the meaning of it, the history of it,
and the value of it
Wild means “self-willed” [Nash 2001: 1, 387; Turner 1996: 82, 112]. Something that’s wild is living on its own terms, not controlled or manipulated by human beings. A wild place is a place where we can look around us, listen, and use our other senses and be unaware of any sign of human activity or impact other than ourselves. Such a place is rare, of course, in this age of airplanes overhead and satellites circling the earth. Indeed, Bill McKibben reminds us in The End of Nature that nothing any longer is completely free of human influence, now that the atmosphere itself has been changed by industrial and technological pollution: “We have built a greenhouse, a human creation, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden” [McKibben 1990: 91].
But wildness is not an absolute. There’s a continuum of it, varying in size and purity. At one end are big wilderness areas where a person can spend many days out of touch with any significant human impact. At the other extreme is the dandelion growing in a crack in the sidewalk or squirrels and chickadees in the back yard. In between is a vast array of variations, including wilderness areas large enough for a day hike but not a backpacking trip, smaller pockets and parcels of wildness in state parks, county parks, nature preserves, etc. (and on private land, too, of course), squirrels in a wilder setting than the back yard, and native plants instead of dandelions. Along that continuum, I am aware of two notable thresholds. The first is a line beyond which we enter into places that are more or less wild—where we ourselves are in the midst of wildness instead of standing to the side of it. I can see wild birds in the planted trees outside my apartment window and wildflowers beyond the lower edge of the lawn. But a qualitative change occurs as soon as I leave the lawn and walk into the woods. The same thing happens when I get out of my vehicle and start hiking a trail. The second threshold is toward the wilder end of the continuum and marks the point where we get deeply enough into in a wild place that we experience nothing but wildness (except, of course, for ourselves). No houses or roads are visible; no traffic sounds reach our ears.
We need to be able to cross those thresholds. I’m sure there are other important thresholds, too. I’m generally content with day hiking in wild places and prefer to head home at night or to a campsite where I can sleep in my van. But some people want more than that: a day or week, for example, between themselves and the last sign of human impact. Those people may know of other thresholds. At the tamer end of the continuum, I recall a time when Laurie and I were in the middle of many days’ work emptying a house in New Rochelle, New York, that Laurie’s mom was moving from. At one point, we drove to a women’s shelter in a thoroughly suburban environment to drop off a donation of clothing, and along the sidewalk leading to the shelter—with my mind preoccupied with all the work we still had to do—I caught a glimpse of a clump of white snakeroots in bloom. They were clearly wild—not a product of anyone’s gardening—and they instantly drew my mind to thoughts of wilder places and a reminder that the unpleasant work we still had to do was only temporary. We need wildness of all kinds in all kinds of places. We need big wilderness areas where we can disappear for hours, days, or weeks. But we also need wildness, even if it’s imperfect, that’s closer to home. We need wildness in everyday life—wildness that’s right around us—that we don’t have to go to—that comes to us—that surprises us—that we can glimpse or touch while we’re working or simply going about our lives.
Wild is not the same as nature. In a radio interview, I heard sculptor Leon Segal tell of Jackson Pollack’s response to criticism that his throwing of paint onto a canvas was “not natural.” Said Jackson: “I am nature.” Indeed, there are people who claim to resent the implication that human activity is not natural. In their terms, cities are natural, industry is natural, and pollution is natural. McKibben points out that “scientists may argue that natural processes still rule—that the chemical reactions even now eating away the ozone or absorbing the earth’s reflected heat are proof that nature is still in charge, still our master” [McKibben 1990: 83]. But McKibben replies that “the nature that matters is not the whirling fuzziness of electrons and quarks and neutrinos [or] the vast and strange worlds ... that scientists can find with their telescopes. The nature that matters is the temperature, and the rain, and the leaves turning color on the maples, and the raccoons around the garbage can” [McKibben 1990: 83].
Neither dogs, cows, farmland, nor gardens are wild. For city-bound people, a trip to the countryside might seem wild by comparison. And I have no doubt that cows do something wild now and then, and, to the farmer’s annoyance, wild things come up in his corn field. But livestock and crops are so overwhelmingly managed for their usefulness to humans that there’s very little they can show us of what the world would be like in the absence of human impacts. Likewise, pets and gardens undeniably help put their owners in touch with something nonhuman, but, as much as I love flowers, I never find a flower garden as satisfying as a patch of wildflowers. Like an animal in a zoo, a plant in a garden has lost its wildness, its naturalness, its self-willed context of site and neighbors and atmosphere. In a garden, I can’t help but think that I’m learning more about the gardener—another human being—than I am about the plants. A family dog tells me more about humans and their lives than it does about coyotes or wolves.
I don’t know why wildness is important. I know that I’m drawn to it uncontrollably. I also know that not everyone is. (Aldo Leopold: “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot” [Leopold 1970: vii].) I know that wild places never let me down. I always find something in them that’s beautiful, spectacular, or wondrous. I love those discoveries, and—this, I believe, is an important point—I especially love them because humans have not created or controlled or manipulated them. They’ve “just happened.” I think there’s something valuable in those experiences. I also believe that wildness is important not just for individuals but for society or civilization as a whole. Thoreau believed that “the woods and swamps that surround a town” are vital as a source of inspiration independent of ourselves. Without things that are self-willed, we’d have nothing to learn from—nothing for inspiration—except other human beings and the history and culture that human beings have created or influenced.
But what sort of inspiration might we expect from wild places? What might the things that we learn from wildness look like, and how would they help? Despite our comfort and our richness, we have a civilization with many problems, not least of which are an inability of diverse people to get along with one another and a relationship to the environment that’s hardly sustainable. Is wildness part of a solution to any of those problems? Do people who visit wild places bring anything home that helps with issues like those? Do they become different people in ways that are helpful? Would our civilization be even worse on these dimensions if it didn’t have its wild places, and might it become better if we had more such places and if more people used them appropriately? I’d like to think that the answer to those questions is yes, but all I know for certain is that wild places are important to me. Being without them is horrible to imagine. I don’t think there’s a problem or a bad mood that can’t be helped by a walk in the woods.
HISTORY OF WILDNESS
Historically, it's said that there was no wildness before agriculture. When human beings made their living by hunting and gathering, they were simply another part of nature. Nothing was tame, so nothing was wild. Although there’s evidence that, even in Pleistocene times, humans set fires that altered natural landscapes, that’s little different from beavers building dams that flood meadows. Lovers of wildness are sometimes accused by their critics of wanting to “return to the Stone Age.” If there’s any truth in such accusations, it stems from the assumption that hunter-gatherers lived in some sort of harmony with nature.
Although the critics hold the contrary assumption that Stone Age lives were “nasty, brutish, and short,” a number of writers see them in more idyllic terms. “Paleolithic people lived comfortably in the wilderness,” writes Max Oelschlaeger, “much as the Inuit on the polar ice or the Kalahari Bushmen in Africa, and they probably had plenty of nourishing food. There is no evidence of widespread malnutrition or death by starvation” [Oelschlaeger 1991: 14]. Oelschlaeger argues that, aside from deaths in infancy and from traumatic injury, the life span of Paleolithic people was similar to ours. “The modern mind is oblivious to the reality that starvation, malnutrition, warfare, and pestilence are post-Neolithic phenomena”—products of crowding, stress, and socioeconomic inequality which came with agriculture and urbanization [15]. David Stuart: “Judging from what we know of modern hunters and gatherers, … Paleo-Indians … worked only enough to meet their basic needs—about 500 hours a year” [Stuart 2000: 15]. Eric Leed: “In Arnhem Land, Australia, aborigines work fewer than four hours a day to satisfy subsistence needs. [Anthropologists], in a study of the !Kung bushmen, conclude that men and women work an average of 1.5 man-days a week to feed themselves” [Leed 1991: 241]. Alex Shoumatoff, traveling with present-day hunter-gatherers in Brazil: “The hunter-gatherer will mount a tremendous effort for twenty-four hours at a time, resulting in the killing of, say, a peccary or a tapir. Then he will do nothing for a few days but eat and rest up for the next expedition” [Shoumatoff 1978: 155]. A native convert in Paraguay speaking to a missionary: “We do not like to be tired with hard work in order that we may have big huts stored with things” [Leed 1995: 160].
If Paleolithic life was so good, one might wonder why it was given up. What Oelschlaeger suggests is that Paleolithic people naturally engaged in horticultural experiments [Oelschlaeger 1991: 25-26]. Perhaps they cleared away undesirable plants so that desirable ones would grow more abundantly, or set fires to encourage plants that they observed proliferating where natural fires occurred, or gathered and sowed seeds of desirable plants in order to produce more of them or to encourage them in more accessible locations. When climatic changes produced hard times, domesticated or half-domesticated plants were relied upon more heavily. Population growth brought about by the agricultural food supply and especially, according to Oelschlaeger, by the heightened fertility that results from living in settled conditions then made it impossible to return to simple hunting and gathering [26]. There were too many people to support by such means, and the mobility required by hunting and gathering was no longer possible because more of the land was occupied. In at least some interpretations of subsequent history, the clearance of forests for cropland and grazing land eliminated wood as a fuel source and effectively required the turn to coal and steam, which initiated the industrial revolution [70].
The shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture to urbanization was not a simple straight line, however [Shepard 1972; Shlain 1998; Nash 2001; Oelschlaeger 1991]. Agriculture on a significant scale developed first in valleys where the soil was fertile. Sacredness in those societies evolved from pantheism, where everything was sacred, to the worship of female gods associated with fertility. On the periphery of agricultural societies, herding societies emerged—migratory like hunters and gatherers, but traveling with domestic herds instead of in search of wild food. Those cultures produced male gods—unpredictable and wrathful, like the land and the weather, and abstract, like the sky [Shepard 1972]. It’s not known whether herding people were direct descendants of hunters and gatherers or whether they were “unsuccessful cultivators or surplus population” emigrating from farming societies [Tannahill 1980: 48]. In any event, connections evolved between herding and trading, for the herding societies often controlled trade routes between various agricultural and urban centers. Perhaps because the herders were more dynamic than the farmers (due to high-protein diets or experience with a more demanding environment [51]), their abstract male gods became the gods of farmers and city people as well—and, in the process, became more predictable gods (such as farmers needed) and ones who were said to have given nature to humans for their use.
As people became farmers instead of hunters and gatherers, nature ceased to be the encircling provider of life and became instead a threat to home, fields, crops, and domestic animals. For the farmer, there emerged important distinctions between tame and wild, crops and weeds, stock and wild animals, home and wilderness [Oelschlaeger 1991: 28]. None of those dichotomies would have been meaningful to hunters and gatherers. In addition, farming was harder work than hunting and gathering since crops required “continued involvement” for the seeds to survive [Solnit 1999: 306]. Hunter-gatherers who worked 500 hours a year became “hand-tool horticulturalists” who worked 1,000 to 2,000 hours a year [Stuart 2000: 15, 37]. According to Richard Manning, American Indians in tribes that had become farmers sometimes ran away to join migratory tribes on the plains, and the Great Wall of China is thought by some to have been built not only to keep the barbarians out but also to keep the Chinese in [Manning 1995: 73]. Farmers, for better or worse, lost the mobility of hunter-gatherers. They acquired property and possessions that invited plunder and required defense, resulting in war on a scale unknown in hunter-gatherer societies [Oelschlaeger 1991: 29]. In time, as agriculture became increasingly complex—involving irrigation, storage, and trade—cities, hierarchy, and inequality also followed. Nature increasingly lost its connection with sacredness and more and more became an object for scientific study and technological exploitation.
