Battle For The Wilderness

Michael Frome

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429716409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Environmental Economics
• Index: Economics

This book focuses on the principles of wilderness, exploring the actual and potential values of wilderness, its ecology, economics, the effect of human impact, and mechanisms to protect small, relatively untouched tracts in or near urban areas in the United States.

Part I
Wilderness Values

Chapter One
What Is Wilderness?

Wilderness has been defined by law as a specific type of untrammeled place, "where man is a visitor who does not remain." It sounds simple on the face of it. The law, however, serves only as a starting point for determining—or discovering—what wilderness really is, what it does, and whom it serves.

A football field is endowed with clearer dimensions. The playing portion is 100 yards long and 30 yards wide. The goal posts at both ends are precisely the same height and width. A basketball court also is fixed by prescribed measurements. It is rectangular, with identical raised baskets at each end, and is always played with a round inflated ball approximately thirty inches in circumference. Golf courses vary in size and shape, but the goal is consistently demonstrable: to hit the small white ball into a succession of holes, usually nine or eighteen, in the lowest number of strokes.

Wilderness is controlled by no such rules or evident objectives. It is more than a place, but equally an idea, a principle, a state of mind, even a dream. While the state of wilderness exists in the mind, it does so only to the degree it exists somewhere on the ground. It becomes worthy of description as wilderness because of its character, not because of any particular purpose it serves. Once it retains that character, however, it serves many purposes.

The principles of wilderness are based on the completeness of all life, rather than on the dominion of man alone. The principles are not new or restricted to science but extend to the artistic, ethical, spiritual, or religious, as well. They are predicated on the unified concept of land, community, and universe and relate the experience of mankind to a universe that is alive and not dead. The man who believes in wilderness doesn't lose sight of concrete objects but sees them in the totality of the world, which is loved for its own sake.

Some think of wilderness as being essentially a large area, ranging from 5,000 acres upward to a million acres or more, where one can get away from all evidence of civilization for a few hours or, even better, for days or weeks, without crossing trails with another soul. The large areas are desirable, but wilderness embraces a sample of the primitive in any degree. It may be as small as one's backyard or a clump of wild plants and grass that provide a feel for the original landscape. Even the sight, sound, or smell of a miniwilderness furnishes a tranquilizing and enriching interval, a subconscious reminder of man's rootstocks in nature.

Others insist that wilderness must be restricted by standards of purity to utterly primeval lands looking exactly as they did before man evolved from the apes. In this age of fallout there are no places left on the earth free of human disturbance, not even at the polar icecaps, but this need not be the basic criterion. Wilderness is where man's sounds, chemicals, and other byproducts of civilized life are not dominant. It can be any area where nature prevails or might prevail given the passage of time. It can be any place, of any size, so long as active ecological succession, structural diversity, and naturalness are permitted.

Wilderness is a part of man's civilization. It is a civilizing force. Wilderness gives America the quality of spaciousness, the touch of frontier and far horizons that are rooted in the national conscience. It provides new generations a link with the adventure and history of old generations, something firm to hold on to while plunging through the onrushing uncertainties of time. Wilderness preserves in living form the tableaus memorialized by artists and poets, so that just as their works are part of the cultural heritage, so the sources remain to serve new artists and poets.

Wilderness is the antidote to an overurbanized, supertechnological age. Man has proved himself resilient, capable of adapting to smoky skies, polluted streams, crowded and noisy cities, but his adaptive potential is not unlimited. Little wonder that we are filling hospitals, mental institutions, clinics, prisons, and cemeteries with the fruit of terrible divorcement from a native environment. Modern man, after all, retains inherent biological characteristics of his ancestors, just as the long-domesticated dog retains characteristics of his wild forebear, the wolf. The human foot hasn't changed much since the paths men trod were grassy slopes, woodland trails, and spongy bog hummocks. The same set of genes governs emotional development, drives, and needs as when he was a Paleolithic hunter or Neolithic farmer. Wilderness furnishes diversity and stimulating experiences of the natural world for society to draw upon now that the material world has been seriously depleted of its resources.

Wilderness is a recreational resource affording the enjoyment of hardy outdoor sports—canoeing, hiking, climbing, riding, hunting, and fishing. It combines the thrills of jeopardy and beauty, an adventure into the physically unknown that has always constituted a major factor in the happiness of curious souls. The wilderness hunter, learning the habits of animals and meeting the prey on its own ground, appreciates the stillness, physical exercise, woodlore, the pride in roughing it, the kill that comes hard, rather than easy. The fisherman, rather than being concerned with the catch itself, focuses on the challenge; even when fish are few and scattered, he finds rewards in the setting and in his feeling of harmony with the flows of weather, wind, and water.

Wilderness is the chorus of thrushes, the thunder of waterfalls, the mist rising from a mountain meadow at twilight, the ancient voices riding the breezes of night enveloping the dark air. It is the chance to wade in marshes where, as Thoreau wrote, the bittern and meadow hen lurk, to hear the whistling of the snipe, to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest. It is the intimate contemplation of Darwin's tangled bank, heavily clothed with plants of many kinds, with birds singing in the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and the reflection that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by natural laws acting around us.

