Natural places became pure and pristine, while anything that contained the stain of human influence was deemed corrupted.

Recently, J.B. Callicott coined the phrase "the Received Wilderness Idea" to describe this way of thinking.  Its principles are simple.  Wilderness is nature as its most pure, with limited human influence, and such influence must be kept at an absolute minimum to preserve its purity.  On its surface, this philosophy seems a logical way to a manage wild places.  In truth, the Received Wilderness Idea is one of hidden falsehoods and flawed logic.  Despite our best intentions, human beings will always influence the natural environment and vice versa.  Creating walls around natural areas, physical and political, does not preserve them but isolates them to waiting dangers and isolates human beings from the natural around them.

Wilderness is in actuality a complete human construct.  While these areas may seem devoid of human interference, it is nonetheless there under the surface.  Wilderness exists because of the human histories of conquest, expansion, and relocation.  And now wilderness is deeply affected by our policies and impacts.  If human beings worldwide accepted the connection that wilderness has to mankind, it would greatly improve the manner in which we interact and manage these landscapes.  Like the shift in thinking that happened during the dawn of environmentalism, we need to change our mentality towards the wild and the remote.

The Human Cost of Wilderness

When one finds oneself in a quiet glade of trees or discovers a trail leading to a forgotten vista, one often thinks that this must be what the entire state or region must have looked like in days past.  "This place probably has not changed at all for hundreds of years," we remark to ourselves.  This is a major ideal of the Received Wilderness Idea, that areas mostly left to nature's devices will remain static and revert to a pre-colonial state.  This idea is romantic and inspiring for the potential outdoors-person.  But it is also a fragrant falsehood.  There is hardly a place on earth that has not been inhabited at one point by human beings.  An example of this is the canyons of Utah, now considered some of the great "untamed" wildernesses of America.  However, as the New York Times reported, "it is also part of what was perhaps the most densely populated area in the American West, the Anasazi Indian country of 1,000 years ago, when perhaps as many as 250,000 people lived in the broad area known as the Colorado Plateau."  This wilderness once held cities.

An Abandoned Settlement from the Anasazi Indian Country of Utah

The pristine view of the American continents is a pervasive one.  It is easier to justify the vast European colonization and American expansion into the continent when it is believed to be an empty landscape ripe for the taking.  Even up to the 1950s, scholars were furthering this incorrect viewpoint, as writings from John Bakeless exemplify:

There were not really very many of these redmen... the land seemed empty to invaders who came from settled Europe... that ancient, primeval, undisturbed wilderness... the streams simply boiled with fish... so much game... that one hunter counted a thousand animals near a single salt lick... the virgin wilderness of Kentucky... the forested glory of primitive America

In reality, it is estimated that between 40-100 million Native Americans lived in the western hemisphere when Europeans made their modern discovery in 1492.  Unfortunately for this large population, the effects of war, disease, and famine spread faster than the European invaders and much of the native population died off before Europeans really began expansion efforts.  The first inklings of the Received Wilderness Idea began when European explorers reached lands previously filled with native communities but the traces of which could no longer be seen.  In North America alone, the population dropped from 3.8 million in 1492 to 1 million in 1800, a 75% decrease.

A Romantic Interpretation of Westward Expansion: This was only possible thanks to the mass dying off of Native Peoples

Today though, there are trained eyes looking at the historical impact of these vanished populations.  In 1990, a biologist named Anderson concluded that the American prairies, "would have mostly disappeared if it had not been for the nearly annual burning of these grasslands by natives" during the previous 5,000 years.  Prairies that many Americans would describe as definitive of American wilderness.

William Deneven asked a question in an essay that explore the pristine myth of America, "Is it possible that the thousands of years of human activity before Columbus created more change in the visible landscape than has occurred subsequently with European settlement and resource exploitation?  The answer is probably yes for most regions for the next 250 years or so, and for some regions right up to the present time".

An American Prairie, now known to be the result of thousands of years of controlled burns

The problem is that the European settlers and  early environmentalists that followed into this new wilderness, did not know or did not care about the native history of these regions.  They found a rich land almost devoid of people and declared that this was the preferred state of nature.  The few remaining Native Americans were then pushed out to make way for the priorities of the invaders and then later to create unspoilt wilderness.  As Samuel Bowles wrote in 1868, "Let us say to (the Indian), you are our ward, our child, the victim of our destiny, ours to displace, ours to protect.  We want your hunting grounds to dig gold from, to raise grain from, and you must 'move on'... the march of... empire demands this reservation of yours, we will assign you another; but so long as we choose, this is your home, your prison, your playground."

This trend continues today in developing countries like India and those in Africa.  Native populations are removed from their ancestral homes in order to make way for parks and reserves that fit the wilderness model.  Mark Dowie reported on  the trend of creating conservation refugees:

About half the land selected for protection by the global conservation establishment over the past century was either occupied or regularly used by Indigenous Peoples.  In the Americas that figure is over 80 percent... During the 1990s, the African nation of Chad increased its protected area from 1 to 9.1 percent of its national land.  That land had been occupied by an estimated 600,000 now-displaced people.  No country I could find beside Chad and India, which officially admits to about 100,000 people displaced for conservation (a number that is almost certainly deflated) is even counting this growing new class of refugee.

