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Workshop VI—Wilderness in the Middle of the 20th

Century

1) What ideas about wilderness emerge from these sources? How do they compare with the

perceptions of “wilderness” from earlier periods in American history?

2) Why do you think the preservation of wilderness became such an urgent issue by the middle

of the twentieth century?

3) Why do several of these sources make reference in one way or another to wilderness as part of

our heritage?

4) What is the significance of The Wilderness Act itself?

5) Is it reasonable to advocate for wilderness preservation as public policy even when very few

people will actually be able to visit wilderness areas? Or, to put it another way, is wilderness

elitist?

Source 1

Wallace Stegner's "Wilderness Letter," was written to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review

Commission to lend support to the drafting of legislation that would create designated

wilderness areas in the United States. Stegner (1909-1993) lived through most of the twentieth

century. Having grown up on farms around the Western United States and Canada in the 1910s

and 1920s, he observed the use and abuse of the western landscape first-hand. He was already a

well-regarded novelist and nature-writer at the time he wrote this “Wilderness Letter”.

Los Altos, Calif.

December 3, 1960

David E. Pesonen

Wildland Research Center

Agricultural Experiment Station

243 Mulford Hall

University of California

Berkeley 4, Calif.

Dear Mr. Pesonen:

I believe that you are working on the wilderness portion of the Outdoor Recreation Resources

Review Commission's report. If I may, I should like to urge some arguments for wilderness

preservation that involve recreation, as it is ordinarily conceived, hardly at all. Hunting, fishing,

hiking, mountain-climbing, camping, photography, and the enjoyment of natural scenery will all,

surely, figure in your report. So will the wilderness as a genetic reserve, a scientific yardstick by

which we may measure the world in its natural balance against the world in its man-made

imbalance. What I want to speak for is not so much the wilderness uses, valuable as those are,

but the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself. Being an intangible and spiritual resource, it

will seem mystical to the practical minded--but then anything that cannot be moved by a

bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to them.

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I want to speak for the wilderness idea as something that has helped form our character and that

has certainly shaped our history as a people. It has no more to do with recreation than churches

have to do with recreation, or than the strenuousness and optimism and expansiveness of what

the historians call the "American Dream" have to do with recreation. Nevertheless, since it is

only in this recreation survey that the values of wilderness are being compiled, I hope you will

permit me to insert this idea between the leaves, as it were, of the recreation report.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be

destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette

cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we

pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last

of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the

exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the

chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the

environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world

and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly,

without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our

technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment.

We need wilderness preserved--as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds--because it was

the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the

reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years

set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can

bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old

simply because it is there--important, that is, simply as an idea.

We are a wild species, as Darwin pointed out. Nobody ever tamed or domesticated or

scientifically bred us. But for at least three millennia we have been engaged in a cumulative and

ambitious race to modify and gain control of our environment, and in the process we have come

close to domesticating ourselves. Not many people are likely, any more, to look upon what we

call "progress" as an unmixed blessing. Just as surely as it has brought us increased comfort and

more material goods, it has brought us spiritual losses, and it threatens now to become the

Frankenstein that will destroy us. One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, to

remain, insofar as we can, good animals. Americans still have that chance, more than many

peoples; for while we were demonstrating ourselves the most efficient and ruthless environment-

busters in history, and slashing and burning and cutting our way through a wilderness continent,

the wilderness was working on us. It remains in us as surely as Indian names remain on the land.

If the abstract dream of human liberty and human dignity became, in America, something more

than an abstract dream, mark it down at least partially to the fact that we were in subdued ways

subdued by what we conquered.

The Connecticut Yankee, sending likely candidates from King Arthur's unjust kingdom to his

Man Factory for rehabilitation, was over-optimistic, as he later admitted. These things cannot be

forced, they have to grow. To make such a man, such a democrat, such a believer in human

individual dignity, as Mark Twain himself, the frontier was necessary, Hannibal and the

Mississippi and Virginia City, and reaching out from those the wilderness; the wilderness as

opportunity and idea, the thing that has helped to make an American different from and, until we

forget it in the roar of our industrial cities, more fortunate than other men. For an American,

insofar as he is new and different at all, is a civilized man who has renewed himself in the wild.

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The American experience has been the confrontation by old peoples and cultures of a world as

new as if it had just risen from the sea. That gave us our hope and our excitement, and the hope

and excitement can be passed on to newer Americans, Americans who never saw any phase of

the frontier. But only so long as we keep the remainder of our wild as a reserve and a promise--a

sort of wilderness bank.

