| Wilderness in the 21st Century: A Problem or Opportunity? |
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John F. Organ Jan E. Dizard The Wilderness Act of 1964 (Act) is arguably one of the most far reaching and ambitious of our nation's environmental policies. Passage of the Act was the culmination of three decades of planning, lobbying, and publicizing the virtues of wilderness, largely led by The Wilderness Society. Leaders of this movement included Aldo Leopold, Robert Marshall, and Howard Zahniser. The Act famously sets forth a seemingly straightforward definition of wilderness: "A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." (P.L. 88-577, 16 U.S.C. 1131-1136, 78 Stat. 890) It was easy to think of wilderness in this way, not least because there remained, primarily in the west at the time, large tracts of federally owned land that had not been severely impacted by human activities. Moreover, the phrase, "visitors who do[es] not remain," seemed to neatly preclude any lasting disturbance to those areas designated as wilderness. The value of wilderness seemed intuitively obvious in the mid-1960s: we had been rapidly shifting from a nation of farms and small cities to a nation dominated by expanding metropolitan areas. In 1920, approximately 50% of the population was classified as "rural" and another 40% lived in towns and small cities; only 10% of the population lived in densely settled cities (U.S. Census Bureau 2008). Small farms were either being gobbled up by ever larger agribusinesses or by suburban developers. The interstate highway system gave Americans unprecedented access to our national parks and to remote areas of national forests and rangelands. It was clear that the time had come to set limits on the use of our remaining unprotected wild lands. The public appeared willing to accept the idea of declaring large swaths of unoccupied land wilderness and protecting them from intensive exploitation. This was due, in part at least, to a recognition that policies put in place in the early decades of the 20th century, covered by the rubric "conservation," had been successful. Government conservation agencies enjoyed public support in no small measure because they had been producing tangible results. Many imperiled fauna, both game and nongame species, had been brought back from the brink by laws sharply curtailing the taking for commercial purposes. Unregulated logging was, at least in principle, being regulated with an eye to sustainability. Farm productivity was rising rapidly, presenting us with the novel problem of surplus. All was not rosy, however. With the publication of Silent Spring (Carson 1962), a new source of alarm was sounded that, combined with growing concerns over nuclear armament and its implications, cast doubt over the integrity of science and scientists (Organ et al. 1998). In this context, entrusting large amounts of land to the federal government to handle with a "hands off" approach seemed a wise thing. With the dramatic effects of market hunting still fresh, and the successes of the government in restoring wildlife all too evident, confidence in government's capacity to protect the public interest was high, probably as high as it has been before or since. (Indeed, public opinion polls in recent years have repeatedly shown the public to be suspicious of, if not overtly hostile to, the government's ability to protect the public interest.) Saving wilderness seemed right, just as, less than ten years later, protecting endangered species seemed the right thing to do. Nearly fifty years after the passage of The Wilderness Act and nearly forty years after passage of The Endangered Species Act, what seemed straightforward seems much less so. "In Wildness is the Preservation of the World" (Thoreau 1893:9)Wilderness became the rallying cry for a generation who knew that the commercial exploitation of natural resources, including aesthetic resources, would invariably lead to an exhausted and impoverished environment. Led by The Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, as well as a steadily growing list of environmental groups and organizations, a very compelling case was made for the preservation of remote and ruggedly spectacular landscapes. Ansel Adams's photographs, marketed by the Sierra Club in posters and their near-iconic calendars, came to epitomize what wilderness represented: the embodiment of the sublime. Here was nature as it was meant to be-from lush, dense stands of Douglas-fir (Psuedotsuga menziesii) to the austerity of the mesas of the southwest, from impressive mountain peaks to the depths of Death Valley-at once alluring and forbidding; not places for the faint of heart. Setting aside wilderness also seemed inexpensive. Land acquisition costs were nil, since the federal government owned most of the sites, and, unlike the National Parks, there would be little need for upkeep. After all, the then prevailing view, about which we will have more to say shortly, was that wilderness was, by definition, self-regulating. The forests were ancient, the canyons and gorges the product of wind and water working away for millennia. Wilderness inspires not simply by its grandeur but also because it seems timeless. Why tinker (i.e., spend)? Cost society would bear would be the lost opportunity of profit-making from logging, mining, and drilling. But visitors with the loftiest of motives can have an unwelcome effect on wilderness. Aldo Leopold saw the dilemma clearly: "But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough of us have seen and fondled, there is no wildness left to cherish" (Leopold 1937). The stage was thus set for managing wilderness-or, more precisely, for managing access to areas designated as wilderness. The need to limit public access immediately gives rise to the question "what is wilderness for if not our enjoyment?" There are several answers to this question, starting with Leopold's advocacy for wilderness preservation. For nearly three decades, he formulated a hierarchy of wilderness values that, in ascending