20 The Great Wilderness Debate, Again
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let
the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last
virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette
cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild
species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air
and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads
through the last of the silence, so that never again . . . can we
have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical, and
individual in the world part of the environment of trees and
rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural
world and competent to belong in it.
—Wallace Stegner
It is odd that attacks on the idea of wilderness have multiplied as the
thing itself has all but vanished. Even alert sadists will at some point
stop beating a dead horse. In the lower 48 states, federally designated
wilderness accounts for only 1.8 percent of the total land area.
Including Alaskan wilderness, the total is only 4.6 percent. This is less
than the land we’ve paved over for highways and parking lots. For
perspective, Disney World is larger than one-third of our wilderness
areas (Turner 1998, 619). Outside the United States there is little or
no protection for the 11 percent of the earth that remains wild. It is to
be expected that attacks on the last remaining wild areas would come
from those with one predatory interest or another, but it is disconcerting
that in the final minutes of the 11th hour they come from
those who count themselves as environmentalists. Each of these critics
claims to be for wilderness, but against the idea of wilderness. This
fault line deserves careful scrutiny.1
In a recent article, for example, novelist Marilynne Robinson concludes
that “we must surrender the idea of wilderness, accept the fact
that the consequences of human presence in the world are universal
and ineluctable, and invest our care and hope in civilization” (1998,
64). She arrives at this position not with joy, but with resignation. She
describes her love of her native state of Idaho as an “unnameable
yearning.” But wilderness, however loved, “is where things can be hidden
. . . things can be done that would be intolerable in a populous
landscape.” Has Robinson not been to New York, Los Angeles, Mexico
City, or Calcutta, where intolerable things are the norm? But she
continues: “The very idea of wilderness permits . . . those who have
isolation at their disposal [to do] as they will” (ibid.). Presumably
there would be no nuclear waste sites and no weapons laboratories
without wilderness in which to hide them. She ignores the fact that
the decisions to desecrate rural areas are mostly made by urban people
or support one urban interest or another.
Robinson then comes to the recognition that history is not an uninterrupted
triumphal march. There have been, she notes, a few dips
along the way. The end of slavery in the United States produced a
subsequent condition “very much resembling bondage” (Robinson
1998, 63). Now “those who are concerned about the world environment
are the abolitionists of this era” whose “successes quite exactly
resemble failure.” So with a few successes under their belt, unnamed
conservationists propose to establish a global “environmental policing
system” and serve in the role of “missionary and schoolmaster” to the
1. The title of this chapter was borrowed from a book edited by Baird Callicott
and Michael Nelson (1998).
rest of the world. But we cannot legitimately serve in that role because
we, in the developed world,“have ransacked the world for these
ornaments and privileges and we all know it” (ibid.). Accordingly,
Robinson concludes that wilderness has “for a long time figured as an
escape from civilization,” so “we must surrender the idea of wilderness”
(ibid., 64).
I have omitted some details, but her argument is clear enough.
Robinson is against the idea of wilderness, but she does not tell us
whether she is for or against preserving, say, the Bob Marshall or
Gates of the Arctic, or whether she would give them away to AMAX
or Mitsubishi. She is against the idea of wilderness because it seems to
her that it has diverted our attention from the fact that “every environmental
problem is a human problem” and we ought to solve
human problems first. Whether environmental problems and human
problems might be related, Robinson does not say.
The environmental movement certainly has its shortcomings.