As a novelist, I may perhaps be forgiven for taking literature as a reflection, indirect but

profoundly true, of our national consciousness. And our literature, as perhaps you are aware, is

sick, embittered, losing its mind, losing its faith. Our novelists are the declared enemies of their

society. There has hardly been a serious or important novel in this century that did not repudiate

in part or in whole American technological culture for its commercialism, its vulgarity, and the

way in which it has dirtied a clean continent and a clean dream. I do not expect that the

preservation of our remaining wilderness is going to cure this condition. But the mere example

that we can as a nation apply some other criteria than commercial and exploitative considerations

would be heartening to many Americans, novelists or otherwise. We need to demonstrate our

acceptance of the natural world, including ourselves; we need the spiritual refreshment that being

natural can produce. And one of the best places for us to get that is in the wilderness where the

fun houses, the bulldozers, and the pavement of our civilization are shut out.

Sherwood Anderson, in a letter to Waldo Frank in the 1920s, said it better than I can. "Is it not

likely that when the country was new and men were often alone in the fields and the forest they

got a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost.... Mystery

whispered in the grass, played in the branches of trees overhead, was caught up and blown across

the American line in clouds of dust at evening on the prairies.... I am old enough to remember

tales that strengthen my belief in a deep semi-religious influence that was formerly at work

among our people. The flavor of it hangs over the best work of Mark Twain.... I can remember

old fellows in my home town speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big empty plains. It

had taken the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of quiet...."

We could learn it too, even yet; even our children and grandchildren could learn it. But only if

we save, for just such absolutely non-recreational, impractical, and mystical uses as this, all the

wild that still remains to us.

It seems to me significant that the distinct downturn in our literature from hope to bitterness took

place almost at the precise time when the frontier officially came to an end, in 1890, and when

the American way of life had begun to turn strongly urban and industrial. The more urban it has

become, and the more frantic with technological change, the sicker and more embittered our

literature, and I believe our people, have become. For myself, I grew up on the empty plains of

Saskatchewan and Montana and in the mountains of Utah, and I put a very high valuation on

what those places gave me. And if I had not been able to periodically to renew myself in the

mountains and deserts of western America I would be very nearly bughouse. Even when I can't

get to the back country, the thought of the colored deserts of southern Utah, or the reassurance

that there are still stretches of prairies where the world can be instantaneously perceived as disk

and bowl, and where the little but intensely important human being is exposed to the five

directions of the thirty-six winds, is a positive consolation. The idea alone can sustain me. But as

the wilderness areas are progressively exploited or "improve", as the jeeps and bulldozers of

uranium prospectors scar up the deserts and the roads are cut into the alpine timberlands, and as

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the remnants of the unspoiled and natural world are progressively eroded, every such loss is a

little death in me. In us.

I am not moved by the argument that those wilderness areas which have already been exposed to

grazing or mining are already deflowered, and so might as well be "harvested". For mining I

cannot say much good except that its operations are generally short-lived. The extractable wealth

is taken and the shafts, the tailings, and the ruins left, and in a dry country such as the American

West the wounds men make in the earth do not quickly heal. Still, they are only wounds; they

aren't absolutely mortal. Better a wounded wilderness than none at all. And as for grazing, if it is

strictly controlled so that it does not destroy the ground cover, damage the ecology, or compete

with the wildlife it is in itself nothing that need conflict with the wilderness feeling or the

validity of the wilderness experience. I have known enough range cattle to recognize them as

wild animals; and the people who herd them have, in the wilderness context, the dignity of

rareness; they belong on the frontier, moreover, and have a look of rightness. The invasion they

make on the virgin country is a sort of invasion that is as old as Neolithic man, and they can, in

moderation, even emphasize a man's feeling of belonging to the natural world. Under

surveillance, they can belong; under control, they need not deface or mar. I do not believe that in

wilderness areas where grazing has never been permitted, it should be permitted; but I do not

believe either that an otherwise untouched wilderness should be eliminated from the preservation

plan because of limited existing uses such as grazing which are in consonance with the frontier

condition and image.