order, were articulated as: esthetic, biological, recreational, cultural, and scientific (Meine 1988). Leopold argued that wilderness areas would serve as refugia for wildlife species hard pressed by the loss of habitat. He was particularly concerned with species requiring large ranges. His notion of recreational value was restricted to hunting, fishing, and backpacking. It is doubtful he or anyone else could have predicted the surge in outdoor recreation, especially wilderness recreation, that began shortly after his death. Leopold, when he wrote "Shall we now exterminate this thing we call American?" (Leopold 1925) was harkening back to ideals regarding the impact of wilderness and the frontier on shaping what it is to be an American; ideals articulated in the late 19th century by Frederick Jackson Turner (1935), Theodore Roosevelt, and George Bird Grinnell (Cutright 1985, Miller 1992, Brands 1997). This reflected the romantic notion of primitivism, where the best antidote to the ills of an overly refined and civilized modern world was a return to a simpler, more primitive life (Cronon 1995). In this context, wilderness became a source for national renewal. As Cronon (1995) postulates, protecting wilderness protected the Nation's myth of origin. Finally, Leopold argued that wilderness provides us with a standard, a base line, against which we can measure the effects of our manipulations of the land. Leopold saw wilderness as the epitome of "land health;" by studying the processes by which a wilderness area maintains itself over time--how it recovers from storms and lightening-started fires; how it repels pests; how it endures drought or heavy precipitation-we may become better managers of the lands we crop, whether for food or wood products. Leopold's case for wilderness protection has informed advocacy for wilderness for two generations. While passage of the Act was certainly a watershed moment for conservation, it by no means quelled debate over wilderness. Wilderness remains contested for several very different reasons and it is to these that we now turn. What is "Wild"?Conventional critics of wilderness hark back to the nation's Protestant roots: wilderness was wasteful and waste, like idleness, was sinful. Wilderness harbored savage heathens and all sorts of evil wildlife. This now sounds awfully quaint but we should not forget that none other than Thoreau favorably regarded his haunts in Concord because they no longer contained the sorts of savage beasts that still roamed Africa and India (Thoreau 1893). And as many have pointed out, Thoreau was not enthralled by his encounter with the ruggedness of Mount Katahdin (Botkin 2000). And when Muir invited Emerson to spend several days camping in the redwoods, Emerson made it clear that he preferred a hotel (Turner 1985). To be fair, Emerson was quite elderly but age was probably reinforced by proclivity. Nowadays, erasing sin is less the issue than chasing resources: oil and natural gas and timber, primarily, but also precious metals. And then there is the more or less constant pressure of recreational interests, particularly those who don't accept the sorts of recreation that Leopold saw as appropriate to wilderness, such as ATV and snowmobile enthusiasts. These are all familiar threats to extant wilderness areas as well as the basis of opposition to proposals to expand wilderness protection. We will not dwell on these threats, though we don't for a minute underestimate the constant need to defend what remains of our wilderness areas. We are interested in a very different sort of challenge, one that bears more on managing wilderness than people. As we noted at the outset, wilderness was promoted as the product of inexorable natural forces that, through natural selection, had achieved just the right mix of organisms, each well adapted to the others in a complex web of interdependencies. This complexity, it was believed, yielded stability, what Clements called "climax" (Clements 1916). To the extent to which there was a history of the system, it was a cyclical history. Climax gave way to externally generated perturbations-storms, fire, etc.-which, when the dust settled, gave way to an orderly, stage by stage, recovery that, in time, reproduced the original climax condition. In the fifty years since the Act's passage, this view of how things work has been sharply challenged (Kricher 2009). Rather than an orderly, prefigured, march to climax, systems are now thought to be much more unruly, with any particular outcome after a disturbance highly contingent. Instead of species being knitted closely together into a single "super organism," ecologists are much more inclined these days to see erratic interactions that produce constant flux. Whether we are talking about forest succession or predator/prey interactions, the old models of equilibrium, dynamic or otherwise, are in disarray (Botkin 2000, Kricher 2009, Lewontin 2000). If the critics of Clementsian theory are right, and mounting evidence keeps pointing in that direction, it becomes hard to say what managing a wilderness area means. Are pest invasions a normal feature of forest dynamics or do invasions set the stage for a forest that differs in important respects from the original forest? Does it matter, so long as we remain visitors and spectators, rather than active managers? From a scientific point of view, contingency or stochasticity need not be disconcerting; indeed, if everything was perfectly predictable, we'd all be out of jobs. The value of wilderness as a laboratory in fact is heightened, precisely because the predictive models we once believed in no longer suffice. Whether studying the dynamics of wilderness will provide us with knowledge we can apply to disturbed sites, as Leopold and many others had suggested, is an open question. Research opportunities should become both more abundant and more urgent in the coming decades. Visitors, recreationists, and scientists can be persuaded to respect the wilderness, but the effects of human activity taking place far from the boundaries