There are, in fact, good reasons to be suspicious of movements of any
kind. But there is more at issue in Robinson’s argument. The recognition
that governments sometimes use less-populated areas for military
purposes hardly constitutes a reason to fill up what’s left of Idaho
with shopping malls and freeways. Her assertion that abolition and
environmentalism have produced ironic results is worth noting. But
does she mean to say that we ought to ignore slavery, human rights
abuses, toxic waste dumps, biotic impoverishment, or human actions
that are changing the climate because we might otherwise incur unexpected
and ironic consequences? Yes, rich countries have “ransacked
the world,” but virtually the only voices of protest have been
those of conservationists aware of the limits of the earth. And what
could she possibly mean by saying that “we are desperately in need of
a new, chastened, self-distrusting vision of the world, an austere vision
that can postpone the outdoor pleasures of cherishing exotica . . . and
the debilitating pleasures of imagining that our own impulses are reliably
good” (Robinson 1993, 64)? Are we to take no joy in the creation
or find no solace or refuge in a few wild places? Who among us imagines
their impulses to be reliably good? Would she confine us to shopping
malls and a kind of indoor, air-conditioned introspection? Finally,
Robinson seems not to have noticed that the same civilization in need
of rehabilitation has done a poor job of protecting its land and natural
endowment. Is it possible that human problems and environmental
problems are reverse sides of the same coin of indifference and that
we do not have the option of presuming to solve one without dealing
with the other?
Robinson’s broadside is only the latest salvo in a battle that began
years earlier with articles by Ramachandra Guha (1998 a, 1998b),
Baird Callicott (1991), and William Cronon (1995). The issues they
raised were, to some extent, predictable. Guha, for example, believes
that the designation of wilderness in many parts of the world has led
to “the displacement and harsh treatment of the human communities
who dwelt in these forests” (1998a, 273). His sensible conclusion is
simply that “the export and expansion [of wilderness] must be done
with caution, care, and above all, with humility” (ibid., 277).
Callicott’s views and their subsequent restatement raise more
complex and arcane issues. Callicott begins, as do most wilderness
critics, by asserting that he is “as ardent an advocate” of wilderness as
anyone and believes bird-watching to be “morally superior to dirtbiking”
(1991, 339). The idea of wilderness may be wrong-headed, he
thinks, “but there’s nothing whatever wrong with the places that we
call wilderness” (ibid., 587). He is discomforted by what he terms “the
received concept of wilderness” inherited from our forebears who
were all white males like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David
Thoreau, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Aldo Leopold. Callicott
is unhappy with “what passes for civilization and its mechanical
motif” that can conserve nature only by protecting a few fragments.
He proposes, instead, to rescue civilization by “shift[ing] the burden
of conservation from wilderness preservation to sustainable development”
(ibid., 340). He proposes to “integrate wildlife sanctuaries into
a broader philosophy of conservation that generalizes Leopold’s vision
of a mutually beneficial and mutually enhancing integration of
the human economy with the economy of nature” (ibid., 346). This
does not mean, however, “that we open the remaining wild remnants
to development” (ibid.).
The heart of Callicott’s argument, however, has to do with three
deeper problems he finds in the idea of wilderness. Wilderness continues,
he thinks, the division between humankind and nature. It is
ethnocentric and causes us to overlook the effects tribal peoples had
on the land. And, third, the very attempt to preserve wilderness is
misplaced given the change characteristic of dynamic ecosystems.
Callicott’s critics, including philosopher Holmes Rolston, have re-
sponded by refuting these premises. Humans are not natural in the
way Callicott supposes. There are “radical discontinuities between
culture and nature” (Rolston 1991, 370). The 8 million or so tribal
people living without horses, wheels, and metal axes had a relatively
limited effect on the ecology of North America. After the initial colonization
10,000 or more years ago, the effects they did have, such as
burning particular landscapes, did not differ much from natural disturbances
such as fires ignited by lightning. As for the charge that conservationists
are trying to preserve some idealized and unchanging
landscape, Rolston asserts that “Callicott writes as if wilderness advocates
had studied ecology and never heard of evolution. . . . Wilderness
advocates do not seek to prevent natural change” (ibid., 375). To
his critics, Callicott’s dichotomy between wilderness preservation and
sustainable development, as if these are mutually exclusive, makes little
sense.
The dispute over wilderness went public in 1995 with the publication
of William Cronon’s essay “The Trouble with Wilderness, or
Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” in the New York Times Magazine.