I don’t mean to romanticize hunter-gatherers as enlightened environmentalists. I don’t know if they were or not. Some skeptics point out that ancient cultures such as the Anasazi, the Hohokam, and the Cahokians in North America disappeared because of population pressure and environmental degradation as well as climate change. Those are poor examples, however, being cultures that had already become agricultural and urban before they disappeared. Even so, they endured for 1,500 to 2,000 years, longer than ours has so far. Hunting and gathering cultures survived for vastly longer periods than that. Other writers point to the extinction of large mammals such as mammoths and giant sloths as examples of unsustainable hunter-gatherer impacts. But still others surmise that the animals had already been weakened by climate change, and humans simply delivered the final blows. The most extensive study of hunter-gatherer impacts that I’ve read is The Ecological Indian by Shepard Krech III [1999]. Krech is highly skeptical that Indians were “ecological.” He cites numerous examples of waste, such as the practice of killing bison by driving them over cliffs, which is documented to have resulted in many more dead animals than the Indians could use [145]. Krech also cites claims that Indians sometimes killed bison only for their tongues, fetuses, or humps, which were considered delicacies [142]. Indians often regarded the leaving of dead animals for consumption by other animals and organisms not as “waste” but as sharing with fellow creatures [Terry 2002].
But waste is not the issue. Sustainability is. My idea of sustainable would be a culture in which people are (1) able to detect problematic changes in their environment at an early stage (declining populations of certain plants or animals, for example) and (2) able to respond appropriately and successfully to the changes that they detect. Unfortunately, much of Krech’s evidence is unavoidably confounded by European contact with the Indians. Many of the Indians’ detrimental practices with regard to bison, deer, beaver, and other wildlife were done under the influence of European markets and the Indians’ desire for trade goods. Would they have been as heedless in the absence of European influence? It’s hard to say, because most of what we know about them comes from European sources, and it was only during the thinnest slice of time that Europeans could describe Indians who were free of European influence. The only other evidence we have is the Indians’ own oral history, but, as Krech says, it’s impossible to say how much those accounts have been dressed up, either intentionally or not, to satisfy the present-day desires of both Indians and whites to make the Indians look good.
In the end, I can’t help but suspect that the questions of whether the Indians were “ecological” or whether Pleistocene hunters and gatherers lived in harmony as part-of-nature are unanswerable. Their numbers were so small and their technology so modest that they rarely—or perhaps never in the absence of climate change as a complicating factor—had even the ability to damage their environment significantly. I’ve also seen an ample number of accounts of Indians’ disinterest in taking more from their environment than they needed if only because it would require too much work. Early European settlers often accused the Indians of being lazy. What would the Indians have done if their numbers had grown or their technology had developed to the point where ecological damage was possible? I don’t think there’s any way to know.
The reappreciation of wildness began in Western culture with seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painters [Shepard 1972; Andrews 1999; Solnit 1999; Schama 1996; Coates 1998; Mitchell 2001]. Holland had become a leading commercial nation, and commercial elites, as opposed to royal or religious ones, provided a market for different types of painting. Science was then in its early stages and stimulated among artists an interest in depicting the real world in objective ways. In the meantime, in places such as Italy, landscape painting was becoming academically respectable in its own right, although it still required a connection with heroic or pastoral themes, as in the paintings of Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorrain [Flexner 1962]. The work of such artists was beginning to teach people to look more carefully at the landscapes around them. It also influenced landscape architects, whose designs evolved from the formal, symmetrical gardens of France to the more informal and “natural” ones of England. French gardens had been clearly distinguished from nature, an obvious separation from the wilderness. “The formal gardens of eighteenth-century continental Europe signified the triumph of culture over a self-willed natural world as emphatically as the sprouting factories and urban tenements” [Coates 1998: 117]. On the other hand, English gardens, though equally artificial, were increasingly imitative of landscape paintings and came more and more to resemble nature itself. One of the English landscape architects was described as having “leapt the fence” and seen that “all nature was a garden” [Solnit 2000: 93]. “English aristocrats developed a passion” for the work of artists such as Claude Lorrain and “began collecting the paintings. And then they began modeling their gardens after the paintings. And then they began to admire the world as they had the gardens” [Solnit 1999: 252]. Various writers and poets may have initially gained an interest in nature and wildness from the gardens.
Of course, the growing interest in nature had a push as well as a pull. Already in seventeenth-century Europe, environmental problems were becoming serious. England was running out of timber for shipbuilding, and air pollution from coal smoke was already a serious problem in London [Merchant 1983].
In the meantime, travelers between northern Europe and Italy, as they crossed the Alps, began to look at mountains in new ways [Nicholson 1963]. At first, they were horrified and disgusted by what they saw— reactions to mountain landscapes that we now find a little hard to imagine—but Thomas Burnet, for one, was so captivated by the Alps that he wrote a book (A Sacred Theory of the Earth) explaining the mountains as the “ruins” of a previously smooth-as-an-egg earth that had been ruptured and battered by the Great Flood. “Theologically Burnet condemned mountains; actually he was obsessed by them” [213]. Burnet’s account was much-read and highly influential, stimulating people to look more carefully at mountain landscapes. During the ensuing century, the tone of descriptions of crossings of the Alps changed. Joseph Addison wrote about the importance of “primary” as opposed to “secondary” pleasures—essentially the importance of clear-eyed looking and forming one’s own judgments rather than responding as people had been taught to respond [308]. Accounts of Alpine crossings became characterized more and more by mixed emotions. John Dennis in 1688: “The sense of all of this produc’d … in me … a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time that I was infinitely pleased, I trembled” [277]. In 1699, Addison described ‘an agreeable kind of horror” [307]. Such feelings were eventually codified by Edmund Burke in 1856 as the Sublime: “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience” [Solnit 1999: 44].
Rousseau’s Emile (1762), which praised the sublimity of the Alps, is credited with inspiring a blossoming of Romanticism among artists and writers [Nash 2001: 49]. The poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley described wild nature in appreciative terms [Oelschlaeger 1991: 116-20]. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads was published in 1798. With growing numbers of people troubled by the ravages of industry and urban growth, writers and artists who sought out wild and sublime landscapes for inspiration became cultural heroes and created new models for travel and tourism. People ventured to waterfalls, mountains, and seashores; wrote about them rhapsodically; painted and sketched them; viewed them through “Claude glasses” designed to make them look like Claude Lorrain’s paintings; and carried guidebooks offering instruction on how to look at landscapes as well as where to find them. “To display a correct taste in landscape was a valuable social accomplishment quite as much as to sing well, or to compose a polite letter” [Solnit 2000: 95].
In America, where genuine wildness was present in quantities long unknown in Europe, the idea eventually took hold that wild nature was a national treasure rather than a source of embarrassment. Thomas Cole in the 1820s rejected the tradition that landscape painting was acceptable only if it contained significant human connections. Cole wrote that America possessed “glorious” features unknown in Europe in the form of a native landscape with associations not of man but of “God the creator” [Nash 2001: 81]. Cole’s paintings and others of the Hudson River School omitted human beings and their works or reduced them to “ant-like proportions” [79]. James Fenimore Cooper’s novels and William Cullen Bryant’s poems portrayed wild nature in positive terms. By mid-century, Ralph Waldo Emerson reiterated for literature what Cole had said for painting. Wildness, for Emerson, made possible an original relationship to the universe for the sake of creative thinking, the only alternative being “synthesis derived from synthesis” [264]. Despite Rousseau’s and Wordsworth’s praise for the primitive, Emerson maintained that what Europeans could know of it was merely abstract, whereas it could be directly experienced in America. Henry Thoreau’s cross-lots walks in Concord and ventures into wilder country put into practice what for Emerson was mostly intellectual. As in Europe, such developments were driven in part by reactions to industrialization and urbanization. As early as 1863, in Man and Nature, George Perkins Marsh catalogued “an enormous array of activities” by which humanity was “a destabilizing environmental force” [Oelschlaeger 1991: 107]. Nathaniel Hawthorn was appalled by the mills at North Adams, Massachusetts; and the railroad passing Walden Pond was a compelling symbol for Thoreau [Marx 1967: 267-68].
Frederick Turner, describing his first visit to the Pacific Ocean, writes: “I stretched my arms out over the water”—he was imitating the explorer Balboa—“taking my own sort of possession, thinking as I did so not only of that old and vain action, but also of the meanings of ‘possession,’ which include the act of possessing and also the state of being possessed: to be held, swept up, enrapt, as now I was by this sea” [Turner 1990: 266]. Since I first read that, I’ve been intrigued with the question of how wild nature can have such contradictory effects. Why do some people, when confronted by it, want to possess it while others become possessed by it? Most of American history is a history of possessing—what Rebecca Solnit refers to as a “frenzied transformation of landscape into real estate” [Solnit 1999: 112]. It’s not that no one noticed the beauty. William Bartram certainly did. As early as the 1770s, Bartram rambled among the forests, swamps, and savannahs of the southeastern U.S. in search of plants and made “the first extensive use of [the] term [sublimity] in American letters” [Nash 2001: 54]. Thomas Jefferson had a scientific as well as a utilitarian interest in the natural world. William Clark was moved to write in his journal notations such as: “[N]ature … exerted herself to butify the Senery by the variety of flours Delicately and highly flavered” [historical marker in Missouri]. Meriwether Lewis rhapsodized about “seens of visionary inchantment” along central Montana’s Missouri River Breaks. Pioneers on the trail to California sometimes stayed at a place “an extra day to have a picnic or to simply ‘enjoy the grandeur which surrounds us’” [National Park Service brochure on the California Trail].
But nothing stopped the orgy of conquering and utilizing. Hardly anyone was motivated to refrain from using anything that appeared usable. Newly-opened land was occupied, homes and towns were thrown up, cattle were driven into new territory, and mining claims were staked, all in a mad rush. Wild things disappeared (or nearly so) in remarkably short periods: old-growth white pine forests, beaver, bison, choice land in river bottoms, and tallgrass prairie. No doubt it was true that, if one didn’t grab whatever it was fast, somebody else would get it. It was almost as if people were afraid to give themselves time to become possessed by a place. By the time Thomas Cole and Henry Thoreau began to praise the American landscape in art and literature, much had been already been changed. Thoreau: “Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am conversant with? ... I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places” [Shepard 1961: 157].
Although I detest the appetite for utilizing everything, I’m well aware that, if we allowed every inch of wildness to possess us, we’d be pretty hungry. My complaint is not that we use nature, but that we don’t know when to stop. The prevalent attitude is captured in the title of an essay that I recall reading in graduate school: “Can Implies Ought.” If it can be done, we do it. If we can cut down trees, we cut ’em down. If we can plow up the prairies, we plow ’em up. If we can extract oil and coal and other minerals, we extract ’em. If we can make pacemakers, candy bars, or assault weapons, we make ’em. We don’t ask, “Is this really a good idea?” or “Do we really need this?” or “Will the world be a better place?” An alternative attitude could be that “Need Implies Ought,” so that, if we didn’t need something, we’d leave it alone, knowing it will be there in the future if we need it. Instead, we behave as if the future will take care of itself. If the resources are there and we can figure out some way to use them, then, by god, we use them. If there’s no need to use them, we spend billions of dollars on advertising to create a need.