of wilderness areas are now well known. Climate change and invasive species are highly likely to change the face of virtually all of our protected areas (Halpin 1997, Karl et al. 2009). To take but one example, the mountain pine bark beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) infestation that is currently raising havoc in the west might well be a natural event. The lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) forest and the beetle have been around for a very long time. But with changing weather patterns, including the likelihood of hotter and drier conditions, can we be confident that the venerable cycle will repeat itself? Does change induced by anthropogenic sources threaten the very idea of "wilderness"? Many natural cycles (migration patterns, etc.) have already begun to be affected by climate change and more change is in store. Will wilderness areas be affected in ways that diminish their aura, thus threatening the level of public support needed to keep them protected? The fixed boundaries that allow wilderness areas to exist may make it difficult if not impossible to adjust to changes in climate and the consequent changes in forest composition and wildlife habitat, not to mention exposing wilderness areas to invasions of non-native species. The spread of the hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae) in the eastern United States has been spurred by increasingly moderate winters which have had the effect of expanding the pest's range. As it marches northward, it is leaving a trail of dead eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) in its wake. The effects of off-site anthropogenic change will sorely test the rationale for wilderness preservation. To the extent that protected areas lose or experience marked declines in their signature characteristics, whether flora and/or fauna, recreational value is likely to suffer. Imagine the Bob Marshall Wilderness slowly shifting to drought-resistant scrub. Even Randy Weaver would turn away. As we noted earlier, the scientific value of these areas will remain high, though not for the reasons Leopold and later proponents of wilderness advanced. Baselines are presumed to be stable and self-replicating. If, as most now expect, instability and unpredictability are in our near future, ecologists will have plenty to study, but whatever they uncover will likely not be a guide to Leopold's gold standard: land health. Wilderness areas will also be compromised as wildlife refugia. Indeed, to the extent that wilderness areas are surrounded by human-dominated landscapes (agriculture, oil and gas installations, and up-scale real estate developments), the wilderness areas may become wildlife traps. With habitat changing and no place to go, wildlife managers will be faced with the goal of maintaining remnant, not robust, populations. This could lead to increasing pressure for the creation of large corridors for connectivity among wild areas that mobile species can utilize. To some extent, this is already upon us, not because of climate change but, ironically, because wilderness has been, at least for some species, a good refuge - some would say "too good." There are two related issues that have given rise to criticism. The first is well-understood. The density of a species in any given area is a function of resources, space, and tolerance. The general public believes that if there is enough food, animals will stay put. To the extent that a wilderness preserve has a good food supply and good breeding habitat, it can quickly generate dispersal. And before you know it, there will be refugees from the refugia roaming, if you will, off the "reservation." We are all familiar with the on-going struggle over the bison (Bison bison) in Yellowstone as well as the on-going conflict over delisting gray wolves (Canis lupus) and the grizzly (Ursus arctos horribilis) in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming (Chadwick 2010). Similar conflicts are likely to gain a higher profile in the upper Midwest over steadily increasing numbers of wolves dispersing from their redoubt in northern-most Minnesota. To add to the mix, the first confirmed mountain lion (Puma concolor) was caught on monitoring camera in northwestern Wisconsin in mid-December, 2009. A DNR wildlife expert said what most would likely say: "That (the photo and a confirmed cougar-killed deer near the site of the trail camera) was really cool." (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Dec 24, 2009, page A1). It is exciting to think that creatures like the wolf and the mountain lion, which we have persecuted for centuries and almost succeeded in extirpating, can rebound, given half a chance. It affirms our deep-seated need to think that nature is resilient. It helps that evidence of such resilience assuages a bad conscience. But more than assuaging guilt is involved. The article announcing confirmation of the mountain lion's presence concluded, quoting the DNR, "The DNR said that cougars typically try to avoid contact with humans. The agency says that the risk of the animal attacking people is very small, but it could happen" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Dec 24, 2009, page A6). This mildly hedged reassurance masks a much larger and more interesting challenge to wilderness as refugia. Without going into great detail, our understanding of large carnivore behavior has been undergoing as fundamental a reappraisal as have the ecological models of climax and stability. Baron (2003) chronicled how habituation of mountain lions led to conflicts culminating in human fatalities. Similar habituation events have occurred with gray wolves, with the tragic killing of Kenton Carnegie in Saskatchewan a powerful lesson (V. Geist, personal communication). The supposed shy traits were considered so common and confirmed by many different observers in separate places and at various times that it came to be taken as "hard wired" prior to these recent events. This is as true for prey species as it is for predator species. Remember how the