Cronon did not add much that had not already been said, but he did
give the debate a postmodern spin and the kind of visibility that lent
considerable aid and comfort to the “wise use” movement and rightwing
opponents of wilderness. Remove the scholarly embellishments,
and Cronon’s piece is a long admonition to the effect that “we
can(not) flee into a mythical wilderness to escape history and the obligation
to take responsibility for our own actions that history inescapably
entails. Most of all, it means practicing remembrance and
gratitude for thanksgiving is the simplest and most basic of ways for
us to recollect the nature, the culture, and the history that have come
together to make the world as we know it” (1995a, 90).
Like Callicott, Cronon hopes that his readers understand that his
criticism is “not directed at wild nature per se . . . but rather at the specific
habits of thinking that flow from this complex cultural construction
called wilderness” (1995a, 81). In other words, it is not “the
things we label as wilderness that are the problem—for nonhuman
nature and large tracts of the natural world do deserve protection—
but rather what we ourselves mean when we use that label.” That
caveat notwithstanding, he proceeds to argue that “the trouble with
wilderness is that it . . . reproduces the very values its devotees seek to
reject.” It represents a “flight from history” and “the false hope of an
escape from responsibility.” Wilderness is “very much the fantasy of
people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a
living” (ibid., 80). It “can offer no solution to the environmental and
other problems that confront us.” Instead, by “imagining that our true
home is in the wilderness, we forgive ourselves the homes we actually
inhabit” which poses a “serious threat to responsible environmentalism.”
The attention given to wilderness, according to Cronon, comes
at the expense of environmental justice. Further, advocacy of wilderness
“devalues productive labor and the very concrete knowledge that
comes from working the land with one’s own hands” (ibid., 85). But
Cronon’s principle objection is “that it may teach us to be dismissive
or even contemptuous of . . . humble places and experiences,” including
our own homes.
Cronon concludes the essay by describing why the “cultural traditions
of wilderness remain so important” (1995a, 88). He asserts that
“wilderness gets us into trouble only if we imagine that this experience
of wonder and otherness is limited to the remote corners of the
planet, or that it somehow depends on pristine landscapes we ourselves
do not inhabit” (ibid.). He admonishes us to pay attention to
the wildness inherent in our own gardens, backyards, and landscapes.
“The Trouble with Wilderness” later appeared as the lead chapter
in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (Cronon 1995b).
The authors’ collective intention was to describe the many ways the
concept of nature is socially constructed and to ask: “Can our concern
for the environment survive our realization that its authority flows as
much from human values as from anything in nature that might
ground those values?” (ibid., 26). The book is a collage of the obvious,
the fanciful, the “occulted,”2 and disconnected postmodernism contrived
as part of a University of California–Irvine conference titled
“Reinventing Nature.” The contributors were asked to summarize
their thoughts in an addendum at the end of the volume titled “Toward
a Conclusion,” suggesting that they had not reached one. In an
insightful retrospective, landscape architect Anne Whiston Spirn,
author of the best chapter in the book, lamented the fact that the discussions
were “so abstracted from the ‘nature’ in which we were liv-
2. The word is one used by Gary Snyder describing the same conference, “an
odd exercise” he thought. See Gary Snyder, A Place in Space. (Washington:
Counterpoint, 1995), p. 250.
ing . . . the talk seemed so disembodied” (ibid., 448). She wondered
“how different our conversations might have been if they had not
taken place under fluorescent lights, in a windowless room, against
the whistling whoosh of the building’s ventilation system” (ibid.). Indeed,
the entire exercise of “reinventing nature” had the aroma of an
indoor, academic, resume-building exercise. And the key assumption
of the exercise—that nature can be reinvented—works only if one
first conceives it as an ephemeral social construction. If nature is so
unhitched from its moorings in hard physical realities, it can be recast
as anything one fancies.
Not surprisingly, wilderness critics have received a great deal of
criticism (Foreman 1994, 1996, 1998; Rolston 1991; Sessions 1995;
Snyder 1995, 1996; Soule and Lease 1995; Willers 1996–1997).
