WILDERNESS

Few currents in literature, the arts, and religion run deeper than the cultural fascination with wildness, and its locational concomitant, wilderness—places where primordial reality dominates and the artificialities of humans, including their sciences and technologies, are not apparent. Marks of the depth of the idea are its universality and flexibility. Appeals to wilderness can be found in cultures as diverse as China and North America. In its many intellectual guises and emotional overlays it has proven adaptable and meaningful across great historical divides. Although here the emphasis will be on its Euro-American manifestations, it is important to recognize that wilderness is not an idea exclusive to that culture.

Euro-American Context

In the Euro-American context the idea of wilderness is associated with the view that humans by nature separate themselves from nature, which then provides the backdrop for most considerations of ethics. Yet throughout western history, ethical principles have been formulated to apply only on the human side of the human-wildness divide. This separation of humans from wildness is especially important normatively, because it shapes the context in which new technologies are evaluated, including technologies that radically alter nature and irreversibly destroy wildness in the process of development and progress. Against the backdrop of wilderness, science has sometimes been judged both tame and distorting. Appeals to wilderness are often the basis for criticizing technologies, especially technologies that radically alter nature or irreversibly destroy wildness in the process of development and progress.

Max Oelschlaeger (1991) hypothesizes that Mediterranean cultures, especially at the eastern end where agriculture was taking hold, began developing in their mythology a separation of human culture from nature as early as 10,000 b.c.e. in the Yahwist tradition. In later Hebrew history, sojourns in the wilderness became symbols for the spiritual purification of prophets; at the same time, wild lands were treated as wastelands awaiting transformation into productive farmland. Oelschlager attributes this ambivalence to residual tensions between settled agriculturalists and nomadic, wilder tribes of herders and gatherers. These two themes—wildness and civilization through cultivation—are entwined throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition. Christ's sojourn in the wilderness, in keeping with the Hebrew tradition of seeking purification by retreating from society into wilderness, is portrayed as a time of spiritual strengthening in preparation for a future ministry.

The idea of wilderness as an obstacle to the human will, which grew out of the earlier tendency of agriculturalists to distinguish their works—the domain of their physical control—from wild nature lying beyond civilization, took on a renewed meaning with the discovery of the New World. In this context, the fascination with wilderness was expressed as a struggle between the Enlightenment view of human perfectibility through science and technology, and romanticism as expressed in the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea of the noble savage. According to this view, pre-civilized humans, not yet corrupted by the affectations of society, have a purity not found in contemporary society. This fascination with wildness was inspired by the discovery of primitive cultures, and reinforced the romantic critique of the overly rational and mechanical world of the Enlightenment.

Once imported into the New World, the wilderness versus civilization theme took on new vitality as colonists came in direct contact with wilderness and with wild tribes they saw as savages. Jonathan Edwards—despite his reputation as a brimstone orator—preached benevolence toward the whole of God's nature (Miller 1967, p. 283). More concretely, the battle between civilization and wilderness was fought again each day at the advancing edge of colonial development of lands formerly inhabited by Native American tribes. In a classic analysis of U.S. history, Frederick Jackson Turner (1920) emphasized the importance of the frontier in the identity of the United States, predicting that a huge transformation in consciousness would ensue as the frontier closed. Turner saw the existence of an open frontier, and the idea of manifest destiny associated with it, as definitive of the American experience. Accordingly the closing of the frontier was thought to usher in a new era in American life.

Two Views of Wilderness

It is useful to separate two aspects of the wilderness idea as it has developed in American thought. First there was the indicated experience of wildness as a countervailing force resisting the daily transformation of wild lands into farmland and cities in the path of westward expansion. This process of civilizing lands that had before been the habitat of nomadic tribes of hunters and gatherers represents a replay of the growth of agricultural societies across the Middle East and Europe in the original expansion of agriculture in the Old World. In this conflict, wilderness was cast as one pole in a dialectic between human culture and wild nature.

The reality of these day-to-day struggles to transform wilderness into productive land may be contrasted with a second, emergent idea of wilderness, an idea—one might say an idealization—of wildness and wilderness that has evolved within academic and intellectual circles, especially in North America and in Australia. The works of Perry Miller (1967), Leo Marx (1967), Roderick Nash (1982) and the philosophers Mark Sagoff (1974) and Max Oelschlager have all articulated and emphasized the importance of the idea of wilderness in the American identity and self-perception. These authors, whose careers correspond to a growing academic interest in environmental studies all brought new dimensions to a vital strain in American intellectual life, as exemplified, for example, in the writings of Ernest Hemingway, Wallace Stegner, Annie Dillard, and many others. These authors reprise a longstanding theme—as exemplified in the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper and his hero, Natty Bumppo, of associating life at the edge of wilderness as symbolic of freedom, self-reliance, and character.

The emphasis in the United States on the idea of wilderness led to a re-shaping of the related concept, "nature," which came to mean "primordial nature," whereas in Europe—where most land had been altered by humans long ago—people enjoyed the "countryside," with farms, homes, and businesses distributed across the landscape, as "natural." The assimilation of the idea of nature to that of primordial nature, and referring only to lands where humans have no presence, has contributed to the polarization of thought about nature in the United States. Whereas Europeans enjoy mixed landscapes, Americans distinguish wilderness from "the working landscape," and there are bitter disagreements about what activities are appropriate in wilderness areas. Advocates of wilderness thus try to eliminate activities, such as motorized recreation, from wilderness areas, considering such uses inappropriate and damaging to the primordial quality of wilderness.