FURTHER THOUGHTS ON THE MEANING OF WILDNESS
Early European-American visitors to Yosemite Valley were struck by its resemblance to an English landscape garden [Rybczynski 1999: 237; Solnit 1999: 243-44]. The gentle and winding Merced River, the towering granite cliffs, and especially the open, grassy-floored oak woodlands encouraged them to think that way. Interestingly, as Rebecca Solnit writes, “it resembled such a garden because it was one” [307]. We know now what those early visitors didn’t know: that it was fires periodically set by Yosemite’s Indians that encouraged the oak forests and prevented the invasion of conifers which would otherwise have made the forest a much more typical one and deprived visitors of the valley’s enchanting vistas of rocks and waterfalls framed by oak trees. As the years went by, subsequent national park policies of controlling fires did result in a significant invasion by incense cedars and other conifers, and the National Park Service has now adopted a policy of periodic burning in order to restore the valley’s original appearance [301-02]. Except, of course, that it’s not original—whatever “original” means—but something that the Indians created from whatever they had found earlier.
That little parable raises all sorts of troublesome questions about the meaning of wildness. Does wildness have to mean “untouched” so that it becomes “spoiled” whenever it’s been altered by human beings? Is it spoiled if Europeans or their descendants altered it but not if Indians did? Does wildness require that a place be left alone, or is some type of management permissible? What if it’s left alone and nature changes it from what it had been earlier? Is it still wild? What if nature, in making its changes, was helped along by human beings, as in the control of fires which allowed the conifers to invade? And if changes like those are not wild, what should we do then? Should we leave the situation alone, so it stays wild, or should we intervene because it wasn’t wild to begin with?
- Wildness doesn’t require an absence of change.
- Wildness doesn’t require an absence of past impacts.
Moreover, there are places where you can’t tell if there’s been human impact or not. The obviousness or faintness of the impacts will vary with their recency, their magnitude, and the resilience of the habitat in question. It also varies with the perceptiveness of the observer. Years ago, I hiked in upstate New York with a friend who had an eye for old house sites and logging roads that he would point out to me in the woods. I could see them when he showed them to me, but it took a long time before I was able to see them on my own. Those woods were wilder for me than they were for my friend. Even now, I’ve seen ruts across hillside meadows and not known if they’re old eroded trails or something completely natural. In Washington’s Willapa Hills, Robert Michael Pyle found a sedge marsh and wondered, “Is this an old, natural feature or a product of recent cat-damming?” [Pyle 1988: 27]. He made a mental note to return in summer and look for “specialized plants and animals that would indicate remnant natural features” [27]. But, even if Pyle’s marsh was a product of cat-damming, it would be interesting to see what nature, self-willed, would do with it. And, given enough time, who the hell would know? Who knows what human impacts—house sites, trails, garden plots, burnt forests or prairies—have vanished completely or been so overwhelmed by natural processes going on around them that no one can find them? None of this is an argument that human impacts don’t matter. What we do presently, and what we’ve done recently, certainly matters. But what we did a hundred years ago, or two hundred, or two thousand, or twenty thousand, at some point doesn’t matter, as long as we leave it alone now.
- Wildness does require an absence of current management, although there are many exceptions to this rule.
Even in places whose primary purpose is the protection of wildness, I can think of situations where management is clearly justified. One example is management to control or prevent harmful spillovers—fires, for example, or predation—onto private property or surrounding communities. Often, this is a problem especially because so many of our wild places are small and fragmented. Another example is the protection of rare species or habitats. Again, if wild places were large and plentiful, this might not be a problem. But, because protected wild places are scare, the likelihood is great that certain species or habitats will be especially scarce. Thus, although I would normally say that fires with natural causes should be allowed to burn, I would change my mind if it meant that a grove of rare trees would be destroyed. Similarly, in the Midwest, I’m delighted to see rare remnants of tallgrass prairie being restored and maintained through rigorous management.
I would also say that management is justified to prevent or ameliorate changes that are caused by humans. If a place’s wildness is being destroyed anyway—by the impact of too many visitors, for example—it would be silly to stand in the way of management on the grounds that it will destroy wildness. I might not like constructed trails, stairways, boardwalks, or railings, but I don’t like a beaten-up, trampled habitat either. Likewise, I might not like the use of management to reduce the numbers of deer or elk or other animals in a park, but, if I know that their numbers have been “unnaturally” inflated by human decisions to control predators, then the impact of the deer becomes “no longer wild,” and a solution that’s not wild doesn’t seem so bad. The same would be true of management to introduce a species—grizzly bears or wolves, for example—that’s been “unnaturally” eliminated.
None of this is meant to be an argument against the importance of wilderness protection. We need more wildness, not less. In the case of places whose primary purpose is the protection of wildness, I would hope that management would be kept to a minimum and stopped as soon as it’s no longer necessary. In places with other primary purposes—logging, farming, mining, industry, shopping, housing, whatever—I wish that the preservation and enhancement of as much wildness as possible could be an important auxiliary goal.
- Wildness doesn’t require an absence of people.
It’s true that too many other hikers can be a problem, but how many are “too many”? Obviously, different people have different tolerances. What I consider too many people might not bother someone else, and I’m personally acquainted with people who would say a place that doesn’t bother me is “too crowded.” But I’ve been to many beautiful, spectacular, and wondrous places with so few visitors that they couldn’t possibly bother anyone. I also know from experience that a lot of wild places can accommodate remarkable numbers of people without damaging my sense of wildness. Laurie and I have come upon trailhead parking lots so crowded with vehicles that we think of choosing a different place to hike. On some of those occasions, we’ve gone ahead and hiked anyway, and, yes, we encountered people, but most of the time we were alone on the trails with no evidence that anyone was around.
It matters, of course, not only how many other people are along a trail but also what they’re doing. It matters to me that the people I meet are friendly and that they’re enjoying the surroundings as much as I am. Interestingly, it also depends on what they’re talking about. I prefer to have them discussing trees, birds, rocks, or other things around them rather than the stock market, the Super Bowl, or Veronica’s breakup with Harold. It certainly matters whether they’re walking or, say, riding a dirt bike. I sometimes think of each of us having a bubble around us, representing the amount of surrounding territory that we affect—the territory within which someone else would be aware of our presence. A person walking silently will have a very small bubble (a person standing still would have an even smaller one); two people walking and talking will have a larger one; a person riding a dirt bike—especially a noisy dirt bike—will have a very large one. The simplest rule of thumb is: The smaller the bubble, the better. The most important rule is to remember that not all bubbles are equal, and that people with smaller bubbles might be unfairly affected by people with bigger ones.
In the end, the most important consideration is not the presence or absence of other people, but the condition (as the Wilderness Act puts it) that we be only visitors and not leave a lasting impact. The top of Mount Dickerman in Washington did not become less wild when two other hikers showed up while I was there, but the trampled appearance of the summit was bothersome. I also find it troubling to think of people as a constant presence in a place. Laurie and I once hiked the trail over Mounts Welch and Dickey in New Hampshire’s White Mountains in practically a continuous parade of other hikers. But it was a gorgeous weekend at the peak of fall color, and I took comfort in assuming that, on another day, the trail would have a much smaller number of visitors. On another occasion, a friend and I hiked the Virgin River Narrows at Zion National Park, and in that case I did imagine that the crowds of people were a constant condition (at least in the warmer months of the year). Badly trampled ground might call for boardwalks or other trail improvements. Conditions like those in the Narrows might call for quotas. Regarding the latter, I don’t like the bother of needing to get a permit and probably wouldn’t do it more than once for the same place. But, if the Narrows is always as crowded as my friend and I found it, I wouldn’t go back a second time anyway.
- Wildness doesn’t require an absence of trails and signs.
As for signs, I’ve seen a few places where they seemed to be overdone, but I’ve never been bothered by them (and have been very grateful for them on certain occasions). One major disadvantage of signlessness is that it creates special difficulties for neophytes. If we believe that wildness is important, we should want to make things easier for newcomers to it rather than more difficult. Making things easier should not extend to such elaborate trails, railings, huts, lodges, tramways, and whatnot that a place is no longer wild. But wild places should cater to the inexperienced as well as to old pros. I wouldn’t want trails and signs everywhere, but I find it hard to see them as major spoilers of wildness.
I sometimes think, in fact, that human impact is greater without a trail than it is with one. It’s not that I mind bushwhacking, but when I have no trail to follow I become preoccupied with the challenges of staying on course to my destination and of choosing the best, easiest, or safest alternatives at many points along the way. (Should I cut through that brushy area or go around it? Angle up the slope or stay down until I pass the next ravine? Follow the creek or stay on the ridge?) When there’s a trail, I still have to watch where I put my feet, but I can ignore most of the other challenges and tune in more completely to the sights, sounds, and scents around me. The trail may be a human impact, but it keeps another human impact—namely, me—further in the background.
In addition to trails and signs, some people are bothered for similar reasons by guidebooks and photographs. Jack Turner tells of an experience in the Maze, in Utah’s Canyonlands, when he was startled—“frozen”—by a sudden view in fading light of a panel of petroglyphs [Turner 1996: 8]. Turner values such opportunities for surprise and believes they’re spoiled by too much advance information. Although I can understand and sympathize with his point of view, I disagree that the possibility of such experiences is eliminated by photographs, guidebooks, maps, or instructions. The problem with those materials occurs when the people using them are looking for “reproductions.” Finding a view in a photograph (and perhaps taking one’s own duplicate photograph) and following directions in order to see exactly what someone else has seen are shallow experiences. Laurie and I use photographs and guidebooks as a way of maximizing our chances of having a spectacular, beautiful, or wondrous experience, but remain open to whatever comes along. We were astonished by Crabtree Falls in Virginia, by fog tearing away from the peaks on Grandfather Mountain, and by the shapes and colors of rocks and soil in the Bisti Badlands, but we found all of those places with the aid of maps and guidebooks.
Turner comes awfully close to arguing that we have to be ignorant in order to have a profound experience with nature. I find that hard to accept. Certainly, we need places beyond the roads and beyond the trails, places that we can’t simply step out of our cars to see, and places that we’ve never seen in photographs. But there’s so much out there to see, and so many different conditions under which we can see the same place (or plant or animal), that I find it hard to worry about knowing too much, seeing too many photographs, or being too well informed by guidebooks.
- Wildness doesn’t have to be dangerous.