Wilderness is an oak forest furnishing acorns, leaves, twigs, bark, flowers, and buds to support bears, squirrels, white-footed mice, wood rats, wild turkeys, titmice, nuthatches, crows, doves, and owls. It is a mosaic, in which the reality of death needs no apology, where natural death advances through history as the nourishing helpmate of birth and blossom. Within the mosaic the observer finds beauty in the fallen tree feeding organisms of decomposition, such as fungi, bacteria, and myriad forms of animal life, and serving as the seedbed and nursery for new trees and flowering plants.

Wilderness is found in every type of terrain where a life community is found—forest, prairie, desert, tundra, rock and ice, marsh, in underground caverns, at the edge of the sea, and beneath that watery surface—with each community demonstrating its distinctive lessons in adaptation and function.

Wilderness is wherever it may stimulate curiosity over the natural cycle, even in an undeveloped fragment of a great city where one may watch the grace of a fluttering butterfly, the red and black of a milkweed beetle, or the shimmering back of a slow-moving slug.

Wilderness is an exercise in solitude, in which the individual achieves freedom from his own problems, but it also provides the opportunity for companionship with others, sharing joys and hardships, learning the meaning of comradeship, humility, and open dialogue among men and women. It builds partnerships through revelations of common origin and common destiny.

Wilderness is a humanitarian resource, the basis of a more healthy social structure, a banner of hope to the ghetto dweller deprived of human dignity and boxed in by crowds, noise, litter, and concrete. How can human life be valued highly in a society shaped by destruction, despoliation, degradation, and exploitation of man by man? Wilderness is the alternative to waste and dissent that characterize modern society. It restores belief in the environment, each other, and ourselves.

Wilderness is a spiritual sanctuary that opens to the search for a moral world. Even today religious leaders of the American Indians spend weeks on a high mountain or in the woods in contemplation of wilderness mythology so their feet may walk in the tracks of the Mountain Spirit. Leaders in many religions have sought a similar sanctuary. On one occasion Jesus Christ spent forty days in the wilderness, where he had been led by the Holy Spirit. On another, he and three disciples undertook to visit a high mountain, probably Mount Hermon, on the northern boundary of Palestine. It was a deliberately planned experience in the expectation of rising above hazards and finding unlimited good. They sought no short cuts and doubtless would have spurned any offer of one. They felt they had found their reward when Jesus was transfigured.*

Wilderness is a place for men, but not for men alone. A river is accorded its right to exist because it is a river, rather than for any utilitarian service. The American tradition has sought only the transformation of resources; wilderness recalls a fundamental and older tradition of relationship with resources themselves. This generation could clean up the Columbia River 01 the Hudson River. But without understanding the true role of the river, as a living symbol of all the life it sustains and nourishes, and our responsibility to it, we would merely be balancing the cost benefits of using the river one way against the cost benefits of using it another.

Wilderness is for the bald eagle, condor, and ivory-billed woodpecker, for birds that nest in the tops of old trees or in the rotted holes in tree trunks and that need dead or dying logs to house the grubs and other insects they feed on. Wilderness is the sanctuary of grizzly bears, mountain lions, bighorn sheep, elk, and wolves that need large areas set aside from civilization.

Wilderness is a learning laboratory, a classroom in biology, botany, and natural wonders, with examples and lessons on the the relationship of living things to their environment. It answers the needs of the sciences for undisturbed and recovering areas in which to conduct base-line studies concerning human influences on the earth and to determine the best ways of managing resources.

Wilderness is one of the incomparable freedoms, like freedom from want, war, and racial prejudice and the freedom to cultivate one's own thoughts in one's own way. Wilderness brings stability, a sense of permanence, to a shaky, unstable world.

* The Bible mentions wilderness nearly 300 times and in many cases considered wilderness to be vast and uninhabited. Its earliest appearance in the Old Testament is the mention of the Sinai Peninsula, where Moses led the wandering Israelites for forty years. However, the Psalms, Job, Isaiah, and the lyrical passages in the discourses of Moses show remarkable empathy with nature.

Chapter Two
An American Happening

The Rose Garden of the White House was a fitting natural setting for President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Wilderness Act on September 3, 1964. On that day the United States became the first country in the long record of civilization to proclaim through law a recognition of wilderness in its way of life, as part of its culture and its legacy to the future.

The struggle had been long. Fruition came after eight years of discussion and debate by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and after eighteen separate public hearings conducted by congressional committees in Washington and other cities. The bill had been written and rewritten time and again, it had been passed in the Senate, then bottled up in the House. It had been aggressively fought by the timber industry and by the oil, grazing, and mining industries, all insisting that resources are meant to be "used," rather than merely admired. Two of the federal agencies principally involved, the National Park Service and Forest Service, had opposed the Act, too, when it was initially introduced. The public may own the land, but administrators prefer to exercise their own prerogatives without submitting their expertise to challenge or sharing their decision-making on either technical or policy questions.