Although Indigenous Peoples have been living in tandem with their natural environment, with more sustainable impact when compared to "developed" societies, many environmentalists still assume that any human impact on a landscape is problematic.  Steven Sanderson, a president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, even once stated that the global conservation agenda was being hijacked by advocates for Indigenous People, placing "wildlife and biodiversity at peril".  In reality, the natural environment evolved alongside Indigenous Peoples and a sudden exodus of humans from a region usually causes rapid deterioration of the ecosystem.

This problematic viewpoint is slowly shifting.  A recent study found that, of the 233 biologically richest ecoregions on Earth, 80 percent were occupied by 3,000 separate Indigenous communities, most of which had been there thousands of years.  This has led to some changes in policy.  The Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act allows subsistence hunting and farming by rural and native Alaskans within wilderness areas.  There is also a proposal to allow the 300-member Timbisha Shoshone Tribe to resume traditional activities within 300,000 acres of the Death Valley National Park.

If we promote the true intertwined histories of man and nature, and admit that mankind does have some place within wilderness.  Then the natural areas that we wish to protect can be better readied against modern challenges.

Impeding Conservation

The science of the environment and its conservation is a tricky one.  It is full of illogical facts and paradoxes that haunt our land management practices.  It seems so simple that in order rehabilitate an area, that we should just let nature take over.  And if we are to preserve some beautiful landscape, then the best manner to do so is to erect a wall and leave it alone.  But this is not the truth.  

The truth is that there are many invisible and far-reaching forces in this world, and we cannot protect the environment by recusing ourselves from the equation.  William Cronon put it well in his article, The Trouble with Wilderness: "The trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject.  The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world."  To accept that the natural and the human are connected, is to accept responsibility for both's conservation.

Unfortunately, many environmentalists, sometimes called Deep Ecologists, carry a fatalistic view of today's ecosystems.  They lament over the state of the planet and consider anything that mankind has touched to be corrupted beyond repair.  To them, the only proper management is the complete removal of human influence.  Thus any use of natural areas is categorized as ab-use and denies managers any middle ground to create a balanced relationship.  Deep Ecologists prioritize the preservation of nature for its own sake, without taking into account the benefits towards humans.  To them preservation of "pristine" and remote areas are prioritized, while areas more accessible to people are not considered worth saving.  Cronon explains the issue with such thinking:

This would seem to exclude from the radical environmentalist agenda problems of occupational health and safety in industrial settings, problems of toxic waste exposure on "unnatural" urban and agricultural sites, problems of poor children poisoned by lead exposure in the inner city, problems of famine and poverty and human suffering in "overpopulated" places of the earth - problems, in short, of environmental justice.  If we set too high a stock on wilderness, too many other corners of the earth become less than natural and too many people become less than human, thereby giving us permission not to care much about their suffering or their fate.

 Are the wilds of the Himalayas and Alaska worth protecting?  Absolutely!  But so is the forested park just outside of the American city and so is the Asian river so heavily polluted that people can no longer drink out of it.  All of these places deserve to be brought back into a sustainable balance.  Any philosophy that believes humans are apart from nature in reality promotes environmentally irresponsible behavior.  The remote may be protected but the at the same time it allows people to treat the areas more accessible with little care.  The human and nature relationship should not be thought of as a strict dichotomy, but instead as a continuous spectrum.  One one end is the remote wilderness areas and on the other is our dense cities.  However, humans and nature exist in both places with varying degrees of dominance and effect.

A Scene from Seneca Creek State Park in Maryland.  An example of a natural area near urban cities

The best evidence for the dismissal of this dualism is the reality of climate change.  Human caused climate change will affect all areas of the planet, regardless of the amount of people or infrastructure in these places.  Due to climate change, even the most remote wilderness areas will be subject to precipitation changes, drought, floods, shifting vegetation, species migration, invasive species, soil composition changes, and other ecosystem impacts.  No amount of perimeters and "off-limits" signs will change this reality.

While humans are to blame for much of the modern woes of the earth's environment, we are also the only species sophisticated enough to remedy these problems.  Wallace Stegner explained best why we must not eliminate human beings from the natural places of the planet:

The special human mark, the special record of human passage, that distinguishes man from all other species.  It is rare enough among men, impossible to any other form of life.  It is simply the deliberate and chosen refusal to make any marks at all... We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate.  But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.

Beyond Philosophy, Into Policy 

Much of what we have discussed so far has been abstract notions of history and environmental theory.  But the idea of wilderness does extend to concrete realms such as public policy.  To narrow our scope a bit, in the United States we have the Wilderness Act of 1964.  This act sought to define and protect wilderness areas.  The definition of wilderness in this act is as follows:

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.  An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural condition and which generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature...

A lot of trouble and debate has resulted from the passing of this Act, because the definition of wilderness is vague and when interpreted in a stricter sense it allows for the preclusion of natural areas from protection.