Contrary to those writers, I don’t believe there’s anything universal about the desire to be terrified. I like wild places in spite of their hazards, not because of them, and I’m sure I’m not unique. The consistent pattern in the Watermans’ book is recommendations that aim for remoteness and difficulty rather than naturalness or minimal evidence of human impact. The truth is that many places that are kept natural, with minimal evidence of human impact, are also remote and difficult of access—but, in my view, the Watermans confuse byproducts of wildness for the condition itself. An example of a point of disagreement is hotels in the wilderness. The Watermans: “Take 50 people and disperse them in tenting groups of two or four; would they disturb the forest habitat more or less than the same 50 concentrated inside one building? … We can get hung up on deploring the modest impact of a few tents and forget that, for many, the presence of a very large building functioning as a high-priced hotel in the heart of the backcountry does a screaming violence to many people’s concept of what the very essence of backcountry is all about” [50-51]. My reaction: If the aim is to minimize the evidence of human impact rather than to maximize difficulty of access, the question would be whether the impact of a hotel in one spot is better or worse than the screaming violence of a long succession of trampled tent sites (which Laurie and I have seen—along the trail to Raven Cliff Falls in North Carolina, for one example). Elsewhere, the Watermans object to radios, railings, mountain bikes, and helicopters because they make access too easy or rescue too close at hand. I object to them because they’re such obvious and intrusive human impacts. Contrary to the Watermans’ assertion that lovers of the outdoors go there for “challenge, not ease; uncertainty, not security; ‘preferring hard liberty before the easy yoke’” [213], that’s not why I go there. I go to the outdoors for the outdoors. For nature. For wildness. For relief from human beings’ insistent tinkering, improving, developing, domesticating, cultivating, civilizing, violently disturbing. I don’t want the dangers removed, because that would require human intervention, which diminishes wildness. But, if a place is left alone, it’s wild, and it’s good enough for me, whether it’s dangerous or not.
- Wildness doesn’t have to be something that we merely look at.
I have two reactions to this. One is to deny that our involvement with wildness needs to be limited to the visual. Laurie and I do more than look. I think of the fragrance of dry pine needles, of the desert after it rains, of roses, trailing arbutus, and black locusts, of salty air near the seashore, of the distinctive aromas of bogs and of galax in the southern Appalachians, and the scent of vanilla in the bark of ponderosa pines. I think of the feel of smooth rocks or rough rocks, of clusters of white pine needles which I can rarely resist fondling, of grasses brushing against my legs or arms, of breezes, the sting of sleet, the pin pricks of cactus needles and thorns, and the coolness and wetness of water. I think of sampling the taste of nuts and berries, wild apples, prickly pear and saguaro fruits, and the salty crust around the edges of playas. I think of the sounds of owls and whippoorwills, of geese, gulls, and loons, warblers, thrushes, meadowlarks, canyon wrens, and white-throated sparrows, of katydids and cicadas, frogs and toads, of thunderstorms and waves rolling onto a beach, of splashing streams, roaring waterfalls, wind in the trees, and much more. It’s the people who fail to get out of their vehicles who experience nature one-dimensionally (and perhaps it’s the preponderance of visual images that encourages them to settle for that). As for Laurie and me, our vehicle has more and more become a device to get us to a wild place and less and less something to be enjoyed in its own right. Once we’ve driven to an interesting place, I can hardly wait to get out and walk. And it now occurs to me that the main reason for that might be the opportunity to experience nature through all of the senses and not just the eyes looking through the windshield.
My second reaction to the claim that we treat wildness as a visual thing is to say there is nothing wrong with treating it gently. We don’t have to confine ourselves to looking, but I’m not sure what else the critics of “merely looking” have in mind. Indians might have experienced wildness differently and made more diverse uses of it, but we’re not Indians. They possessed a culture that, for whatever reasons, allowed them to use nature while still preserving it and sustaining it. We do not. Our use of nature knows no bounds, and, because of that, we have relatively little wildness left. What little we have is precious. As long as our use of nature fails to be sustainable, we need a countervailing approach that has minimal impact. In that light, restricting our use of wild places to looking—and taking pictures, listening, smelling, feeling, thinking, reflecting, absorbing—is perfectly appropriate.
PASTORAL IS NOT WILD
Between wildness and urban civilization is a third alternative which I find troublesome. That alternative is pastoralism: landscapes of neither city nor wilderness, but of family farms and small villages, or the image of the landscape as a garden. Those are seductive ideals for many people, but farms and gardens are not wild. Leo Marx describes the temptation:
Beginning in Jefferson’s time, the cardinal image of American aspirations was a rural landscape, a well-ordered green garden magnified to continental size. Although it probably shows a farmhouse or a neat white village, the scene usually is dominated by natural objects: in the foreground a pasture, a twisting brook with cattle grazing nearby, then a clump of elms on a rise in the middle distance, and beyond that, way off on the western horizon, a line of dark hills [Marx 1967: 141].It’s a compelling image, and even now, in an age when agriculture has become increasingly industrialized and farming is no longer an option for most people, the pastoral vision lives on in people’s dreams of a house in the country. But, the lessons of wildness (whatever they are) will not be found in a pastoral landscape.
Fields and pastures and woodlots, farmsteads and villages, are human creations as much as cities and factories and shopping malls. “Gardens,” says Joseph Meeker, “are not images of nature, but of the human manipulation of nature” [Meeker 1974: 85]. The pastoral landscape might be more “natural” than an urban one, providing more contact with plants, animals, and soil, and less with buildings, machines, and concrete. But it isn’t wild. There may be wildness woven through it, in woodlots, hedgerows, and tracts of land too rough to cultivate, but its principal features are not wild. Whatever lessons wildness has to teach will not be found among cows and corn fields. If an absence of wildness is a problem, which I believe it is, then the inhabitants of a pastoral landscape, no less than city dwellers, may have to go elsewhere to find it.
Let me make it clear that I don’t dislike gardens. I love gardens, and I love little villages and pastoral landscapes. But they’re not a substitute for wildness. I want us to keep the wild wild, and I want more of it. It’s not wildness, but civilization, that should be more garden-like.
Considering that most people don’t want to live in the wilderness—that they want the benefits and comforts of civilization—it’s perhaps logical that the middle landscape of pastoralism would seem like an ideal. But Henry Thoreau thought differently. As Roderick Nash points out, “[M]ost Americans had revered the rural, agrarian condition as a release both from wilderness and from high civilization. They stood, so to speak, with both feet in the center of the spectrum of environments. Thoreau, on the other hand, arrived at the middle by straddling. He rejoiced in the extremes and, by keeping a foot in each, believed he could extract the best of both worlds” [Nash 2001: 94]. Instead of a pervasive middle ground between civilized and wild, why not the alternative that Nash calls “Island Civilization” [381]: a distinct contrast between truly civilized places where most people live and truly wild ones that they visit periodically?
The attitudes of farmers and ranchers about wildness are not well known among the people who think and write about the topic, nor are the corresponding attitudes of loggers, miners, and fishing people. Some of them undoubtedly see wildness as an enemy to be beaten back and conquered, but others are likely to harbor a love of wildness. Indeed, such love might be a principal reason why they chose the work they did instead of taking a job in town. If their work destroys the wildness they love, they may be saddened by that or see it as an unfortunate but worthwhile price to pay. I have a suspicion that much of the romance of the frontier is based on the mix of wildness and civilization that surrounded the pioneers. For some of them, I suppose, their satisfaction derived primarily from the sense of replacing savage wilderness with civilization. But I can’t help but think that the nearby presence of wildness was at least as important to many of those people as the inroads of civilization they were making.
Consider the example of Daniel Boone moving further west whenever neighbors got too close. I can’t believe that the idea of bringing lace curtains, fancy china, churches, and opera houses to another tract of wild country was a primary motivation for people like Boone. There was something in the wildness itself. And they moved on because it was disappearing, not because they wanted to build more churches and opera houses. Wallace Stegner: “The vein of melancholy in the North American mind may be owing to many causes, but is surely not weakened by the perception that the fulfillment of the American Dream means inevitably the death of the noble savagery and freedom of the wild. Anyone who has lived on a frontier knows the inescapable ambivalence of the old-fashioned American conscience, for he has first renewed himself in Eden and then set about converting it into the lamentable modern world” [Stegner 1992: 282].
The frontier was a will-o’-the-wisp advancing across the country (not necessarily in a straight line, as Dayton Duncan [1993] reminds us, but sometimes leapfrogging and then filling in). In any given place, it was evanescent, smothered by too much civilization almost as soon as the wildness was gone. Thomas Cole’s painting, “View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow),” captures it. On one side of the picture is “the primitive, storm-ravaged wilderness (the past)”; on the other, “neatly cleared fields, overhung with skies of celestial-blue clarity (the future)” [Schama 1996: 365]. “[T]he balance between settlement and pastoral innocence, between cultivation and wilderness, has been magically frozen at a moment of perfect equilibrium,” writes Simon Schama about the painting; “Cole deliberately stepped back from the inexorable march of time … to pause at an impossibly perfect place and moment” [367]. In a similar way, and much longer ago, as Joseph Meeker points out, pastoral poetry in Greek and Roman civilization “expresse[d] a longing for [an] early stage of civilization when agriculture had given people leisure and sufficiency, but before the development of elaborate social and political structures” [Meeker 1974: 86].
A desire to preserve something like that frontier condition probably underlies some of the opposition of local residents to proposals for parks or wilderness areas in their neighborhoods. In the common pattern, the park or wilderness proposals are supported by outsiders from the cities. In many cases, the opposition of local residents is rooted in a desire to keep the opportunity open for more lucrative developments. But often the locals simply say they want things left as they are. They don’t want restrictions on hunting, ATV use, and other activities that they presently enjoy and fear will be outlawed in the proposed park or wilderness area. In many cases, the outsiders may see more clearly than the locals that “the way things are” is a frontier condition that won’t last, whether the park or wilderness area is created or not. Even if major developments aren’t in the works, the purchase of local property by outsiders for investment or second homes might be likely. When that happens, local people’s access to the land for hunting and other purposes is likely to be closed off anyway.
The widespread dream of a home in the country is another manifestation of the frontier pattern. The quest is for the same blend of wildness and civilization, and it’s just as evanescent as the frontier or the local residents’ enjoyment of “the way things are.” I have no doubt that a few people pull off the home in the country successfully, but for each success there are many others who discover that the idyll lasts for a few years and then more people with the same dream start building houses nearby. The idyll becomes a suburb, and the modern-day Daniel Boones think about moving still further from town. Actually, I think the evanescence is even quicker than that, because people seeking wildness may find that even a single house destroys it. I don’t know of anything that spoils wildness like houses do, with their lawns, cars, mailboxes, utility lines, bird feeders, TVs, gardens, security lights, and fences. Mines, roads, and clearcuts destroy wildness, of course, but I can excuse them (some of them, anyway) on the grounds that they’re necessary for work that can be done only in certain places. I can likewise excuse the homes of miners, loggers, farmers, and other people who have a right to live near their workplaces. Resorts don’t bother me, either, if they facilitate access to wild places; nor do the homes of people who work at the resorts. But the homes of commuters, and even of retired people or people who work at home, drain away a sense of wildness like nothing else I know. Coming upon them in an otherwise (or formerly) wild place, I object to their aura of possessiveness—the message that this is private property and wanderers like me aren’t welcome. But even worse is the aura of domestication. The unmistakable message seems to be that, if people can live here so comfortably, the country isn’t wild all.