Let me say something on the subject of the kinds of wilderness worth preserving. Most of those

areas contemplated are in the national forests and in high mountain country. For all the usual

recreational purposes, the alpine and the forest wildernesses are obviously the most important,

both as genetic banks and as beauty spots. But for the spiritual renewal, the recognition of

identity, the birth of awe, other kinds will serve every bit as well. Perhaps, because they are less

friendly to life, more abstractly nonhuman, they will serve even better. On our Saskatchewan

prairie, the nearest neighbor was four miles away, and at night we saw only two lights on all the

dark rounding earth. The earth was full of animals--field mice, ground squirrels, weasels, ferrets,

badgers, coyotes, burrowing owls, snakes. I knew them as my little brothers, as fellow creatures,

and I have never been able to look upon animals in any other way since. The sky in that country

came clear down to the ground on every side, and it was full of great weathers, and clouds, and

winds, and hawks. I hope I learned something from looking a long way, from looking up, from

being much alone. A prairie like that, one big enough to carry the eye clear to the sinking,

rounding horizon, can be as lonely and grand and simple in its forms as the sea. It is as good a

place as any for the wilderness experience to happen; the vanishing prairie is as worth preserving

for the wilderness idea as the alpine forest.

So are great reaches of our western deserts, scarred somewhat by prospectors but otherwise open,

beautiful, waiting, close to whatever God you want to see in them. Just as a sample, let me

suggest the Robbers' Roost country in Wayne County, Utah, near the Capitol Reef National

Monument. In that desert climate the dozer and jeep tracks will not soon melt back into the earth,

but the country has a way of making the scars insignificant. It is a lovely and terrible wilderness,

such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored,

broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from

Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.

Save a piece of country like that intact, and it does not matter in the slightest that only a few

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people every year will go into it. That is precisely its value. Roads would be a desecration,

crowds would ruin it. But those who haven't the strength or youth to go into it and live can

simply sit and look. They can look two hundred miles, clear into Colorado: and looking down

over the cliffs and canyons of the San Rafael Swell and the Robbers' Roost they can also look as

deeply into themselves as anywhere I know. And if they can't even get to the places on the

Aquarius Plateau where the present roads will carry them, they can simply contemplate the idea,

take pleasure in the fact that such a timeless and uncontrolled part of earth is still there.

These are some of the things wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we need to put into

effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or "usefulness"

or even recreation. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more

than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as

creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

Very sincerely yours,

Wallace Stegner

Source 2—excerpts from Desert Solitaire

Ed Abbey (1927-1989) was perhaps the most iconoclastic environmentalist of the twentieth

century. Indeed, he refused to call himself an environmentalist. He was a staunch advocate of

the right to own guns and was sometimes very ethnocentric. But he was a passionate defender of

wild places and unsparing critic of Cold War industrial America. His novel The Monkey Wrench

Gang (1975) inspired Earth First!, an environmental organization committed to saving

wilderness through eco-sabotage. Born and raised in the hard scrabble mountain farm country

of the Alleghenies in Pennsylvania, Abbey spent most of his adult life in the American Southwest.

The following excerpt comes from his first well-known book, Desert Solitaire. This book is a

collection of reflections gathered during his three seasons as a park ranger at Arches National

Monument in southern Utah in the 1950’s.

“Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks” from Desert Solitaire by Edward

Abbey (1968)

There may be some among the readers of this book, like the earnest engineer, who believe

without question that any and all forms of construction and development are intrinsic goods, in

the national parks as well as anywhere else, who virtually identify quantity with quality and

therefore assume that the greater the quantity of traffic, the higher the value received. There are

some who frankly and boldly advocate the eradication of the last remnants of wilderness and the

complete subjugation of nature to the requirements of — not man — but industry. This is a

courageous view, admirable in its simplicity and power, and with the weight of all modern

history behind it. It is also quite insane. I cannot attempt to deal with it here. . .

Industrial Tourism is a big business. It means money. It includes the motel and restaurant

owners, the gasoline retailers, the oil corporations, the road-building contractors, the heavy

equipment manufacturers, the state and federal engineering agencies and the sovereign, all-

powerful automotive industry. These various interests are well organized, command more wealth

than most modern nations, and are represented in Congress with a strength far greater than is

justified in any constitutional or democratic sense. (Modern politics is expensive — power

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follows money.) Through Congress the tourism industry can bring enormous pressure to bear

upon such a slender reed in the executive branch as the poor old Park Service, a pressure which

is also exerted on every other possible level — local, state, regional — and through advertising

and the well-established habits of a wasteful nation.