After the dust has settled a bit, what can be said of “the great new
wilderness debate”? First, on the positive side, I think it can be said
that, under provocation from Callicott, Cronon, and others, a
stronger and more useful case for wilderness protection emerged
(Foreman 1994, 1996, 1998; Grumbine 1996–1997; Noss 1998a,
1998b). The conjunction of older ideas about wilderness providing
spiritual renewal and primitive recreation with newer ones concerning
ecological restoration and the preservation of biodiversity offers a
better and more scientifically grounded basis to protect and expand
remaining wilderness areas in the twenty-first century. It is clear that
we will need to fit the concept and the reality of wilderness into a
larger concept of land use that includes wildlife corridors, sustainable
development, and the mixed-use zones surrounding designated
wilderness. But the origin of these ideas owes as much to Aldo
Leopold as to any contemporary wilderness proponent. And, yes, environmentalists
and academics alike need to make these ideas work
for indigenous people, farmers, ranchers, and loggers. Development of
conservation biology, low-impact forestry methods, and sustainable
agriculture suggest that this is beginning to happen. For these advances,
wilderness advocates can be grateful for their critics.
On a less positive note, the debate over wilderness resembles the
internecine, hair-splitting squabbles of European socialists between
1850 and 1914. Often the differences between the various positions
of that time were neither great nor consequential. Nonetheless, positions
hardened, factions and parties formed around minutiae, and
contentiousness and conspiracy became the norm on the political
Left. As a result, by 1914 the Left had coalesced into ideologically
based factions, firmly and irrevocably committed to one impractical
doctrine or another. It was a great tragedy that when the world
needed far better ideas about the organization of property, government,
and capital, in the early decades of the twentieth century, it had
few from the Left. Instead, socialists of whatever stripe gave the
strong impression to mainstream society that they had nothing coherent
or reasonable to offer. Their language was obscure, their proposed
solutions often entailed violence, their public manners were uncivil,
and their tone was absolutist. It was in this environment that Lenin
and his Bolsheviks concocted the odd brew of socialism, intolerance,
brutality, messianic pretensions, and ancient czarist autocracy that became
known as Marxism-Leninism. And the rest of the story, as they
say, is history.
Like that of the early twentieth century, the world now more
than ever needs better ideas about how to meld society, economy, and
ecology into a coherent, fair, and sustainable whole. The question is
whether environmentalists can offer practical, workable, and sensible
ideas, not abstractions, arcane ideology, spurious dissent, and ideological
hair-splitting reminiscent of nineteenth-century socialists. In this
regard, the most striking aspect of the ongoing great wilderness debate
is the similarity that exists between positions that were initially
cast as mutually exclusive. There is no necessary divide, for example,
between protecting wilderness and sustainable development. On the
contrary, these are complementary ideas. And there are some issues,
such as the old and unresolvable question about whether and to what
degree humans are part of or separate from nature, that are hardly
worth arguing about over and over again. Nor do we need to hear truisms
that wilderness must be adapted to the circumstances, culture,
and needs of particular places. These are obvious facts that deserve to
be treated as such. Finally, since all participants profess support for
the thing called wilderness, as distinct from the idea of it, we are entitled
to ask, What is the point of the great wilderness debate? If we intend
to influence our age in the little time we have, we must focus
more clearly and effectively on the large battles that we dare not lose.
The time and energy invested in our great debates should be judged
against the sure knowledge that, while we argue among ourselves,
others are busy bulldozing, clear-cutting, mining, building roads, and,
above all, lobbying the powers that be.