POSSESSING OR BEING POSSESSED BY
Confronted by wildness, some people want to possess it and some become possessed by it. Here’s one of my favorite illustrations of “being possessed by”:
Freeman Dyson made plans to test a nuclear rocket at the [Nevada] Test Site. The rocket, Orion, would have been a far more effective way of leaving earth than conventionally fueled rockets are, but it posed enormous dangers as well.... Dyson was a great proponent of manifest destiny who believed that restlessness is an inevitable and valuable aspect of the human character. At the time of this rocket project, he believed that since the most restless culture had wrapped itself all around the earth, it needed to continue onward, into outer space [Solnit 1999: 66-67].At one point, Dyson visited Jackass Flat, the site for the planned test, which was subsequently prohibited. Dyson:
Only once in my life have I experienced absolute silence. That was Jackass Flat under the midday sun. Jackass Flat was as silent as Antarctica. It is a soul-shattering silence. You hold your breath and hear absolutely nothing. No rustling of leaves in the wind, no rumbling of distant traffic, no chatter of birds or insects or children. You are alone with God in that silence. There in the white flat silence I began for the first time to feel a slight sense of shame for what we were proposing to do. Did we really intend to invade this silence with our trucks and bulldozers, and after a few years leave it a radioactive junkyard? The first shadow of a doubt about the rightness of Orion came into my mind with that silence [67].Ironically, an equally famous physicist provides a contrary example. In 1943, the Los Alamos mesa was selected as the laboratory where the first atomic bomb was developed “because Robert J. Oppenheimer ... had hiked across the mesa in his teens and remembered how beautiful it was” [Shoumatoff 1997: 459].
Wendell Berry provides another interesting account of becoming possessed by a landscape. Writing of his first visit to Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, he says: “I thought of it then as a strange place, a place strange to me. The presumptuousness of that, it now occurs to me, is probably a key to the destructiveness that has characterized the whole history of the white man’s relation to the American wilderness” [Berry 1988: 226]. In time, Berry says, he came to understand that it was not the land but he himself that was strange. “If I had continued to look upon the place as strange,” he realizes, “I would clearly have had only two choices: stay out of it altogether, or change it, destroy it as I found it and make it into something else. But once I learned to look upon myself as a stranger there, it became possible for me to return again and again without preaching to the natives, or making treaties with them, or swindling them out of their property, or cutting down any timber, or buying a lot on which to build a drive-in restaurant. It became possible for me to leave the place as it is, to want it to be as it is, to be quiet in it, to learn about it and from it” [227].
I don’t know where the love of wildness comes from that makes some people become possessed by it while others want to possess it. Obviously, some people get such a love from their parents. But others grow up in families with no particular interest in nature. How does it happen that some of those people become exposed to nature, and, of those who do, some come to love it? I can’t even say as much as I’d like about my own experience. I wish I had a journal or diary from earlier days to tell of my experiences and feelings. My father was a steelworker by the time I was born, but he had a farmer’s understanding of wildness—he was also a sometime hunter—and he had a farmer’s attitude toward land. “There sure is a lot of useless country” was his reaction to many of the landscapes that grabbed my attention. But he never actively discouraged my incipient interests in wild places, and my mother—as well as a great-aunt and my grandfather—took me for walks in the woods. They showed me an appreciation of nature even though none of them was very knowledgeable about it. Growing up in northwest Indiana (two miles south of the southern tip of Lake Michigan), I found nothing that I enjoyed as much as walking in the woods, through the sand hills, and beside Salt Creek. But I was twenty-seven years old before I had any serious role models such as hikers, mountain climbers, or botanists for what have become the most important aspects of my life. (Like the character in the John Denver song, I was born in the summer of my twenty-seventh year.) As for Laurie, her parents had virtually no interest in nature. She attributes her love for it to summer camp, something that I suspect significant numbers of people can do.
Of course, it takes more than mere exposure to wildness to instill a love for it. Laurie acquired the love as well as the exposure, but she has a cousin whom I love and respect, but who has zero interest in wildness. “It has bugs,” she said. When she once told us that she also went to summer camp, Laurie was surprised and asked if she enjoyed it. “No, I hated it,” said her cousin.
I have no expectation of making Laurie's cousin a convert, and no intention to try, but I do agree with Joseph Sax’s claim that—in spite of all the attention environmentalists devote to the activities that should or should not be allowed in wilderness areas—the real issue is not activities, but attitudes. “The preservationist,” writes Sax, “is not an elitist who wants to exclude others, notwithstanding popular opinion to the contrary; he is a moralist who wants to convert them” [Sax 1980: 14]. I hate dirt bikes and ATVs not for themselves or their owners but for the attitude toward the land that their use implies.
The National Park Service, according to Richard West Sellars, hopes to “inspire the public to a deeper understanding and appreciation of the complexities of natural history” [Sellars 1997: 287], and Sellars appears to be hopeful. He writes that the Park Service’s efforts have “no doubt moved the public toward a greater comprehension of environmental matters…. For many visitors drawn to the national parks partly by their very accessibility and convenience, contemplation of the natural beauty displayed and interpreted in the parks surely has nurtured a deeper realization of the complexities of nature…. It may be that few people develop a concern for ecology without having first acquired a heightened sense of the beauty in nature, as is fostered in the national parks” [288]. As much as I’d like to believe those statements, I’m afraid they contain a lot of wishful thinking—likely shared by the Park Service, but without much research to support it. (If the research exists, Sellars doesn’t cover it.) I don’t think we know beans about how to encourage the understanding and appreciation of nature. The national parks and other natural areas certainly provide an opportunity for people to become possessed by wildness. I have no doubt about that. But why or how it happens or what, for example, park rangers can do to facilitate it … who knows?
At some level, I’m not even sure how important the attitudes of ordinary people are. I recall reading A Sand County Almanac some years ago and feeling frustrated because, as persuasive as Leopold’s advocacy of a land ethic seemed to be, I couldn’t see that there was much that I or most people could do. Most of us owned too little land and had too little knowledge to manage it properly even if we did own it. (We were not Aldo Leopold.) Decision makers in corporations and government have vastly greater opportunities than the rest of do to affect the quality of life on earth. I don’t mean to let the rest of us off the hook. If we don’t know enough, we could learn. If we don’t have much impact, we could do the right thing anyway. But here’s a case in point: Our camper-van gives us about twelve miles per gallon of gas. We could do something about problems of resource depletion and air pollution if we drove a vehicle that was more fuel-efficient. But such a change would have a damn small effect on the environment unless a whole lot of other people made the same decision. By contrast, if the Ford Motor Company quit selling vehicles that were not a lot more fuel-efficient, it would make much bigger difference.
I can imagine than Ford might be reluctant to quit selling twelve-miles-per-gallon vans because they fear that Chevrolet, GMC, and Dodge would continue selling them and thereby cut into Ford’s profits. In which case Ford could appeal to the government to enact legislation prohibiting the sale of fuel-inefficient vehicles. Better yet, they could build a coalition of auto companies and interest groups to appeal to government for such legislation. Such an option is one of the things we lose in the Republican Empire’s conservative rubbish about freedom and limited government. Government can be a mechanism for requiring ourselves to do things that we know we should do. It’s not at all unreasonable or irrational for me to drive a vehicle that gets twelve miles to a gallon and to simultaneously favor laws that would make it illegal to do so. If it was illegal, I would own a more efficient vehicle, plus I would have the knowledge that everyone else would, too, making it thinkable that we might actually have a meaningful impact on resource depletion and air pollution. That would be a lot more rational than individually doing the right thing but doubting that it will make much of a difference because there may be too few of us who do it.
Another argument against the sort of laws I am talking about is that they will result in higher prices. “It will be more costly to build more efficient vehicles,” the auto industry will say. To which I will reply, “So?” Public opinion polls consistently indicate that majorities of citizens say they’re willing to pay higher taxes or higher prices in return for environmental improvement. In actuality, of course, I, and those other citizens as well, would like to have more confidence than we usually do that industry will be honest about its costs. As it is—and I’m not thinking exclusively about the auto industry here—they give us too many reasons to be suspicious that their cost increases are padded and that they’ll use new laws or requirements as an excuse to increase profits by jacking up prices more than necessary. But, if we could be confident that the higher prices were justified, I think most of us would be willing to pay them.
I’ve belabored this auto industry example to make a larger point. The choices that will make the most difference in environmental quality are not ones that are made by individual citizens or consumers. They’re ones that corporations and government agencies make. If there are lessons to be learned from wildness and if those lessons have implications for environmental quality, then it’s not only ordinary individuals but also corporate and governmental decision makers who need to become possessed by wildness. When we “moralists” who hope to “convert” say that attitudes need to change, this is what we mean: (1) decision-makers in industry, finance, and government need to be willing to make changes that put an end to environmental damage; (2) the public needs to be willing to pay whatever additional costs are necessary; and (3) there needs to be an understanding between the two such that (a) the public can trust the decision makers that the added costs really are necessary and (b) the decision makers can believe that the public is in fact willing to pay the added costs. I grow tired of environmental writers who insist that it’s “we”—“all of us”—who are the problem. Just because we buy vehicles that get twelve miles to a gallon does not mean that we condone their manufacture or sale. Just because we live in wooden houses does not mean that we approve the quantity of timber that’s harvested or the way it’s done. Somebody else makes the decisions and we simply react to them. Furthermore, the same somebodies have the ability to prevent government from acting in our interests if it happens to be contrary to theirs. Yes, we are all implicated in the problems confronting our environment, but our culpabilities are not equal.
BLAMING JOHN MUIR
Among a number of writers in recent decades, there’s been a curious reversal in attitudes about wilderness preservation. “The time has come to rethink wilderness,” wrote William Cronon [1996: 69], kicking off a bewildering attack on environmentalists in which ninety percent of American history is forgotten. The attack, in which additional writers such as Kenneth Olwig and William Ashworth have also participated, was initiated by research that clarified the extent to which Indians had altered the American landscape before the arrival of Europeans. Foremost among that research was Cronon’s own Changes in the Land [1983]. Considering how much the Indians had set fires, cleared land for farming, constructed villages, and maintained networks of roads and trails, it was no longer possible to see America at the time of European contact as the untouched, untrodden Eden it had been made out to be. Cronon had been a principal teacher of that lesson, and he became a leading critic of environmentalists. In a nutshell, the argument that Cronon and others have advanced goes like this: (1) untouched nature was a myth from the start; (2) humanity needs to learn how to coexist with nature; (3) therefore, it's a mistake to create wilderness areas that exclude human activity. What’s so utterly bizarre about this argument is that it blames environmentalists—wilderness advocates in particular—for separating the human from the natural, as if the whole history of European-American plundering of American nature had never occurred. As if environmentalists fought to have wild places set aside and protected for no apparent reason. The time has come to rethink civilization. But that’s not what Cronon wrote.
In an essay titled “The Trouble with Wilderness, Or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Cronon points out that wilderness used to be a place that was feared and avoided and that gained value “solely from the possibility that it might be ‘reclaimed’ and turned toward human ends” [Cronon 1996: 71]. It was only with the passing of the frontier that “the movement to set aside national parks and wilderness areas began to gain real momentum” [76-77]. In other words, Cronon relates a familiar story but somehow seems surprised by it, as if there was something weird about environmentalists raising an objection after seeing a civilization that they considered a mixed blessing at best spread from coast to coast. Cronon notes that wilderness was “the landscape of choice” for urban people, for whom wild land was “a place of recreation” rather than “a site for productive labor [or] a permanent home” [78]. “Country people,” by contrast, “generally know … too much about working the land to regard unworked land as [an] ideal” [79]. Again, none of that should be surprising. The more completely civilization alienates people from nature, the more desperately they crave an untrodden wilderness for an antidote. Country people simply are not as alienated as urban people.