When a new national park, national monument, national seashore, or whatever it may be called is

set up, the various forces of Industrial Tourism, on all levels, immediately expect action —

meaning specifically a road-building program. Where trails or primitive dirt roads already exist,

the Industry expects — it hardly needs to ask — that these be developed into modern paved

highways. On the local level, for example, the first thing that the superintendent of a new park

can anticipate being asked, when he attends his first meeting of the area‟s Chamber of

Commerce, is not “Will roads be built?” hut rather “When does construction begin?” and “Why

the delay?” . . .

Great though it is, however, the power of the tourist business would not in itself be sufficient to

shape Park Service policy. To all accusations of excessive development the administrators can

reply, as they will if pressed hard enough, that they are giving the public what it wants, that their

primary duty is to serve the public not preserve the wilds. “Parks are for people” is the public-

relations slogan, which decoded means that the parks are for people-in-automobiles. Behind the

slogan is the assumption that the majority of Americans, exactly like the managers of the tourist

industry, expect and demand to see their national parks from the comfort, security, and

convenience of their automobiles.

Is this assumption correct? Perhaps. Does that justify the continued and increasing erosion of the

parks? It does not. Which brings me to the final aspect of the problem of Industrial Tourism: the

Industrial Tourists themselves.

They work hard, these people. They roll up incredible mileages on their odometers, rack up state

after state in two-week transcontinental motor marathons, knock off one national park after

another, take millions of square yards of photographs, and endure patiently the most prolonged

discomforts: the tedious traffic jams, the awful food of park cafeterias and roadside eateries, the

nocturnal search for a place to sleep or camp, the dreary routine of One-Stop Service, the endless

lines of creeping traffic, the smell of exhaust fumes, the ever-proliferating Rules & Regulations,

the fees and the bills and the service charges, the boiling radiator and the flat tire and the vapor

lock, the surly retorts of room clerks and traffic cops, the incessant jostling of the anxious

crowds, the irritation and restlessness of their children, the worry of their wives, and the long

drive home at night in a stream of racing cars against the lights of another stream racing in the

opposite direction, passing now and then the obscure tangle, the shattered glass, the patrolman‟s

lurid blinker light, of one more wreck.

Hard work. And risky. Too much for some, who have given up the struggle on the highways in

exchange for an entirely different kind of vacation out in the open, on their own feet, following

the quiet trail through forest and mountains, bedding down at evening under the stars, when and

where they feel like it, at a time when the Industrial Tourists are still hunting for a place to park

their automobiles.

Industrial Tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the

motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling

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to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never

escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped,

presumably, to leave behind for a while.

How to pry the tourists out of their automobiles, out of their back-breaking upholstered

mechanized wheelchairs and onto their feet, onto the strange warmth and solidity of Mother

Earth again? This is the problem which the Park Service should confront directly, not evasively,

and which it cannot resolve by simply submitting and conforming to the automobile habit. The

automobile, which began as a transportation convenience, has become a bloody tyrant (50,000

lives a year), and it is the responsibility of the Park Service, as well as that of every-one else

concerned with preserving both wilderness and civilization, to begin a campaign of resistance.

The auto-motive combine has almost succeeded in strangling our cities; we need not let it also

destroy our national parks.

It will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a

hopeless battle. This is true. Unless a way is found to stabilize the nation‟s population, the parks

cannot be saved. Or anything else worth a damn. Wilderness preservation, like a hundred other

good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival

and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded

environment. For my own part I would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live

in such a world.

Assuming, however, that population growth will be halted at a tolerable level before catastrophe

does it for us, it remains permissible to talk about such things as the national parks. Having

indulged myself in a number of harsh judgments upon the Park Service, the tourist industry, and

the motoring public, I now feel entitled to make some constructive, practical, sensible proposals

for the salvation of both parks and people.

(1) No more cars in national parks. Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild

pigs — anything — but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized

relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art

museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture; we

should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places. An

increasingly pagan and hedonistic people (thank God!), we are learning finally that the forests

and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches. Therefore let us behave

accordingly.

Consider a concrete example and what could be done with it: Yosemite Valley in Yosemite

National Park. At present a dusty milling confusion of motor vehicles and ponderous camping

machinery, it could be returned to relative beauty and order by the simple expedient of requiring

all visitors, at the park entrance, to lock up their automobiles and continue their tour on the seats

of good workable bicycles supplied free of charge by the United States Government.

Let our people travel light and free on their bicycles — nothing on the back but a shirt, nothing

tied to the bike but a slicker, in case of rain. Their bedrolls, their backpacks, their tents, their

food and cooking kits will be trucked in for them, free of charge, to the campground their choice

in the Valley, by the Park Service. (Why not? The roads will still be there.) Once in the Valley

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they will find the concessioners waiting, ready to supply whatever needs might have been

overlooked, or to furnish rooms and meals for those who don‟t want to camp out.

