6 ms·

The Myth of a Wilderness Without Humans

79 points by anarbadalov 7y ago

anarbadalov 7y ago
The fact that native people have been displaced from their lands in the name of conservation isn’t news to all, but this is an elegant and erudite piece of writing — and a good distillation of that troubling history — all the same. Mark Dowie, a decorated journalist and former editor & publisher of Mother Jones, sheds light on the tortured semantics of the words “nature” and “wilderness,” and how conflicting views of wild nature created a rift between indigenous people and misguided conservationists for over a century. disclosure: I work on the MIT Press Reader, where the article — an excerpt from Dowie's book "Conservation Refugees" — is published. We're a non-profit press and the Reader is a space where we post excerpts, essays, and interviews with our authors.
- rch 7y ago
  However well written, it's frustrating to see an otherwise thoughtful work disregard the benefits of protecting public lands under the Wilderness Act, which is to the best of my knowledge the only robust means of doing so.
  - soperj 7y ago
    Protecting it from what exactly? It's already been massively disturbed by humans.
    - rch 7y ago
      The intent is to protect areas from further disruption, along the lines of road building, for example.
      - soperj 7y ago
        Sure, but there's nothing special about that land specifically. You could take any land, even within a city and do the same. It would return to nature pretty quickly.
        gambiting 7y ago
        Return to the "natural" state might take much longer than you anticipate - my favourite example is that the lands that the Aztecs and the Mayans used for farming still haven't returned to the same state as the surrounding jungle, despite being left alone and undisturbed for literally several centuries.
        soperj 7y ago
        Uhhh, i didn't say to a natural state. I said "to nature". The same way that the land protected to the example hasn't returned to a natural state. You can't get back to a natural state, it's been massively disturbed by humans.
  - njarboe 7y ago
    And there are vastly larger areas of public lands that are not protected under the Wilderness Act (Forest Service, and BLM lands) where human activity is still allowed. These could be managed in some way like the article advocates. I think that is article is a good one if one takes away from it the idea that humans have had an influence over almost all of the Earth's landmasses for thousands of year. The idea of wilderness, meaning a place where humans don't influence nature, is recent and probably partly stems from the depopulation of western North America from European diseases before Europeans began exploring the region. See the Louis and Clark expedition.
    - rch 7y ago
      I don't believe the article adequately addresses intensive industrial uses, e.g. oil and gas leases[1], which are potentially permitted on other categories of federally managed lands. It's also fairly disingenuous to claim that human activity is not allowed in wilderness areas: I'll be camping in a gorgeous wilderness area in Colorado this weekend. [1] https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/oil-and-gas/oil-and-gas-statistics https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/oil-and-gas...
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> He filled thousands of human-free negatives with land he knew the Miwok had tended for at least four thousand years. And he knew that the Miwok had been forcibly evicted from Yosemite Valley, as other natives would later be from national parks yet to be created, all in the putative interest of protecting nature from human disturbance. The history of the conservation movement is rich white people screwing over poor brown people due to romantic notions of wilderness. Lest we think it is in the past, look at the current conservation movement and endangered species. If you look at the land animals most people want to save, these are mostly in areas where a lot of poor brown people live. The brown people are the ones who have their development curtailed and have to live with lions killing their cattle, elephants trampling their crops, etc.
- hinkley 7y ago
  I've heard similar complaints about John Muir. People get very, very touchy when you say bad things about John Muir. Having read Tending the Wild, I'm inclined to think that at least some of their complaints have merit. California 'wilderness' was considerably curated by communities that moved back and forth from foothills to shoreline with the seasons (are you 'semi-nomadic' if you keep moving between the same handful of locations?)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jariel 7y ago
    This notion of 'curation' in the article and in your comment stretches credulity. Aboriginals were not in a position to 'curate' or 'manage' much at all. Aside from some rare controlled burns here and there - they didn't have the capacity to 'curate' vast areas of land. More reasonably, their 'industrial footprint' was small by virtue of their near lack of modern industrialisation and their small population. They were light on the land, but let's not construe that with some kind of 'caretaker' moniker - this is a romanticism of another kind entirely. Finally, because aboriginals were present in some areas does not abnegate the notion that they were essentially pristine, i.e. this is not some kind of false romanticisation of the land by Westerners, rather, a mischaracterisation. Lacking a large agricultural base, large scale domestication of animals, an industrial base, large cities or even large populations, it's fair to suggest that such areas were in fact, by and large, pristine - certainly relative to the West. Treatment of aboriginals by whatever policy is an altogether different question.
lacker 7y ago
If you go to a place like Desolation Wilderness, one of the reasons they can keep it feeling like wilderness is by enforcing fairly strict rules on visitors. In particular, the rules around where you can hike, where you can camp, where you can start a fire, and what sorts of activities you can do there. In areas where the government doesn't enforce so many rules, there will be recreational vehicles, hunting, logging, all sorts of other disruptive activities. So ironically, the only places that can still feel like wilderness are the places where the government takes some action to keep it that way.
- justinator 7y ago
  Is it ironic thought? Many of those disruptive activities you list aren't allowed in places legally designated as, (Capital "W") Wilderness. https://wilderness.net/learn-about-wilderness/key-laws/wilderness-act/default.php https://wilderness.net/learn-about-wilderness/key-laws/wilde...
  - mikelyons 7y ago
    But notice that it takes government enforcement to protect Wilderness, otherwise devils will do as they will.
  - lacker 7y ago
    It just seemed ironic to me because I once naively thought that the wilderness was an area where nobody did anything, and the government didn't enforce any rules. Then I got some handout with a big list of forbidden activities and realized, the government puts a lot of rules on the wilderness. There seem to be far fewer rules on the national forests. As a result it feels less wild because there are more people there doing non-wild things like riding ATVs.
    - justinator 7y ago
      There's a finite amount of land in say, the USA. The way the public land managed is not so wishy-washy for sure. Perhaps it's easier to understand when you live (like me) in a State where 1/3 of the land is Public - you start getting very familiar with all the different designations and what they all mean. It's a little archaic.
davidw 7y ago
Wilderness Areas in the US are sort of like the John Wayne preservation act in that they seek to preserve this idea of the "wilderness" from our imaginations. Ok: ride in with a string of horses, shoot an elk with a rifle, and pack it out. Not ok: push a baby stroller around because ...wheels! That said, they're a good way of preserving areas.
- ph0rque 7y ago
  Just put a car seat on a horse... problem solved!
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  Baby wearing is definitely a thing. I much prefer carrying around my kid in a pack or sling to pushing her in a stroller. She seems to prefer it as well.
  - davidw 7y ago
    Sure, it's more practical, but it's still an inane rule.
aazaa 7y ago
> “The time has come to rethink wilderness,” Cronon begins his essay. He goes on to challenge the widely held and decidedly romantic notion of environmentalists that “wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth.” The article doesn't contain many facts to support or refute this idea. For a lot of them, check out the books 1491 and 1493 by Charles Mann. Spoiler: the lands we think of as having been pristine prior to arrival by Europeans were in fact heavily manipulated and in some cases densely populated.
mistrial9 7y ago
warning -- the phrase "without humans" is an invocation of primal fears and anger amongst every sort of human mind that reads it.. It is a fairy-tale story intro, like "Once upon a time" .. the truth is, close to eight billion humans now live in every corner and crevice of this Earth.. there is no comparison to that, that is rational; instead we labor under stories like this..
jasonhansel 7y ago
BuzzFeed's (yes, I know) investigation of the WWF was very interesting for illuminating the effect of conservation initiatives on local populations: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomwarren/wwf-world-wide-fund-nature-parks-torture-death https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomwarren/wwf-world-wid...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- smnrchrds 7y ago
  No yes, I know is necessary. BuzzFeed News [1] is a well-respected award-winning investigative journalism outlet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
spodek 7y ago
I recommend MacKinnon's The Once and Future World, which talks about the world before our population exploded and overtook the world. It's shocking how much more untouched nature there was, or however I should describe it. Fish were so dense in the ocean that boats would come to a halt in the middle of the Atlantic. Coral reefs several stories high and miles long. Lions roaming North America larger than in Africa. Armadillo-like animals the size of cars. Plenty more. I did a couple video essays on it: - http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the-once-and-future-world-8-9-19 http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the-once-... - http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-010-the-once-and-future-world-august-27-2019 http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-010-the-once-...
- AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  Flying in a plane, it's apparent the scale of industrialization, be it agricultural or otherwise, we've imposed upon the world.
  - dTal 7y ago
    I think about this whenever I hear someone complain that windmills "spoil the natural landscape". There isn't a natural landscape - not anymore. Those pretty green fields and hedgerows you see in rural areas? As artificial as the Hoover dam, and as destructive to the former ecosystem. Unless you're putting windmills in Yellowstone National Park, you're not ruining anything that wasn't already ruined. (Also, it's ironic that despite the amount of criticism on aesthetic grounds they catch, compared to most things that generate power windmills are virtually ecologically invisible.)
    - Nasrudith 7y ago
      Aesthetic complaints seem to be largely nostalgia/conservatism based - anything new and functional is called ugly at first because they aren't used to it. See how the Eiffle Tower and trains were called ugly and now tearing it down would be unthinkable and old steam engines are considered picturesque.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