Cronon points out that the first national parks were set aside shortly after the last of the Indian wars. “The myth of the wilderness as ‘virgin,’ uninhabited land had always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once called that land home. Now they were forced to move elsewhere, with the result that tourists could safely enjoy the illusion that they were seeing their nation in its pristine, original state.... The removal of Indians to create an ‘uninhabited wilderness’—uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place—reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is” [79]. What Cronon fails to mention is that the desire for natural landscapes “uninhabited as never before” might have been a response to the fact many of those landscapes were being obliterated as never before. Rebecca Solnit, who shares Cronon’s reservations about separating the natural and the human, includes in her account of Yosemite the fact that “hydraulic mining operations in Malakoff Diggings, northward, in Nevada County” were extremely destructive and were a graphic part of the background to Yosemite Park’s creation [Solnit 1999: 245]. “In this light,” Solnit writes, “Yosemite becomes not merely a general respite from the cares of the world, but a specific refuge from the frenzied earth-moving of mining” [246]. As for the treatment of Indians, their forcible removal from areas such as Yosemite was clearly inexcusable. The best that can be said about it is that, when the assault on nature becomes sufficiently objectionable, drastic remedies might seem called for. But in no event does it make sense to single out environmentalists for reprehensible treatment of Indians. “Compared to whom?” I’m tempted to ask.
What’s most bizarre of all about Cronon’s work is the fact that he writes one of the most beautiful arguments I’ve ever seen for the preservation of wildness—and then draws conclusions that go 180 degrees in a different direction. Here’s the core of Cronon’s argument:
The autonomy of nonhuman nature seems to me an indispensable corrective to human arrogance…. In reminding us of the world we did not make, wilderness can teach profound feelings of humility and respect ... helping us set responsible limits to human mastery—which without such limits too easily becomes human hubris. Wilderness is the place where, symbolically at least, we try to withhold our power to dominate [Cronon 1996: 87].
In the broadest sense, wilderness teaches us to ask whether the Other must always bend to our will, and, if not, under what circumstances it should be allowed to flourish without our intervention. This is surely a question worth asking about everything we do, and not just about the natural world [88].
Calling a place home inevitably means that we will use the nature we find in it, for there can be no escape from manipulating and working and even killing some parts of nature to make our home. But if we acknowledge the autonomy and otherness of the things and creatures around us—an autonomy our culture has taught us to label with the word “wild”—then we will at least think carefully about the uses to which we will put them, and even ask if we should use them at all [89].I can hardly imagine a better argument for preserving wildness. And I understand that what Cronon wants is wildness throughout our lives and that the idea he’s objecting to is the idea of wilderness as something separate and distant. One would think, however, that his argument would lead to all sorts of recommendations for integrating wildness into people’s immediate, everyday surroundings. What could cities do, for example? What could industry do? What could housing developments do? What would our civilization look like if nature were part of it instead of something separate and foreign? But, no, what Cronon keeps harping on is environmentalists’ obsession with distant and pristine wilderness, an obsession that in truth characterizes only a minority of environmentalists. Most environmentalists have a broader range of concerns than that (and would hardly object to wildness closer to home even if it wasn’t their primary interest). “Wilderness gets us into trouble,” Cronon says, “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” [88]. The people most likely to want to limit wildness to “remote corners” and “pristine landscapes” are industrialists, capitalists, and real estate developers. In fact, that’s exactly the recommendation of conservative writer Peter Huber [1999]: lots of wild land set aside and rigorously protected in exchange for laissez-faire everywhere else. The only environmentalists I can think of that fit Cronon’s description are some of the advocates of deep ecology.
An essay by Kenneth Olwig [1996] on the protection of nature in national parks is just as odd as Cronon’s. At the outset, Olwig says: “This essay attempts to reinvent, or at least recover, an essentially premodern concept of nature in which people and their values do not appear to be excluded from nature.... This usage of ‘nature’ emphasizes sustainable reciprocity rather than dominion and makes of nature not a spectacle but something to be dwelled within” [380]. At the end of the essay, Olwig writes: “It is important to protect national parks and the extraordinary places where we can go, like pilgrims, to recreate physically, while regenerating our community and environmental values. We must not, however, lose the connection between the ‘nature’ of these uncommon places and the ‘nature’ of the ordinary worlds where we spend our daily lives” [408]. Each of those statements seems perfectly reasonable. Why, then, is the entire middle of the essay an attack on the parks instead of on our daily lives?
Olwig praises the “garden” rather than the “wild wasteland” as a model for parks and for human relationships with nature [384]. “The garden idea is potent because it has long been a vital symbol in Western culture of a moral society living in ‘natural’ social and environmental harmony” [384]. He says nothing about Western culture’s overwhelming preponderance of scarcely garden-like relationships with nature. Olwig points out that England’s national parks are “working agrarian landscapes” rather than “pastoral paradises preserved from evidence of human labor” [396]. He also mentions that England and other European countries tolerate more regulation of private land use and economic activity that the U.S. does, but fails to acknowledge that the two might go together—that the more rapacious the treatment of the broader environment, the more desperately people will want pristineness in the wild places that are protected.
Of Yosemite, Olwig writes that “Muir’s temple was bloodied from the start by the violent eviction of the native Indians..... Questions are raised, too, by the odd alliance between wilderness preservers and industrial interests, particularly the railroads, which were not otherwise noted for their environmental concern.... Finally, there is the troubling support by the wilderness preservationists for militarizing the park” [401]. None of that is fair. Indian removal was done far more often to open up land for farming or mining than for parks. It was a detestable policy, but hardly one for which to single out Muir for criticism. The railroads and the army assisted in the creation and protection of the park, and Muir might have welcomed their assistance, but it was not because of him that they came. Olwig also remarks that Henry Thoreau was not as aggressive or passionate as Muir in his advocacy of wildness [402]. That should not be surprising, since the commercial and industrial assault on the environment was more advanced in Muir’s day than it was in Thoreau’s. Olwig has the same perverse tendency as Cronon to misplace the blame. If environmentalists dreamed of parks without human activity, it was not an original impulse, but a response to a destructive economy that had already driven a wedge between the human and the natural, making the natural the enemy. It seems to me that what Cronon and Olwig are upset about is a result of the unrestrained commercial and industrial exploitation of the American environment, and they blame John Muir for it!
William Ashworth [1999] in The Left Hand of Eden maintains that wilderness is an artificial condition—“there is nothing whatsoever unnatural about wanting to get in out of the rain” [101]—but he neglects to mention that our civilization’s destruction of nature is equally artificial. He makes the worthwhile point that “using nature to produce things you need” is not the problem; the problem is “using nature to produce things you don’t need” [102]. But, as Ashworth sees it, we are not likely to improve our ways of using nature if we keep thinking of the natural as something separate from the human. Separation from nature is a hazardous attitude, Ashworth claims, but, like Cronon and Olwig, he blames environmentalists for it.
Ashworth relates a story about a large area in his home state of Oregon that had been roadless forest in 1965 and just five years later was carved up by hundreds of logging roads [163]. Environmentalists had won passage of the Wilderness Act in 1965, and there was a clause in it requiring all roadless blocks of federal land of 5,000 acres or more in size to be considered for wilderness status. What the timber industry had done in just five years time was to ensure that no such blocks of roadless land were left. “We had passed the Wilderness Act,” writes Ashworth, “and protected our little Edens and locked the bastards out. And the bastards, being human, had responded in kind” [164]. What then becomes odd in Ashworth’s telling of this story is that, although himself an environmentalist, he blames the environmentalists for the outcome: “We have locked development out of the wilderness. But by doing so, we have also unavoidably locked the wilderness out of development” [104]. I know I’m biased, but I cannot see that the environmentalists were as intentionally evil as the timber industry’s response.
Nevertheless, Ashworth’s story makes a worthwhile point and a good argument for collaborative problem solving. He offers a view of how land outside of wilderness areas should be treated: “Over the vast bulk of the land we should simply move lightly, taking what we need, leaving the web intact. Long harvest rotations should be the rule, and culling rather than clearcuts. Roads should be thought of, for the most part, as temporary structures, to be removed after use along with the machinery that uses them. Where reproduction cannot be reasonably guaranteed, we should not log at all” [176]. An important point that Ashworth wishes to make is that environmentalists should have a voice in those decisions, but they’re not likely to do so as long as they continue to antagonize the timber industry. On that point, I agree with Ashworth. Too much gets lost when every issue is polarized. But collaborative problem solving works only when both sides are committed to it and does not work when one side is powerful enough to get what it wants without collaborating. Sometimes, environmentalists have to beat down the door before industry is willing to collaborate.
Read carefully, the gist of what writers such as Cronon, Olwig, and Ashworth are saying is that (1) we should have more wildness in everyday life and (2) we should have less (or perhaps no) wilderness with rigorous limits on what humans are permitted to do in it. The first of those recommendations implies at least as much criticism of corporations as it does of environmentalists. The ostensible reason for the second recommendation is that rigidly separating the human and the natural in wilderness areas sets a bad example for the rest of the landscape. Even if that were true, however, blaming environmentalists for creating the separation is such an odd thing to do that I find it impossible to explain. And, actually, I don’t even think it’s true. If wildness has something valuable to teach us (and Cronon et al. seem to agree that it does), then I would expect pristine wildness to speak more eloquently than a half-baked one with human beings fiddling around in it in more than minimal ways. Before I would give up rigidly protected parks and wilderness areas, I would have to see an awful lot of evidence that human beings are capable of using the rest of nature without wrecking it. The intolerability of a civilization that destroys nature has always been the main motivation for creating parks and wilderness areas. I’m nowhere near ready to give them up. I think our rule of thumb should be that we won’t consider giving them up until our civilization is so integrated with nature that the desire to head for the woods never comes to mind.
WILDNESS IN THE REST OF THE WORLD
Above us, at the very end of the pine trail, was a small extended-family settlement of three houses, with a donkey and a goat pegged in a swept yard. My friend … nodded at the several wattle-and-daub huts with tin roofs across the lush ravine from us. “These people live a good life up here, quiet, growing their food,” he mused. The tiny grandmother raised her hand in greeting from their door. Two young women looked up from a bench in the shade where they sat embroidering flowers on white dresses. A brilliant yellow rectangle of corn was raked out to dry in the sun next to them. “And besides,” he continued, “up here they get great television.”Research like Cronon’s has also been influential in the international arena, where parks and preserves on the U.S. model, in which people are only visitors, are often said to be a failure. Many of the ones regarded as successful, in Africa and elsewhere, have imposed great hardships on indigenous people by forcing them to move from their home territories or prohibiting access to their hunting and gathering grounds. Others have failed because of poaching, attributable at least in part to resentment and hatred of the parks by local people. Poaching can be prevented only by vigorous monitoring and enforcement, which is seldom provided—and, if it is provided, it imposes still more hardships. In many cases, an even bigger threat than poaching is the outright raping of parks and preserves by logging and mining companies who move in with full knowledge and acquiescence by local government or military officials. One response to such problems—in line with the vision offered by Cronon—has been the creation of parks or preserves in which indigenous people are allowed to continue traditional activities. The effectiveness of such experiments remains a matter of debate.—Kathleen Harrison, traveling with a curandero in Oaxaca
[Harrison 2001: 132].
The World and the Wild, edited by David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus [2001], is a collection of essays offering a diversity of perspectives on this topic.
Although I’ve traveled throughout the United States and much of Canada and think I know something about wildness in those places, I can claim no special expertise about the rest of the world. But I know a fallacious argument when I see one.