The Act was passed, nevertheless, establishing both a definition of wilderness in law and a National Wilderness Preservation System in fact. The very effort surrounding passage may make the law more impressive as a statement of national philosophy than as a formula or compendium o£ rules and regulations, for it plainly evoked the feeling of countless individuals throughout the country—and likely throughout the world—who would speak for wilderness if given the chance and would say that natural islands within our expanding civilization are essential to the spirit of man.

The idea of protecting wilderness is not new in itself. In Europe kings and princes for centuries held the forests as a source of game for sport and food. Henry David Thoreau commented that sometimes they even destroyed villages to create or extend the natural domain. But those preserves were for the nobility alone. In America wilderness is protected as a common birthright.

"Why should not we, who have renounced the king's authority, have our national preserves," demanded Thoreau, "where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and the panther may still exist, and not be 'civilized off the face of the earth'—our own forests not to hold the king's game merely, but for inspiration and our own true recreation?" ¹

Thoreau foresaw man's need to reach out from the clatter of the mechanized age for a touch of the natural. He proposed that each community sustain a primitive forest of 500 or 1,000 acres. "Let us keep the New World new," he proposed, "and preserve all the advantages of living in the country." ²

At the dawn of European settlement America was endowed with wilderness. As John Muir described it, the whole continent was a garden that seemed to be favored above all other wild parks and gardens of the globe. It was wilderness that dazzled the Europeans of culture and science when they thought about America. Seven Indian chieftains created a furor when they went to England in 1730, with painted faces and feathers in their hair, to present the king four scalps and five eagle tails and to pose for a portrait by William Hogarth. Peter Kalm, a pupil of Linnaeus, was among a number of botanists dispatched to collect flora from the New World and report on it. He found plants the like of which he had never seen before. "When I saw a tree, I was forced to stop and ask those who accompanied me how it was called," he wrote in his Travels in North America. "I was seized with terror at the thought of ranging so many new and unknown parts of natural history," *

As the New World became settled, open squares, greens, and "commons" were set aside for community purposes. In 1836 William Cullen Bryant began promoting the idea of a city park on a tremendous scale for New York. With the support of two noted landscape architects, Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted, Central Park ultimately was established in 1857. During the mid-1800s the groves of sequoia trees in California catapulted to world attention as a result of the stripping of one of the giant trees in the Calaveras Grove. At the behest of prominent Americans, Congress withdrew Yosemite Valley, in the heart of the big-tree country, from the public domain, generally open to settlement and private acquisition, and gave it to California as a state park, thus seeking to safeguard the big trees from commercial timber exploitation. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant in 1864, the same year as the Emancipation Proclamation.

Then came the epochal establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872. Within five years after the end of the Civil War vast areas of the Middle West and Pacific West had been colonized. Pioneers were exploring unknown country, bringing with them the morals, values, and institutions of an older society, and thus devouring land for both settlement and exploitation. Yet on the raw, fast-developing frontier the concept of a national park was born. The bill to establish Yellowstone succeeded after one of the most formidable, public-interest lobbying campaigns in history—the same kind that swept through the Wilderness Act almost a century later. President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Act into law on March 1, 1872, thus placing a large parcel of the public domain under protection of the federal government to be "reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy or sale." It was a revolutionary idea, the beginning of a systematic effort to preserve natural treasures.

As recently as 1901 John Muir, champion of Yosemite and pioneer of the modern preservation movement, commented, with a measure of satisfaction, "When, like a merchant taking a list of his goods, we take stock of our wilderness, we are glad to see how much of even the most destructible kind is still unspoiled." ³ In the ensuing years, however, industrial growth far outpaced preservation. The greater the development of natural resources, the greater the public welfare—such was the prevalent view. The smokestack succeeded the pioneer's axe as a national symbol. If there were constantly more people to be supplied, it was presumed that bigger markets and more capital would follow, and so would research and development and endless new mechanical marvels. Allowing a resource to remain as it had been for millions of years was considered antisocial.

As a consequence many valuable resources were disastrously depleted. Wilderness became a prime victim. In 1926 the Forest Service made a survey of roadless units. Based on a minimum of 230,400 acres to each, it found seventy-four such units totaling 55 million acres.

The greatest depletion has come since then.

By the early 1960s Americans were startled to find how little of even the most indestructible kind of wilderness was still unspoiled. A survey conducted in 1961 by the University of California Wildland Research Center as an independent review commissioned by the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, a Presidential agency, showed that the larger areas had become scarce, so the sum of 100,000 acres was now predetermined as the minimum size for a wilderness to be considered. That acreage was believed to convey an adequately strong impression of undisturbed vastness and to provide an opportunity for maintaining relatively undisturbed biological conditions and ecological interaction. Smaller areas were recognized as "quasiwilderness" but were not included in the study.

Where the largest roadless unit of 1926 covered 7 million acres, in 1961 it was about 2 million acres. The number of units 230,400 acres or larger in size had dropped from seventy-four to nineteen, and the total area from 55 million acres to 17 million acres. The report found sixty-four separate areas in national parks and national forests with over 100,000 acres eac...