The same thing could be done at Grand Canyon or at Yellowstone or at any of our other shrines

to the out-of-doors. There is no compelling reason, for example, why tourists need to drive their

automobiles to the very brink of the Grand Canyon‟s south rim. They could walk that last mile.

Better yet, the Park Service should build an enormous parking lot about ten miles south of Grand

Canyon Village and another east of Desert View. At those points, as at Yosemite, our people

could emerge from their steaming shells of steel and glass and climb upon horses or bicycles for

the final leg of the journey. On the rim, as at present, the hotels and restaurants will remain to

serve the physical needs of the park visitors. Trips along the rim would also be made on foot, on

horseback, or — utilizing the paved road which already exists — on bicycles. For those willing

to go all the way from one parking lot to the other, a distance of some sixty or seventy miles, we

might provide bus service back to their cars, a service which would at the same time effect a

convenient exchange of bicycles and/or horses between the two terminals.

What about children? What about the aged and infirm? Frankly, we need waste little sympathy

on these two pressure groups. Children too small to ride bicycles and too heavy to be borne on

their parents‟ backs need only wait a few years — if they are not run over by automobiles they

will grow into a lifetime of joyous adventure, if we save the parks and leave them unimpaired for

the enjoyment of future generations. The aged merit even less sympathy: after all they had the

opportunity to see the country when it was still relatively unspoiled. However, we‟ll stretch a

point for those too old or too sickly to mount a bicycle and let them ride the shuttle buses.

I can foresee complaints. The motorized tourists, reluctant to give up the old ways, will complain

that they can‟t see enough without their automobiles to bear them swiftly (traffic permitting)

through the parks. But this is nonsense. A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see

more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.

Better to idle through one park in two weeks than try to race through a dozen in the same amount

of time. Those who are familiar with both modes of travel know from ex perience that this is

true; the rest have only to make the experiment to discover the same truth for themselves.

They will complain of physical hardship, these sons of the pioneers. Not for long; once they

rediscover the pleasures of actually operating their own limbs and senses in a varied,

spontaneous, voluntary style, they will complain instead of crawling back into a car; they may

even object to retuming to desk and office and that dry-wall box on Mossy Brook Circle. The

fires of revolt may be kindled — which means hope for us all.

(2) No more new roads in national parks. After banning private automobiles the second step

should be easy. Where paved roads are already in existence they will be reserved for the bicycles

and essential in-park services, such as shuttle buses, the trucking of camping gear and

concessioners‟ supplies. Where dirt roads already exist they too will be reserved for

nonmotorized traffic. Plans for new roads can be discarded and in their place a program of trail-

building begun, badly needed in some of the parks and in many of the national monuments. In

mountainous areas it may be desirable to build emergency shelters along the trails and bike

roads; in desert regions a water supply might have to be provided at certain points — wells

drilled and handpumps installed if feasible.

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Once people are liberated from the confines of automobiles there will be a greatly increased

interest in hiking, exploring, and back-country packtrips. Fortunately the parks, by the mere

elimination of motor traffic, will come to seem far bigger than they are now — there will be

more room for more persons, an astonishing expansion of space. This follows from the

interesting fact that a motorized vehicle, when not at rest, requires a volume of space far out of

proportion to its size. To illustrate: imagine a lake approximately ten miles long and on the

average one mile wide. A single motorboat could easily circumnavigate the lake in an hour; ten

motorboats would begin to crowd it; twenty or thirty, all in operation, would dominate the lake to

the exclusion of any other form of activity; and fifty would create the hazards, confusion, and

turmoil that makes pleasure impossible. Suppose we banned motorboats and allowed only canoes

and rowboats; we would see at once that the lake seemed ten or perhaps a hundred times bigger.

The same thing holds true, to an even greater degree, for the automobile. Distance and space are

functions of speed and time. Without expending a single dollar from the United States Treasury

we could, if we wanted to, multiply the area of our national parks tenfold or a hundredfold —

simply by banning the private automobile. The next generation, all 250 million of them, would

be grateful to us. . . .

Critics of my program will argue that it is too late for such a radical reformation of a people‟s

approach to the out-of-doors, that the pattern is too deeply set, and that the majority of

Americans would not be willing to emerge from the familiar luxury of their automobiles, even

briefly, to try the little-known and problematic advantages of the bicycle, the saddle horse, and

the footpath. This might be so; but how can we be sure unless we dare the experiment? . . .