I don’t question the sustainability of indigenous people’s relationships with their surroundings and have no argument with the sensibility of allowing traditional sustainable activities to take place in protected natural areas. But let's think about this more carefully. When indigenous people live harmoniously on the land for a long time, it happens for some combination of three reasons. (1) Their numbers are limited. (2) Their technology doesn’t allow them to do much damage. (3) They have myths and taboos telling them that everything is sacred, that everything else is just as important as they are, and that nature provides for them. Hence, they take what they need, but are disinclined to do more than that. Significantly, each of these things changes when indigenous people come in contact with Western culture. (1) Their numbers don’t increase—in fact, they’re more likely to decrease—but the opening up of markets for trade increases the pressure they put on their resource base. (2) More powerful technology becomes available (the Inuit can hunt with snowmobiles). (3) Their myths and taboos, which worked well enough when they were hunting and gathering only for their own needs, become sorely tested when markets open up. No doubt, the latter happens partly because markets present too great a temptation, but it might happen for more complicated and respectable reasons as well. What I imagine is that, in the absence of markets, a comfortable balance between felt need on the one hand and myths and taboos on the other evolves over a long period of time, but that balance ceases to work when the market’s insatiable needs enter the picture.
The only thing we know for sure is that indigenous people have lived sustainably with nature for hundreds or thousands of years. But how many are still doing it, and how long will they continue? It’s an absolute certainty that things won’t stay the same as they’ve been. Consider some of the evidence reported in The World and the Wild:
- Indigenous people defend the killing of elephants “because it was for the ivory the abelungu (white people) wanted” [Player 2001: 104].
- They hunt and gather for markets as well as their own use [Bevis 2001:119].
- They trade, among other things, for radios, tape players, and batteries [119].
- They watch TV [epigraph at the beginning of this section].
- They live beside newly built roads and sell sodas and medicinal plants to travelers [Harrison 2001: 138].
- Their curanderos give up privacy, said to be “essential for doing medicine,” in favor of a house by the road [137].
- Indigenous people in Oaxaca grow and sell ginger imported from India [138].
Moreover, even in the absence of contact, a culture’s relationships with nature might become unsustainable. After all, we were once sustainable—or at least our long-ago ancestors were. Our alienation from nature presumably began with agriculture, and most of the indigenous cultures mentioned in The World and the Wild are already agriculturalists. Moreover, it makes no difference whether indigenous cultures remain sustainable or not if their habitats are destroyed by logging and mining companies or other outside forces. The best that can be said is that the people in question thought they wanted the changes, and it’s not for Westerners to come in and say otherwise.
The presumption here is that wildness is a Western invention that has no meaning in the rest of the world. But I don’t believe that.
- For their vision quests, young Native Americans “traveled to some remote area where it was known that many powers dwelled—often a mountaintop, or the shore of a remote lake, sometimes in the depths of a deep forest” [Highwater 1981: 84].
- “In the Western Ghats of India … the religious practice of setting aside sacred groves and ponds from which hunting is banned has resulted in the survival of a few patches of primary rain forest in an otherwise ecologically devastated region” [Sarkar 2001: 50]. In Papua New Guinea: “In sacred places we worshipped the spirits—in special forests, at special trees, on special lakes…. No one, except our priests who had special knowledge of the spirits, was allowed to enter the sacred sites…. There was complete harmony with nature in those sacred areas” [Arabagali 2001: 214].
- The dwellings of shamans “are commonly at the spatial periphery of the community or, more often, out beyond the edges of the village—amid the rice fields, or in a forest, or a wild cluster of boulders” [Abram 1996: 6]. The role of the shaman is “mediating between the human community and the larger community of beings upon which the community depends for its nourishment and sustenance” [6].
- Jay Griffiths, traveling among hunter-gatherers in various parts of the world, asked them if they had words for “wilderness,” “desert,” or “wasteland,” and they often cited places where people didn’t go. The Inuit have a word, inuillaq, which means “people-less places,” and silainaq is “a place where no one lives but people just pass through” [Griffiths 2006: 115]. One Inuit woman said a forest is a wilderness because you could get lost there [116]. An Aboriginal woman in Australia said her language had words for “the-place-where-nobody-has-walked” or “where-there’s-no-water” [210]. “Linguist Myfany Turpin suggests that in the Kaytetye language there are words for country that is ‘desert,’ with no water courses, so people should visit there only with great caution, and the Kaytetye word alpawe is ‘a country that has little to offer.’ … Meanwhile, another term for desert, akngenpe, means that people have not hunted there recently, and it is a positive reason to go there” [211].
In that light, it seems to me that indigenous people have made their livings in a more sustainable way and that their use of wild places has something to do with that sustainability. I don’t pretend to know how the connection works. In ways that I can only dimly visualize, indigenous people’s shamans, vision questers, sacred groves, prayers, rituals, and the like—along with their limited numbers and technology—somehow help to keep their use of nature sustainable. We on the other hand make our livings in far less sustainable ways, partly because of our greater numbers and more powerful technology, but perhaps also because our use of wild places has a far more tenuous connection with the way we make a living.
Western culture’s problem isn’t (as Cronon and others have argued) that we’ve made an artificial separation between wild places and the rest of our lives. Rather, the problem is that the rest of our lives is too little influenced by what we experience in our wild places. Indigenous people—in any case, those who succeed over the long term—keep that connection tighter, and it behooves us to find ways to tighten it up in our case. In that regard, I believe the biggest obstacle is the fact that we’ve allowed our making a living to become so stressful that we overload wildness with too much need for relief—or release—and give it too little opportunity to provide direction, inspiration, or instruction.
The corresponding problem for indigenous people has less to do with their use of wild places than with the danger that their wild places will disappear. Unless active steps are taken to protect them, they can be destroyed by indigenous cultures themselves as they continue to change—and, if they don’t destroy them, outside forces surely will. Yes, humans and nature have coexisted sustainably for thousands of years, but that’s no reason to conclude that the setting aside of separate wild places isn’t needed now. Obviously, the nature of the wild places, the manner of their use, and the results of their use will vary from culture to culture (which is why it’s not a good idea to replicate Yellowstone National Parks all around the world). Each culture has to choose its own way of protecting the wild places it needs. The commonality is the need itself.
WHAT PEOPLE BRING HOME FROM WILDNESS
I keep returning to the question of what exactly it is that we and our culture gain from wildness. “Why can’t you just enjoy it?” Laurie wants to know. “Why do you have to justify it?” I can’t give a good answer to that question. All I know that the issue continues to haunt me. I want to believe that my obsession with wild places satisfies something besides selfishness. It feels like it does, but I find it difficult to be specific. I’ve reflected on my own rewards from wildness and read what other people have written on the topic. Here’s what I’ve come up with:
- Pleasure and Enjoyment.
- Escape.
- Contact with Something Special.
- God.
- Clarification of Values.
- Humility.
In addition, for at least some people, wildness teaches something a bit more complex than humility alone. I believe this is an important point, because it’s possible for humility to be experienced as humiliation. Robert Macfarlane asserts that mountains not only “compress” the mind and make it aware of its “smallness,” but also “stretch out the individual mind” and make it “aware of its own immeasurable acreage and reach” [Macfarlane 2003: 275]. Even more helpful are Alain de Botton’s remarks about the influence of dramatic rock formations. “There are concerns that seem indecent when one is in the company of a cliff,” de Botton writes, “and others to which cliffs naturally lend their assistance, their majesty encouraging the steady and high-minded in ourselves, their size teaching us to respect with good grace and an awed humility all that surpasses us” [de Botton 2002: 148]. As de Botton observes, such emotions have analogies in relationships with other humans, whereby we feel acceptably humble in the presence of certain people, because those people, like a wild landscape, seem noble rather than petty or ordinary. “This is the lesson written into the stones of the desert and the ice fields of the poles,” writes de Botton. “So grandly is it written there that we may come away from such places not crushed but inspired by what lies beyond us, privileged to be subject to such majestic necessities” [167].
- Environmental Concern.
- Urge to Simplify.
HUCKLEBERRIES
Somewhere in my struggle to understand the importance of wildness, I picked up the idea that there might be something genetic about it. At first, it was a thought that I didn’t take seriously. In one of Scott Russell Sanders’s books, he quotes a man who complains about people, like me, who get up early in the morning. “They’re atavists, throwbacks, hairy-knuckle types,” the man says. “Deep down in their blood they’re still afraid of saber-toothed tigers. We late risers are a more modern branch of the human tree” [Sanders 1991: 169]. I read that and then read an essay by Stephen Trimble in which he says, “Recent research has surprised us with how emphatically our behavior and personalities are hard-wired by genetics.… The bent of personality that makes a girl or boy receptive to natural history may well be something we cannot instill” [Nabhan and Trimble 1994: 22]. Laurie and I began to call ourselves hairy-knuckled throwbacks and to joke that wildness would be less important to use if we were more highly evolved.
Aside from joking about it, my initial reaction to the idea that people’s behavior might still be influenced by their hunting and gathering ancestry was disbelief. It simply didn’t seem plausible that anything so ancient could still have an effect. But when I thought about the numbers, I realized that human beings lived for 200,000 years interwoven with the natural world and have spent only 12,000 years increasingly divorced from it. In such terms, it seemed more plausible that human evolution has been outpaced by our present way of life. Eons of hunting and gathering, of believing that nature was sacred, that everything was sacred, that nature would provide for us as long we were patient and knew where to look—all those eons of adapting to nature might very well be in our genes. Our culture works very hard to deny it, of course, continually pushing people away from nature. Many men seem uncomfortable in the woods unless they’re hunting or fishing, and women are taught at any early age not to be tomboys. Parents, as I frequently observe in campgrounds, discourage their children from wandering into the woods to explore. (“Tommy! Come back here!”) And, as Gary Nabhan and Stephen Trimble [1994] point out, schools provide scarcely any field trips to wild places. Instead, they teach about nature through the classroom, laboratory, films, TV, and computer programs. The message is clear: Nature should be treated as a distant abstraction. Given enough years of such discouragement, perhaps humans will evolve into creatures that won’t need nature. It’s in that sense that people like Laurie and I are throwbacks. We wouldn’t need wildness so badly if we were not so genetically-challenged.
On the other hand, evolution takes a long time, and western society only thinks it’s civilized. In evolutionary terms, or even in terms of human history, our way of life has not even been tested. We think we’re successful and that earlier civilizations like the Anasazi or Hohokam failed, but those cultures lasted for 1,500 years before they declined. Furthermore, if we were really civilized, we wouldn’t burn holes in the ozone layer, alter the atmosphere with pollution, or settle arguments by dropping bombs on one another. When we do become civilized, if we ever do, we will have learned how to get along with one another in spite of our differences and how to become integrated (or reintegrated) with nature. Cultural evolution of that sort is a better bet than trying to hold out until biological evolution produces human beings who have no need for nature. It’s not those of us who get up early who are on the wrong track.