The Act's author, Howard Zahniser, meant for the word "untrammeled" to mean "not being subjected to human controls and manipulation that hamper the free play of natural forces."  However, groups opposed to wilderness (such as the natural gas industry) and the United State Forest Service, have adopted a stricter definition in which any areas impacted in any way by humans are not subject to this Act, resulting in less potential areas becoming preserved.

For example, during the Carter Administration, the USFS underwent the RARE process, which looked to examine potential wilderness areas for future protection.  The Service identified 12.3 million acres of USFS land as suitable for wilderness designation.  However, the general public and Congress decried the findings as too strict, and a RARE-II process was undertaken.  With a more loose definition of wilderness forced upon them, the USFS recommended 60 million acres of wilderness for inclusion.  In the realm of environmental management, we cannot have a difference of interpretation resulting in a huge discrepancy of protection.

Logging in a National Forest

The government should rewrite the Wilderness Act, and other such environmental legislation, to be more inclusive and less interpretive.  Roger Kaye, who works for US Fish and Wildlife, proposed changing the metric of "untrammeled" to "wildness" defining it as, "the state wherein those processes of an area's genesis, free from human purpose, utility, or design, are allowed to shape its future."  The new language should be clear and concise, and not preclude a land's protection because of its past human activities.

Moving Forward

It is nice to imagine our wilderness areas as unchanging monolithic testaments to the primeval beauty of nature.  It is nice to pretend that by creating boundaries and declaring certain places "off-limits", that these places will remain as they are for future generations to enjoy.  But in reality we are doing these places a disservice by setting them apart and leaving them to their own devices.

Wildness and naturalness is not some gold standard to be awarded or revoked, they are continuums of ecology extending from the most remote forest to the densest city park.  As William Cronon wrote, "The tree in the garden is in reality no less other, no less worthy of our wonder and respect, than the tree in an ancient forest that has never known an ax or a saw - even though the tree in the forest reflects a more intricate web of ecological relationships." We need to stop prioritizing the vast and primal landscapes at the cost of those in our backyards.

Wilderness, to many in the government, in industry, and in the public, has become a rigid and strict ideal.  To them, a wilderness must be pristine, remote, and unspoiled.  But we cannot define any place by these metrics thanks to the global effects of phenomena such as climate change.  We need to change our definition of these places.  We need to give these places breathing room to exist within our human dominated world, such as how Aldo Leopold described it, "It must be a flexible thing, accommodating itself to other forms and blending with them in that highly localized give-and-take scheme of land-planning which employs the criterion of 'highest use'".  A flexible definition, that extends along the spectrum of naturalness, would allow different places and areas to receive the correct amount of protection and management.

So let us change how we think of wilderness.  Sure, national parks and remote mountain ranges are beautiful, but they are not the only places to experience nature.  Nature exists all around us, it can be found at any point on earth.  The human influence does not have to destroy the presence of nature if we learn how to properly manage its effects across the continuum of wildness.

A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth.  It is a quality of one's own consciousness.  The planet is a wild place and always will be  - Gary Synder

Milford Sound in New Zealand:  A remote area that nonetheless has infrastructure and amenities available to the visitor 

Bibliography

• Anthropocene. (2018). TED Radio Hour (Podcast).
• Callicott, J. B. (2000). Contemporary criticisms of the received wilderness idea. In: Cole, David N.; McCool, Stephen F.; Freimund, Wayne A.; O’Loughlin, Jennifer, Comps. 2000. Wilderness Science in a Time of Change Conference-Volume 1: Changing Perspectives and Future Directions; 1999 May 23-27; Missoula, MT. Proceedings RMRS-P-15-VOL-1. Ogden, UT: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station. p. 24-31, 015. Retrieved from https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/21893
• Christensen, J. (2007). The great wilderness compromise. High Country News, 39(1).
• Cronon, W. (1996). The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. Environmental History, 1(1), 7–28. https://doi.org/10.2307/3985059
• Denevan, W. M. (1992). The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82(3), 369–385. Retrieved from JSTOR.
• Dowie, M. (2010, Spring). Conservation Refugees. Cultural Survival Quarterly; Cambridge, 34(1), 28–35.
• Egan, T. (1999, September 12). Ideas & Trends: Searching for Eden; The Definition of Wilderness Is Increasingly Elusive. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/12/weekinreview/ideas-trends-searching-for-eden-definition-wilderness-increasingly-elusive.html
• Fox Keller, E. (2008). Nature and the Natural. BioSocieties; London, 3(2), 117–124. http://dx.doi.org.proxy.library.cornell.edu/10.1017/S1745855208006054
• Friskics, S. (2008, August 1). The Twofold Myth of Pristine Wilderness: Misreading the Wilderness Act in Terms of Purity. https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics200830441
• Guha, R. (1989, February 1). Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Perservation: A Third World Critique. https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics198911123
• Leopold, A. (1925). Wilderness as a Form of Land Use. The Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics, 1(4), 398–404. https://doi.org/10.2307/3138647