Excluding the automobile from the heart of the great cities has been seriously advocated by

thoughtful observers of our urban problems. It seems to me an equally proper solution to the

problems besetting our national parks. Of course it would be a serious blow to Industrial Tourism

and would be bitterly resisted by those who profit from that industry. Exclusion of automobiles

would also require a revolution in the thinking of Park Service officialdom and in the

assumptions of most American tourists. But such a revolution, like it or not, is precisely what is

needed. The only foreseeable alternative, given the current trend of things, is the gradual

destruction of our national park System.

“The Heat of Noon: Rock and Tree and Cloud” from Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

(1968)

The mountains are almost bare of snow except for patches within the couloirs on the northern

slopes. Consoling nevertheless, those shrunken snowfields, despite the fact that they're twenty

miles away by line of sight and six to seven thousand feet higher than where I sit. They comfort

me with the promise that if the heat down here becomes less endurable I can escape for at least

two days each week to the refuge of the mountains-those islands in the sly surrounded by a sea of

desert. The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of

the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as

wilderness complements and completes civilization.

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the

boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not

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we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. I may never

in my life get to Alaska, for example, but I am grateful that it's there. We need the possibility of

escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime

or drugs or psychoanalysis.

A familiar and plaintive admonition; I would like to introduce here an entirely new argument in

what has now become a stylized debate: the wilderness should be preserved for political reasons.

We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge

from authoritarian government, from political oppression. Grand Canyon, Big Bend,

Yellowstone and the High Sierras may be required to function as bases for guerrilla warfare

against tyranny. What reason have we Americans to think that our own society will necessarily

escape the world-wide drift toward the totalitarian organization of men and institutions?

This may seem, at the moment, like a fantastic thesis. Yet history demonstrates that personal

liberty is a rare and precious thing, that all societies tend toward the absolute until attack from

without or collapse from within breaks up the social machine and makes freedom and innovation

again possible. Technology adds a new dimension to the process by providing modern despots

with instruments far more efficient than any available to their classical counterparts. Surely it is

no accident that the most thorough of tyrannies appeared in Europe's most thoroughly scientific

and industrialized nation. If we allow our own country to become as densely populated,

overdeveloped and technically unified as modern Germany we may face a similar fate.

The value of wilderness, on the other hand, as a base for resistance to centralized domination is

demonstrated by recent history. In Budapest and Santo Domingo, for example, popular revolts

were easily and quickly crushed because an urbanized environment gives the advantage to the

power with the technological equipment. But in Cuba, Algeria and Vietnam the revolutionaries,

operating in mountain, desert and jungle hinterlands with the active or tacit support of a thinly

dispersed population, have been able to overcome or at least fight to a draw official

establishment forces equipped with all of the terrible weapons of twentieth century militarism.

Rural insurrections can then be suppressed only by bombing and burning villages and

countryside so thoroughly that the mass of the population is forced to take refuge in the cities,

there the people are then policed and if necessary starved into submission. The city, which

should be the symbol and center of civilization, can also be made to function as a concentration

camp. This is one of the significant discoveries of contemporary political science.

How does this theory apply to the present and future of the famous United States of North

America? Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people --

the following preparations would be essential:

1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close

surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-

gunned with a minimum of expense and waste.

2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered

farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers,

woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to

manage unless displaced from their natural environment.

11

3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations.

4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more

easily manipulated and dominated than scattered individuals.

5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an

attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority.

6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within the society by engaging in foreign wars; make

support of these wars a test of loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the

new order.

7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate

autobahns.

8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests,

strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks

into national parking lots.

Idle speculations, feeble and hopeless protest. It was all foreseen nearly half a century ago by the

most cold-eyed and clear-eyed of our national poets, on California's shore, at the end of the open

road. Shine, perishing republic.

Source 3

A child of privilege who grew up in Burlington, Iowa, before attending Yale University, Aldo

Leopold (1887-1948) began his life as a forester and wildlife manager for the United States

government. After two decades of this work he began to question the ecological benefits of

managing land for human benefit. In the 1930s, after he had become a professor of forestry and

wildlife management at the University of Wisconsin, Leopold purchased a worn-out farm on the

Wisconsin prairie and devoted the rest of his life to restoring the land. The essay that follows is

from his most famous book, A Sand County Almanac, a collection of reflections on the

relationship between humans and the land.