Somewhat more seriously, I entertained the idea that the enjoyment of wildness might be an end in itself. It might be what the rest of life is for. I thought of Henry Thoreau. “The cost of a thing,” he wrote, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run” [Thoreau 1995: 19]. Thoreau’s fundamental idea, of course, was that, if you keep your needs modest, you won’t need many “things,” and therefore won’t have to work very much. About six weeks a year, he said. But, if that’s the cost—the “life” that we’re giving up—what is life? What should we be doing when we’re not working? To judge from Thoreau’s example, we should wander over the countryside observing the workings of nature, and we should think about the lessons those observations might have for ourselves and for humanity. Above all, we should pick huckleberries. The best lives, in that light, are the ones with the fewest needs, the least work, and the most huckleberries. So perhaps this life that Laurie and I are enjoying—these huckleberries that we’re gathering—needs no justification. Maybe Laurie’s right: I should quit worrying about what our love of wildness is for. Maybe everything else is for it.
But, thinking further about Thoreau, I found myself depressed at the realization of how little influence he’s had. If you consider Thoreau’s ideals—what he liked and disliked in his day—and then think about the world that we know now, it’s pretty clear that civilization has not been influenced very much by Thoreau. Or by Muir, Leopold, Abbey, or any of my other primary heroes. Those are individuals who have simultaneously been lovers of wild country and critics of our culture. They’ve criticized not as outsiders who hate the culture, but as insiders who love it and who criticize it the way loving parents criticize a child when they believe the child is going wrong. By and large, Thoreau and his colleagues have not been successful, in the sense that the culture has not changed the way they wanted it to.
But then I began thinking about rivers and creeks—we were following the Missouri River to Montana at the time. If you watch a river or creek, you notice the way the current sometimes moves backwards, especially along the edges of the stream. The vast majority of the water flows downstream, but part of it circles around and curls backwards, flowing in the opposite direction from the main current. That’s Henry Thoreau, I thought. And John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, and other writers for whom wild country has been important. I once saw an excellent program on public television about the Mississippi River. It was narrated by Roy Blount and devoted a lot of attention to the river’s backwaters. “You can’t have a mainstream without the backwaters,” said one man on the program who lived along the river. “The backwaters nourish the mainstream.” Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, Abbey, and others like them are the backwaters. They’re countercurrents to the mainstream—the channelized mainstream. They haven’t changed the direction of the river, but they’ve slowed down the onrush of water. Like a river’s backwaters, they pause and linger and poke around, and they enrich the life of the river. They help to keep our culture a better (or less intolerable) one than it otherwise would be.
Not all of us who love wild country can be Thoreaus, Muirs, Leopolds, or Abbeys, of course—but some few will—and the rest of us might contribute smaller countercurrents in quieter ways. Laurie and I might be less wasteful consumers, for example, than we would if we hadn’t found the alternative rewards of wild country. Without its critics and countercurrents, our urban-industrial culture might be worse than it is. It might already have provoked violent revolution either domestically or world-wide, exhausted critical natural resources, made life impossible by poisoning the air and water, or robbed us of absolutely everything whose value can’t be measured in monetary terms. Here, then, is a powerful argument for wildness. Even if most people have no interest in it, it remains important for a minority of the population, and that minority includes the Thoreaus, Muirs, Leopolds, and Abbeys, and those people are important for the civilization as a whole. Thus, the entire civilization has a stake in wildness, even if only a minority utilize it, because a minority of that minority is vital to the welfare of all of us.
I’ve wondered in fact if wildness hasn’t always been important, in every civilization. Histories like Nash’s [2001] and Oelschlaeger’s [1991] give the impression that wildness through most of history has been a feared and detested condition, and that it’s only in recent times that it’s been seen in a positive light—only after its complete disappearance became a plausibility. But we know that wildness has had its importance in other historical periods. In 2600 BC, Gilgamesh, venturing into the savage and dangerous forest, was “revitalized by danger, and found the undiscovered in himself” [Mitchell 2000: 15]. The gods of the Greeks and Romans resided in wild places. The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years. Jesus went there for 40 days and nights. Saint Basil the Great lived in the mountains, and Saint Francis of Assisi loved nature and its creatures [Nash 2001: 18-19]. Native Americans and other indigenous people retreat to wild places for vision quests. Our nomadic hunting and gathering ancestors—presumably with no concept of wildness separate from “home” or “tame”—most likely experienced a distinction between country that they visited on a regular basis and other areas that were less familiar. And I suspect that the less familiar country had some kind of importance to them for which they ventured into it from time to time. Undeniably, in most accounts before the 19th century, wild places were thought of, spoken of, and written of in overwhelmingly negative terms—as difficult and dangerous places which humans avoided as much as possible. But some people—some few people—found something of value in them. Gilgamesh did. Jesus did. Saint Basil did. Native American vision questers did. Granted, they didn’t come back speaking in rhapsodies about their wilderness experiences. They didn’t sound like John Muir. But here’s the point that I believe is important: Wildness historically was an ordeal and most people avoided it, but a minority went there anyway and found something that they valued in spite of the ordeal. And that’s still the case! Most people still avoid wild places, and such places are still an ordeal, and yet some of us go there anyway and find something of value. Granted, today’s wildness isn’t the ordeal it used to be, but it’s not like going there is easy. Otherwise, a lot more people would do it. If I was looking for comfort or luxury, I wouldn’t go for ten- or twenty-mile walks in the mountains.
And what is it that we find in wild places that makes the ordeal worthwhile? In an essay titled “Something Wild in the Blood,” Bob Shacochis tells about a couple who he says “were the first adults I befriended who had decided to step off the well-marked path and keep going” [Shacochis 2001: 295]. What Shacochis learned from those people—a revelation “as clear and guiding as the North Star”—was that “[w]hatever your resources, the world was yours to the exact degree to which you summoned the fortitude and faith to step away from convention and orthodoxy and invent your own life. Tay and Linda knew better than most that there’s never a good reason to make your world small” [299]. Clearly, the word “wild” in Shacochis’s title represents a broadening of the idea of wildness beyond nonhuman nature, suggesting a connection between the concept of wildness and the entirety of one’s approach to life. To be wild, in this sense, is to invent your own life, to be “self-willed,” to not allow your world to be made small.
That idea reminds me of the insistence by David Oates [2003] that wildness can be everywhere and in everything. It’s not just something that’s “out there”—a quality of other creatures that are free of human control. It’s a quality of us, too. In Oates’s framework, anything self-willed is wild, including sex, the subconscious mind, and even failure (which is certainly self-willed) [9-11]. But Oates’s main concern, as mine has generally been, is not so much with the size of one’s own world as with the foolishness of humans in general believing they can comprehend it all and control it all. At the same time, however, I do care very much about inventing my own life. I have a great interest in artistic and literary people, and a major reason is the fact that they tend to be individuals who refuse to let their worlds be small. I guess the truth is that personally I relate more to the issue of inventing my own life, but intellectually the other topic—how much we humans try to control or conquer our surroundings—seems more important. There are limits, however, on what the majority of us can do about those matters. Most decisions about controlling and conquering are made by corporate and governmental decision makers. The rest of us can vote with our ballots and our pocketbooks (although, even then, it’s hard to be well enough informed), and we can try (somehow) to make it clear that we’re willing to live with the consequences of reduced conquering and control. Clearly, those are important things to do. By comparison, the size of my own life feels like a selfish concern.
But is it? Whenever I try to invent my own life—to figure out what’s really important to me and then act on it—I find myself drawn to wildness. Why is that? It feels so irresistible and natural that I wonder again if there’s something genetic about it. Several writers think there is. David Oates: “The deep past laps like a silent ocean right up to the very edge of the present. All it takes is a walk to reawaken it” [23]. Robert Finch reports the experience of being “taken unawares by remarkable sunset displays” and wonders why we become so “transfixed” at such moments [Finch 1989: 193]. He speculates that it might be the triggering of certain neurological responses indicating “that our sense of wonder and beauty is locked at the very deepest levels” [194]. Bruce Berger thinks that wilderness travel, like dreaming, might be “so invigorating because [it] form[s] bridges to a past still within us, stranded in inaccessible parts of our being. That might explain why a journey to the wilds … seems for so many like a homecoming, a return to something lost” [Berger 1990: 72]. Paul Shepard believes that people’s love of wildness is “partly the expression of an impulse to hold on to an aspect of the environment that has always been real to humanity: the uninhabited place and the reality of wildness and danger” [Shepard 1972: 266]. Gary Ferguson suspects that “whatever it is that rises to consciousness … is something that’s been hidden in the shadows for much too long” [Ferguson 1993: 151].
Here’s what I come up with when I try to put all of this together. Wildness is anything that can’t be controlled. To be wild—and this is true for humans as well as nature—is to be free, uncontrolled, self-willed. But that’s only part of it. Real wildness—of the sort that shaped so much of human evolution—is not merely to be uncontrolled, but also to accept that everything else is also uncontrolled. In other words, the environment is something to be adjusted to rather than something to be controlled. That may be the most basic lesson that wildness teaches. That’s the condition of nature—of hawks and rabbits and trees. They’re self-willed, but they exist in a world where everything else is also self-willed. That was also true of our hunting and gathering ancestors. To recognize that condition deep down inside and to accept it is very different from our usual attitude toward the world around us. And it’s also different from our usual attitude toward other people. For the most part, we imagine no alternatives except taking charge or submitting. Winning or losing. We’re sometimes able to think of ourselves as implicated in webs or networks of relationships in which everything has mutual effects on everything else, and now and then we participate in dispute resolution processes in which conflicting parties talk to one another and listen to one another and work out a mutually agreeable solution. But we haven’t internalized those frameworks or processes. In the normal course of daily life, we don’t think or act that way. We’re much more likely to think in terms of winning or losing, controlling or submitting.
What wildness teaches is that nature is neither an Eden of harmony and pleasure nor an Inferno of predation and fear. It’s both at the same time. In nonhuman nature, we enjoy the Eden even in the presence of the Inferno. And human life is the same, giving us much to enjoy even in the presence of difficulty, disease, and death. Wildness teaches humility, as so many visitors to it seem inclined to report, but not a negative humility. Its lesson is to refrain from the impulse to conquer, but also to not let our worlds be made small. Nature is not simply a crop to be harvested nor is it a frightful thing to be avoided or beaten back. And that’s equally true at the level of the all-encompassing nature-that-sustains-us and in the little tracts of wildness that we visit. We are part of nature, as our hunting and gathering ancestors could not fail to understand. We don’t need to go back to their life of hunting and gathering, but we do need to get back to the type of understanding that they had. A life well-lived calls for neither control nor submission. The lesson of wildness is neither to conquer nor to submit, but to be alert and attentive. To accept, adapt, accommodate. To see relationships instead of dichotomies. To care about what we’re part of and not just about ourselves. Freedom is not the freedom to do whatever we want but the freedom to fit in ... to do what’s appropriate ... to do what works.
SOURCES
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4 comments:
Alan, I've read your essay on Wildness with what I can only call astonishment: I think it's the best thing on the subject I've ever seen. It's written with a clarity and intellectual honesty, intellectual (and moral) responsibility, which I find totally admirable. Your eschewal of inflated claims, your sense of what you can say and what the limits are only powerfully strengthen the legitimacy of what you do say--which is much indeed. And that fusion of your deep sense of and effective reference to the literature on the subject, and your own wide experience is extraordinary, lending to your essay an authenticity which exceeds that of anything else I've ever read.
What a wonderful essay! It is well thought out, but also very inspiring. Your love of the wild is clearly devoted but also balanced. I also admire your linking the love of the wild to the wild element that can be in each person's life. Thank you for a work of great inspiration.
Thanks, Jim Lutz. And thanks to Ed Twining for letting me reproduce portions of his e-mail among these comments.
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