Expanding the concept of "wilderness"

Today marks the anniversary of one of the most successful pieces of environmental legislation in the US, the Wilderness Act. It's a great time to reflect on the progress we've made in protecting essential ecosystems and setting aside a legacy of untrammeled land for our children and grandchildren. But there is much work left to be done.

The idea of "wilderness" conjures up images of unspoiled tracts of old-growth forests, crystal clear streams, and land untouched by humans. But the reality is that very little such land exists today, even inside of the National Park and National Forest systems that protect most of the land designated as "wilderness." In fact, there is not a single square inch of land in the United States that remains "untouched' by the influence of humans, whether through logging or air pollution, we have left our indelible mark on every ecosystem on the planet, to some extent. If the goal of designating wilderness is to preserve that land which is left free from human influence, then we would never have had any land to so designate.

The greatest period of expansion of federal control over land that now comprises the backbone of our wilderness was acquired during the 1930's, as landowners across the US found themselves unable to even pay taxes on their farms in the depths of the great depression. As an example, consider the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois. Including over 25,000 acres of designated wilderness, much of that forest was acquired in terrible shape, as overextended farmers had created horrific erosion throughout the hillocks and hollers of the Illinois Ozarks. Many of the trails (unfortunately ill-maintained) the cut across the forest are old single rut wagon trail roads. In the Spring, you can discover old home sites by looking for the patches of daffodils, the descendants of the flowers planted by homesteaders to be cut and shipped to the Chicago flower and produce markets by train from little towns like Cobden or Makanda. By any definition, the wildernesses in the Shawnee National Forest are disturbed land, still noticeably so, despite nearly 80 years of respite. In many ways, the Shawnee represents the conundrum of land preservation east of the Mississippi - there was no land left free from human influence by the time we started thinking about the need to set aside land for the future.

Where I live now, the controversies surrounding the Wilderness Act still swirl. The crown jewel of the Midwest's wilderness (some would argue the nation's crown jewel) is the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. This area is now so popular with canoeists and campers that the permits that limit entry are quickly snatched up every Spring for the most popular entry points and weekends. In many ways, it is threatened by its very success - overcrowding is a big problem in the more traveled parts of the area, and the character of the wilderness is nearly lost in the bustle of humanity.

This is hardly the problem that longtime Northwoods residents had when the BWCAW was first designated. The "culture war" that erupted, most notably in the small town of Ely, still reverberates today. At the time, wilderness advocates were harassed and driven out of town, and burned in effigy as resident predicted the end of their community, and railed against the feds grabbing control from the community. Now, thirty years later, it's hard to make the same economic arguments, as Ely has benefited from a particular kind of tourism that has brought a modicum of growth to the town. Nonetheless, the residue of these battles remain, in the semi-annual battles over snowmobile access and motorized portages, and in the recent anti-Iraq war resolution first passed by the town council and then hastily overturned soon afterward. The divide between "new" and "old" Ely may have scabbed over, but it still has not healed.

The areas of the Superior National Forest that surround the BWCAW represent the next battle, as wilderness advocates press for designating additional national forest land surrounding the BWCAW as wilderness as well. While we are in the early stages of this next round, expect it to heat up as the old wounds are picked at. This time, all terrain or off road vehicles are complicating things as their users are pressing for increased access to the forest. Which logging roads will be opened to ATV use will be one of the most important sticking points, and in the first draft of the new SNF operating plan, ATV's would be allowed on all old logging trails (over 1200 miles), but would be prohibited from cross-country travel. Of course, given the paltry enforcement resources of the Forest Service, whatever rules are arrived at will largely be a paper tiger.

The stories of these Midwestern wildernesses are probably more instructive than the stories of our "glamour shot" wildernesses in the Rockies, Adirondacks and Alaska, since they represent the battles that result from attempts to balance preservation, restoration and multiple use management philosophy. They are also "flawed" wildernesses - nearly the entire area of the BWCAW was logged between 1890-1920, and the Shawnee was nearly completely homesteaded and farmed until the lean years of the 1930's. Using a strict definition of wilderness, would certainly disqualify them from consideration. And that would be the deathknell for wilderness in the US, especially in the Midwest.

For that matter, it would be an exercise in futility to believe that we can protect wilderness from all damage, as the raging debates over fire management strategies indicate. Do we extinguish fires because they destroy the forest, or do we recognize that fire is part of the natural cycle of maintaining healthy forests? And it's probably somewhere in between and beyond those perspectives, since we have undoubtedly influenced the availablility of fuel in forests through previous decades of fire suppression. And we also have to account for the increasing proximity of humans to these fires, which is probably an even stronger influence on the debate.

All of this should lead us to discard the romantic, but tragically flawed, notion of wilderness as land untouched by humanity. But that admission is not a license to bulldoze all of these lands because they are no longer pure; instead, it is a mandate to continue to designate land and let it stand as places where nature is given the maximum possible breathing space from human depredation. In so many ways, our "perfect wilderness" ideals are anachronistic, so much so that it erases the fact that humans lived and used these land for thousands of years prior to European settlement. We've got thirty years of this experiment under our belts, and it's only a beginning. If we want to preserve a future for our grandchildren that counterbalances the seemingly exponential expansion of development in America, it needs to start with a new commitment to designating lands as wilderness.

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