“Wilderness” from A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, Oxford

University Press, 1949, Aldo Leopold.

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.

Wilderness was never a homogenous raw material. It was very diverse, and the resulting artifacts

are very diverse. These differences in the end product are known as cultures. The rich diversity

of the world‟s cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.

For the first time in the history of the human species, two changes are now impending. One is the

exhaustion of wilderness in the more habitable portions of the globe. The other is the world-wide

hybridization of cultures through modern transport and industrialization. Neither can be

prevented, and perhaps should not be, but the question arises whether, by some slight

12

amelioration of the impending changes, certain values can be preserved that would otherwise be

lost.

To the laborer in the sweat of his labor, the raw stuff on his anvil is an adversary to be

conquered. So was wilderness an adversary to the pioneer.

But to the laborer in repose, able for the moment to cast a philosophical eye on his world, that

same raw stuff is something to be loved and cherished, because it gives definition and meaning

to his life. This is the plea for the preservation of some tag-ends of wilderness, as museum

pieces, for the edification of those who may one day wish to see, feel, or study the origins of

their cultural inheritance.

The Remnants

Many of the diverse wildernesses out of which we have hammered America are already gone;

hence in any practical program the unit areas to be preserved must vary greatly in size and in

degree of wildness.

No living man will see again the long-grass prairie, where a sea of prairie flowers lapped at the

stirrups of the pioneer. We shall do well to find a forty here and there on which the prairie plants

can be kept alive as species. There were a hundred such plants, many of exceptional beauty.

Most of them are quite unknown to those who have inherited their domain.

But the short-grass prairie, where Cabeza de Vaca saw the horizon under the bellies of the

buffalo, is still extant in a few spots of 10,000-acres size, albeit severely chewed up by sheep,

cattle, and dry-farmers. If the forty-niners are worth commemorating on the walls of state

capitols, is not the scene of their mighty hegira worth commemorating in several national prairie

reservations?

Of the coastal prairie there is one block in Florida, and one in Texas, but oil wells, onion fields,

and citrus groves are closing in, armed to the teeth with drill and bulldozers. It is last call.

No living man will see again the virgin pineries of the Lake States, or the flatwoods of the

coastal plain, or the giant hardwoods; of these samples of a few acres each will have to suffice.

But there are still several blocks of maple-hemlock of thousand-acre size; there are similar

blocks of Appalachian hardwoods, of southern hardwood swamp, of cypress swamp, and of

Adirondack spruce. Few of these tag-ends are secure from prospective cuttings, and fewer still

from prospective tourist roads.

One of the fastest-shrinking categories of wilderness is coastlines. Cottages and tourist roads

have all but annihilated wild coasts on both oceans, and Lake Superior is now losing the last

large remnant of wild shoreline on the Great Lakes. No single kind of wilderness is more

intimately interwoven with history, and none nearer the point of complete disappearance.

In all North America east of the Rockies, there is only one large area formally reserved as a

wilderness: the Quetico-Superior International Park in Minnesota and Ontario. This magnificent

block of canoe-country, a mosaic of lakes and rivers, lies mostly in Canada and can be about as

large as Canada chooses to make it, but its integrity is threatened by two recent developments:

the growth of fishing resorts served by pontoon equipped airplanes, and a jurisdictional dispute

13

whether the Minnesota end of the area shall be all National Forest, or partly State Forest. The

whole region is in danger of power impoundments, and this regrettable cleavage among

proponents of wilderness may end in giving power the whip-hand.

In the Rocky Mountain states, a score of areas in the National Forests, varying in size from a

hundred thousand to half a million acres, are withdrawn as wilderness, and closed to roads,

hotels, and other inimical uses. In the National Parks the same principle is recognized, but no

specific boundaries are delimited. Collectively, these federal areas are the backbone of the

wilderness program, but they are not so secure as the paper record may lead one to believe. Local

pressures for new tourist roads knock off a chip here and a slab there. There is perennial pressure

for extension of roads for forest-fire control, and these, by slow degrees, become public

highways. Idle CCC camps presented a wide spread temptation to build new and often needless

roads. Lumber shortages during the war gave impetus of military necessity to many road

extensions, legitimate and otherwise. At the present moment, ski-tows and ski-hotels are being

promoted in many mountain areas, often without regard to their prior designation as wilderness.