The complex, often conflicting theme of nature versus culture has been important in environmental thought and action. Henry David Thoreau, the transcendentalist, said "in Wildness is the preservation of the World" (Thoreau 1998 [1862], p. 37), and his ideas are echoed in the work of John Muir (founding president of the Sierra Club) and many other wilderness advocates. Muir's reverence for forests and wild nature clashed with the ideas of Gifford Pinchot, the first Forester of the National Forest Reserves, who argued that all resources should be developed to improve the material lot of humans. So reverence—and passion—for wildness exists in sharp contrast to another, opposing theme: the need to control and civilize nature for human use. This tension in the environmental movement, it could be argued, reflects the broader ambivalence of Euro-American culture toward wildness and civilization.

Wilderness Policy

Muir's respect for wilderness also motivated Aldo Leopold, the philosophical forester who worked tirelessly to protect wild areas from development, from within and, later, outside the U.S. Forest Service. Leopold convinced the Forest Service to set aside the Gila Wilderness in 1922, and he co-founded the Wilderness Society—an activist group that advocates for wilderness protection—in 1935. Leopold advocated for preservation of the wilderness on several bases; he countered the utilitarians and materialists by noting that wilderness backpacking and hiking are uses, too, and that some land has more utility for back-country recreation than for development. He also argued that humans need wild, natural systems as models of healthy systems if they are ever to become intelligent managers of the modified systems that are their immediate habitats. Leopold, however, at his most passionate, argued for wildness and wilderness as a cultural necessity, and as a matter of intellectual humility. "The shallow-minded modern" must, he thought, learn to appreciate wilderness as a symbol of our "untamable past," and "giving definition and meaning to the human enterprise" (Leopold 1949, p. 200–201, 96).

In 1964 the U.S. Congress passed the Wilderness Act, which gave wilderness areas considerable protections. This act, which provides for the designation and protection of wilderness areas, defined wilderness "in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor who does not remain." Far from resolving the conflict between wilderness advocates and advocates of economic development, however, the passage of the act has resulted in a series of political struggles regarding which, and how much, U.S. government land would be designated as wilderness, and what kinds of activities would be allowed on designated land.

A New Wilderness Debate

In the 1990s, a new wilderness debate broke out, as philosophers, historians and scientists all called into question the truth and efficacy of the wilderness myth. An early salvo in this new war came from the philosopher J. Baird Callicott, who criticized the entrenched idea/myth of wilderness because it supports an inaccurate view of humans as separate from nature; and because the myth has colonialist overtones, treating members of the cultures who lived there as less than human, whereas these peoples managed the land, albeit less intensively than the European colonists. Callicott also thinks the myth confuses policy by emphasizing exclusion of all humans from wilderness. If the emphasis were shifted to protecting wildness, protection would only forbid the intrusion of modern, industrial uses, Callicott argues, and one might encourage people to live with nature in unobtrusive ways in order to cohabit with wildlife.

Subsequently this debate was rekindled in two contexts. First the historian William Cronon, who had implicitly raised some of Callicott's issues in his 1983 book, Changes in the Land, published a book in which he and his co-authors emphasized that the idealized, mythical idea of wilderness is very much an American construction, a culturally relative idea that should be recognized as very particular to the United States, and prone to hide rather than illuminate the reality of European settlement and colonial land transformations (Cronon 1995).

The wilderness debate also shaped a subsequent debate in conservation biology, as conservation biologists suggested that, whatever the original rationale for wilderness, the wilderness areas in the early twenty-first century are indispensable reserves to protect biological diversity. This idea has since been criticized by Callicott, who argues against the assumption that wilderness areas must be depopulated in order to protect wild species, arguing that conservation biologists requiring wilderness simply perpetuates the old dichotomy between humans and nature. Further the philosopher of biology, Sahotra Sarkar, has argued persuasively that the goals of biodiversity protection and wilderness preservation often conflict; this debate shows signs of continuing well into the twenty-first century. (Sarkar 1999).

The idea of wilderness has been, and remains, both seminal and controversial in ongoing discussions of the American character. Further this idea provides an attitudinal backdrop for explorations in environmental ethics and environmental thought, and also for debates about environmental policy. Given this central role in European and North American—especially U.S.—thought and action, it is not surprising that the idea deeply affects the ways humans understand—and evaluate—new and emerging technologies.

BRYAN G. NORTON

SEE ALSO Earth;Environment;Environmental Ethics;Wildlife Management.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Callicott, J. Baird, and Michael P. Nelson. (1998). The Great New Wilderness Debate. Athens: The University of fGeorgia Press.

Cronon, William. (1983). Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang.

Cronon, William, ed. (1995). Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: Norton.

Leopold, Aldo. (1949). A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press.

Marx, Leo. (1967). The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London: Oxford University Press.

Miller, Perry. (1967). Nature's Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nash, Roderick. (1982). Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. First edition was published in 1967.

Oelschlaeger, Max. (1991). The Idea of Wilderness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Sagoff, Mark. (1974). "On Preserving the Natural Environment." Yale Law Journal 81: 205–267.

Sarkar, Sahotra. (1999). "Wilderness Preservation and Biodiversity Conservation—Keeping Divergent Goals Distinct." Bioscience 49: 405–412.

Thoreau, Henry David. 1998 (1862). "Walking." In The Great New Wilderness Debate, ed. J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson. Athens: University of Georgia Press.