Wilderness

An alert reader found this piece, which I thought was well worth a read. Here is the link and below is an excerpt.

Politicians, environmental groups and laws don’t protect wilderness, voters do.

* If the voters of the political entity with jurisdiction over the wilderness area are educated to personally understand the wilderness values involved, then and only then, will their representatives support Wilderness proposals.

* Neither Democrats nor Republicans are intrinsically pro–wilderness or anti–wilderness.

* The citizens and legislators who happen to live near a wilderness area should have no more say about it than the neighbors of the statue of liberty would have a special voice on what happens to it.

* Most legislators, public and civic officials and people near a wilderness tend to favor its commercialization, commodification and development.

* Once you identify the legislators to target, you know the voters you must educate: the voters who elect the politicians who sit on or chair the legislative committees with jurisdiction over your issue.

* Administrative agencies do what their political overseers tell them, so focus your lobbying on their political leaders.

* Campaigns for Wilderness in rural counties are won in urban areas. Most of the energy, concern and money in a campaign come from large cities. The focus of any campaign should be where the population of the controlling political entity is, not where the resource happens to be located.

It’s an interesting, and inaccurate, characterization of folks around wilderness areas in the New West who want all kinds of things, including wilderness. and I find the idea that federal property rights trump local needs as a bit.. well… colonialist. If it quacks like a duck… (eek.. I think I’m channeling Dave Skinner (!))

However, as a person who looked at endless tables of “things not allowed” in roadless compared to wilderness, I’ve gotta wonder whether “wilderness acres” is a target for someone or some organizations regardless of how much they’ve moved the needle from “very restrictive roadless land allocation” to “wilderness.” I think it would be helpful for everyone involved in the discussion to be reading off the same table of comparative restrictions. One of my wonky former coworkers, who is way more knowledgeable than I, pointed out that a specific part of the Colorado roadless regulation was more restrictive than wilderness. But how many people actually know what’s in and what’s out, comparatively? In my experience, very few.

And if it is all about Congress placing a stamp of approval on it, and wilderness being “more permanent”, then probably place-based bills for other things are the way to go, equally. IMHO. One more thing.. I am in no way dissing The Wilderness Society.. the people there I have worked with have been respectful and reasoned.

I was out of town and have a bit of a backup of posts and will be be posting them this week. This from Char Miller on Wilderness:

Link here..

Excerpt below:

The two men met in Colorado in 1919, shortly after Carhart achieved what Leopold then was dreaming about. Assigned to develop a plan for the development of roads into and cabins surrounding Trappers Lake in Colorado’s White River National Forest, Carhart took one look at the unsullied high-country site and reported to his supervisor that the best and highest use of the lake and its beguiling environs was no use at all. Strikingly, his advice and plan was accepted, and Trapper’s Lake is today considered the “Cradle of Wilderness.” So when Leopold came calling, he and Carhart had a meeting of the mind.

From their conversation emerged a set of ideas that eventually became enshrined in the Wilderness Act. Carhart, for example, drafted a memorandum distilling the essence of their shared vision, a perspective driven by a sense of how imperiled these lands were and how democratic their preservation would be. “There is a limit to the number of lakes in existence; there is a limit to the mountainous areas of the world,” Carhart affirmed in 1919, and “there are portions of natural scenic beauty which are God-made.” Such divine terrain, primitive and uncluttered, “of a right should be the property of all people.”

Two years later, Leopold published what amounted to a declaration of first principles, and did so in his profession’s lead publication, the Journal of Forestry: “By ‘wilderness,’ I mean a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.”

Even in the 1920s, not many places would meet all these qualifications, but the upper watershed of the Gila River did. Its typography — mountain ranges and box canyons — had isolated it from development, leaving it in a “semi-virgin state,” Leopold confirmed in his article. Its relatively pristine character made it perfect for his purposes: The Gila was the “last typical wilderness in the southwestern mountains. Highest use demands its preservation.” With the support of Forest Service chief, William B. Greeley, and regional forester Frank Pooler, he submitted a proposal to designate the vast region a wilderness, and to that end on June 3, 1924 the Forest Service set aside 755,000 acres.

For all its virtues, one of this landed legacy’s core assumptions, the notion that wilderness is absent of and an antidote to civilization, a place devoid of human impress, must be critiqued. The conceit emerged in the late 19th-century in response to the industrial revolution and rapid urbanization, when writers such as John Muir asserted that the call of the wild, of open space, would be a tonic for those living in cramped, dense cities. This understandable aspiration only makes sense however in the context of other historic forces that had emptied these lands of the people who once lived within them. The Gila wildlands Leopold encountered were absent of people as a direct result of the Mexican-American War and the Gadsden Purchase of 1853. To manifest its control over the region, the U.S. Army ultimately defeated the Apache who had made use of the Gila, relocating them to distant reservations.

Even with their forced removal, evidence remained that what would become a “wilderness” had supported complex social life dating back 11,000 years to the Paleoindian peoples who occupied the Gila highlands. And forward in time to include the Cochise and Mogollon cultures that later settled the region. When the latter disappeared sometime in the 13th-century it left behind a built environment that included cliff dwellings and pueblos, and a material culture rich in pottery. The Apaches, who arrived in the 1600s, held this ground for several centuries. To declare this land wild, then, was to erase these people and their ancient histories, an erasure the Gila designation set in motion and that has been replicated wherever wilderness has been proclaimed.

Leopold did not wrestle with this conundrum, though he recognized that wilderness was a social construct and a lived reality. He knew too that its physical presence was in decline. “Wilderness is a resource that can shrink but not grow,” he observed in Sand County Almanac. “The creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible,” and it follows that “any wilderness program is a rear-guard action, through which retreats are reduced to a minimum.” To hold this line required a new form of activist, “a militant minority of wilderness-minded citizens” scattered across the country and who are available “for action at a pinch.”

Energizing this avant-garde is also cause for celebration, on this or any other day.