behavior of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) was once described? The once-shy animal can be better described now as a lawn ornament across a broad swath of the nation's suburbs and urban fringes. In an intriguing study, researchers compared two groups of elk in Yellowstone, one group had recently experienced wolf predation and the other group had yet to (Creel et al. 2009). The experienced animals interrupted browsing frequently to check for danger while the naïve animals browsed contentedly. There were other statistically different patterns of behavior between the two groups, differences clearly related to the threat the new wolf population posed. With wolves absent from the Park for decades, the elk had to learn (or, if you prefer, relearn) the signs of danger. Then, and only then, do the instinctual responses kick in. The implications of this are clear. Wildlife leaving wilderness areas will learn that life on the outside is different. Predators, if they are not hunted, will sooner or later become habituated to humans and when that happens, there will be problems. Implications for Wildlife ManagementHunters as Wilderness Components Leopold (1933) postulated that the value of a recreational experience is inversely proportional to the intensity of the management required to produce it. Hence, the "wilder" and more "natural" the hunting experience, the greater the recreational value. This harkens back to the romantic notion of primitivism noted earlier. A true wilderness hunt can be an experience of a lifetime and add value that transcends the hunt itself (McCabe 1999). However, relatively few hunters can afford such an experience. As access to private lands becomes increasingly limited (Bromley and Hauser 1994), the importance of hunter access to public lands becomes magnified. Yet, as noted earlier, the legal concept of wilderness shuns human presence. Ironically, paleoecological findings suggest humans, as hunters, were integral components of pre-Columbian America, the perceived wilderness (Martin and Szuter 1999, McCabe and McCabe 1984). The paradox unfolds as we see that humans may in fact have been keystone species in wild America, management of wilderness wildlife without human hunting as part of the system would be artificial, and wilderness designation makes human entry difficult. Impact of Wilderness Areas on Conservation Funding Hunters have been the primary funding source for wildlife conservation in North America (Williams et al. 2009). Expenditures for hunting exceeded $22 billion dollars in 2006 (U.S. Department of the Interior 2006), more than twice that expended in 1985 ($10,059,386,000; U.S. Department of the Interior 1988). The percentage of hunters who hunted both public and private lands declined from 31% to 24% between 1985 and 2006, while the percentage who hunted only on public lands remained constant (16%:1985; 15%:2006; U.S. Department of the Interior 1988, 2006). The impact of wilderness designation to hunter access, and resultant implications to trends in conservation funding should be studied; such information should inform wilderness policy. Wilderness and Biodiversity Conservation From a total species diversity perspective, wilderness areas are relatively low. Globally, only 18% of plants and 10% of terrestrial vertebrates are endemic to individual wildernesses (Mittermeier et al. 2003). This does not mean wilderness areas are not important contributors to biodiversity; the viability of certain species may depend on large areas of land with relatively little human use (Noss 1991). However, it has been argued that wilderness preservation and biodiversity conservation represent separate, distinct, and divergent goals that can conflict with one another (Sarkar 1999). The potential tradeoff of biodiversity conservation should be considered and weighed when contemplating wilderness designation. Population Management The wilderness ideal of letting nature takes its course with limited human intrusion has been framed earlier as utopian. Anthropogenic impacts are universal (McKibben 2006), and the dynamic (non-Clementsian) nature of ecosystems can make such a choice a dangerous gamble. There certainly is scientific value in observing and understanding these processes over long time periods. However, as wilderness is essentially a human value (Cronon 1995), so is the desired condition of wildlife populations. Active management, whether by hunting, habitat manipulation, or a combination of techniques can maintain ungulate and carnivore populations at levels compatible with the landscape and desired by humans. In considering wilderness designation, the consequences of limiting such management must be taken into consideration. Corridors that allow wildlife movement among patches of wild areas can be essential for maintaining viability for populations of certain species, and could become critical for climate change adaptation strategies. ConclusionThe wilderness concept embodies a vision where humans are not a part of nature (Cronon 1995). Wildlife conservation has operated under the premise that humans are active participants in nature, yielding both positive and negative effects. The wilderness and wildlife conservation movements both arose out of human passion, and shared many of the foremost advocates. Wildlife conservation has been fueled in large part by the vested self-interest of hunters. Would wilderness benefit from greater access and use by hunters, thereby reaping more support from that self interest? Or would this compromise the very notion it is founded on? First and foremost, the recognition that wilderness is a human value construct is essential for looking at wilderness in perspective. A number of questions should be given serious consideration as we frame the future of wilderness in America, including:
These questions and others will help us understand the role wilderness can and should play in 21st century America. References Baron, D. 2003. Beast in the garden. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, New York, USA. |