Third, the effort to find common ground by “reinventing nature”
along postmodernist lines seems to me to have the same foundational
perspicacity as, say, the effort to extract sunbeams from cucumbers
for subsequent use in inclement summers—a project of the great
academy of Lagado, described by Jonathan Swift. Most surely we see
nature through the lens of culture, class, and circumstance. Even so, it
is remarkable how similarly nature is, in fact, “constructed” across different
classes, cultures, times, and circumstances. This is so because
gravity, sunlight, geology, soils, animals, and the biogeochemical cycles
of the earth are the hard physical realities in which we live, move, and
have our being.We are free to describe them in different symbols and
wrap them in different cultural frameworks, but we do not thereby
diminish their reality.
The idea that we are free to reinvent nature is, I think, an indulgence
made possible because we have temporarily created an artificial
world based on the extravagant use of fossil fuels. But that idea will
not be particularly useful for helping us create a sustainable and sustaining
civilization, however useful it may be as a reason to organize
conferences in exotic places and for keeping postmodernists employed
at high-paying, indoor jobs. “Reckless deconstructionism,” in
the words of Peter Coates, “cuts the ground from under the argument
for the preservation of endangered species” (1998, 185). More
broadly, it prevents us from taking any constructive action whatsoever.
The postmodern contribution to environmentalism has privileged
(in their word) an arcane, indoor, and ivory tower kind of environmentalism
with more than a passing similarity to views otherwise
found only on the extreme political right. Separated as it is from both
physical and political realities, as well as the folks down at the truck
stop, postmodernism provides no realistic foundation for a workable
or intellectually robust environmentalism.
Looking ahead to the twenty-first century, the debate over
wilderness has illuminated the fact that we will need larger, not
smaller, ideas about land, nature, and ourselves. We will need more,
not less, ecological imagination. We certainly need to be mindful of
the “otherness” in our backyards, as Bill Cronon reminds us, but that
reminder is a small idea that comes at a time when we must cope
with global problems of species extinction, climatic change, emerging
diseases, and the breakdown of entire ecosystems. We need a larger
view of land and landscape than is possible where “It’s mine and I’ll
do with it as I damn well please” is the prevailing philosophy. As Aldo
Leopold pointed out decades ago, we need well-kept farms and
homeplaces, well-managed forests, and large wilderness areas. None
of these needs to compete with any other. Of the four, wilderness
protection is by far the hardest to achieve. It is a societal choice that
requires an ecologically literate public, political leadership, economic
interests with a long-term view, and above all, the humility necessary
to place limits on what we do. Until we have created a more farsighted
culture, the conjunction of these forces will always be rare,
fragile, and temporary.
The battle over wilderness will grow in coming decades as the pressures
of population growth and alleged economic necessity mount.
There will be, someday soon, urgent calls to undo the Wilderness Act
of 1964 and release much of the land it now protects to mining, economic
expansion, and recreation facilities. At the same time it is entirely
possible that much of our affection for wilderness, rural areas,
and wildness will decline if we continue to become a tamer and more
indoor people. In Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley described
the effort to “condition the masses to hate the country” while conditioning
them “to love all country sports.” This process is already well
under way, and we are the less for it. As D. H. Lawrence put it: “Oh,
what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm
of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe,
what a maiming of love when it was made a personal,
merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the
sun, and cut off from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox.
This is what is wrong with us.We are bleeding at the roots” (Bass
1996, 21).
In the century ahead, the battle over wilderness will become a
part of a much larger struggle.We have entered a new wilderness of
sorts, one of our own making, consisting of technology that will offer
us a virtual reality (an oxymoron if there ever was one), fun, excitement,
and convenience. Caught between the ugliness that accompanies
ecological decline and the siren call of a phony reality cut off
from soils, forests, wildlife, and each other, we will be hard pressed to
maintain our sanity and the best parts of our humanity. The struggle
for wilderness and wildness in all of its forms is no less than a struggle
over what we are to make of ourselves. I believe we need more
wilderness and wildness, not less. We need more wildlands, wildlife,
wildlife corridors, mixed-use zones, wild and scenic rivers, and, even
urban wilderness. But above all, we need people who know in their
bones that these things are important because they are the substrate
of our humanity and an anchor for our sanity.