One of the most insidious invasions of wilderness is via predator control. It works thus: wolves

and lions are cleaned out of a wilderness area in the interests of big-game management. The big-

game herds (usually deer or elk) then increase to the point of over browsing the range. Hunters

must then be encouraged to harvest the surplus, but modern hunters refuse to operate far from a

car; hence a road must be built to provide access to the surplus game. Again and again,

wilderness areas have been split by this process, but it still continues.

The Rocky Mountain system of wilderness areas covers a wide gamut of forest types, from the

juniper breaks of the Southwest to the „illimitable woods where rolls the Oregon.‟ It is lacking,

however, in desert areas, probably because of that under-aged brand of esthetics which limits the

definition of „scenery‟ to lakes and pine trees.

In Canada and Alaska there are still large expanses of virgin country

Where nameless men by the nameless rivers wander and in strange valleys die strange

deaths alone.

A representative series of these areas can, and should, be kept. Many are of negligible ornegative

value for economic use. It will be contended, of course, that no deliberate planning to this end is

necessary; that adequate areas will survive anyhow. All recent history belies so comforting an

assumption. Even if wild spots do survive, what of the fauna? The woodland caribou, the several

races of mountain sheep, the pure form of woods buffalo, the barren ground grizzly, the

freshwater seals, and the whales are even now threatened. Of what use are wild areas destitute of

their distinctive faunas? The recently organized Arctic Institute has embarked on the

industrialization of the Arctic wastes, with excellent chances of enough success to ruin them as

wilderness. It is last call, even in the Far North.

To what extent Canada and Alaska will be able to see and grasp their opportunities is anybody‟s

guess. Pioneers usually scoff at any effort to perpetuate pioneering. . . .

14

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. Invasions can be arrested or modified in

a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, or for science, or for wildlife, but creation

of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.

It follows, then, that any wilderness program is a rearguard action, through which retreats are

reduced to a minimum. The Wilderness Society was organized in 1935 „for the purpose of saving

the wilderness remnants in America.‟

It does not suffice, however, to have such a society. Unless there be wilderness-minded men

scattered through all the conservation bureaus, the society may never learn of new invasions until

the time for action has passed. Furthermore a militant minority of wilderness-minded citizens

must be on watch throughout the nation, and available for action in a pinch.

In Europe, where wilderness has now retreated to the Carpathians and Siberia, every thinking

conservationist bemoans its loss. Even in Britain, which has less room for land-luxuries than

almost any other civilized country, there is a vigorous if belated movement for saving a few

small spots of semi-wild land.

Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of

intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes

that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or

economic, that will last a thousand years. It is only the scholar who appreciates that all history

consists of successive excursions from a single starting point, to which man returns again and

again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values. It is only the scholar who

understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise.

15

Source 4 Grand Tetons and Snake River, Ansel Adams (1941)

16

Source 5—The Wilderness Act (1964)

Public Law 88-577 (16 U.S. C. 1131-1136)

88th Congress, Second Session

September 3, 1964

AN ACT

To establish a National Wilderness Preservation System for the permanent good of the whole

people, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in

Congress assembled,

SHORT TITLE

Section 1. This Act may be cited as the "Wilderness Act".

WILDERNESS SYSTEM ESTABLISHED STATEMENT OF POLICY

Sec. 2. (a) In order to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement

and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and

its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural

condition, it is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress to secure for the American

people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness. For

this purpose there is hereby established a National Wilderness Preservation System to be

composed of federally owned areas designated by Congress as "wilderness areas", and these

shall be administered for the use and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as will

leave them unimpaired for future use as wilderness, and so as to provide for the protection of

these areas, the preservation of their wilderness character, and for the gathering and

dissemination of information regarding their use and enjoyment as wilderness; and no Federal

lands shall be designated as "wilderness areas" except as provided for in this Act or by a

subsequent Act. . . .

DEFINITION OF WILDERNESS

(c) 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 its community of life are

untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of

wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land

retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or

human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions

17

and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature,

with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding

opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least

five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation

and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or

other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value. . . .

PROHIBITION OF CERTAIN USES

(c) Except as specifically provided for in this Act, and subject to existing private rights,

there shall be no commercial enterprise and no permanent road within any wilderness

area designated by this Act and, except as necessary to meet minimum requirements for

the administration of the area for the purpose of this Act (including measures required in

emergencies involving the health and safety of persons within the area), there shall be no

temporary road, no use of motor vehicles, motorized equipment or motorboats, no

landing of aircraft, no other form of mechanical transport, and no structure or installation

within any such area.