79 points by anarbadalov 7y ago

The fact that native people have been displaced from their lands in the name of conservation isn’t news to all, but this is an elegant and erudite piece of writing — and a good distillation of that troubling history — all the same. Mark Dowie, a decorated journalist and former editor & publisher of Mother Jones, sheds light on the tortured semantics of the words “nature” and “wilderness,” and how conflicting views of wild nature created a rift between indigenous people and misguided conservationists for over a century. disclosure: I work on the MIT Press Reader, where the article — an excerpt from Dowie's book "Conservation Refugees" — is published. We're a non-profit press and the Reader is a space where we post excerpts, essays, and interviews with our authors.

rch 7y ago
However well written, it's frustrating to see an otherwise thoughtful work disregard the benefits of protecting public lands under the Wilderness Act, which is to the best of my knowledge the only robust means of doing so.
- soperj 7y ago
  Protecting it from what exactly? It's already been massively disturbed by humans.
  - rch 7y ago
    The intent is to protect areas from further disruption, along the lines of road building, for example.
    - soperj 7y ago
      Sure, but there's nothing special about that land specifically. You could take any land, even within a city and do the same. It would return to nature pretty quickly.
      - gambiting 7y ago
        Return to the "natural" state might take much longer than you anticipate - my favourite example is that the lands that the Aztecs and the Mayans used for farming still haven't returned to the same state as the surrounding jungle, despite being left alone and undisturbed for literally several centuries.
        soperj 7y ago
        Uhhh, i didn't say to a natural state. I said "to nature". The same way that the land protected to the example hasn't returned to a natural state. You can't get back to a natural state, it's been massively disturbed by humans.
- njarboe 7y ago
  And there are vastly larger areas of public lands that are not protected under the Wilderness Act (Forest Service, and BLM lands) where human activity is still allowed. These could be managed in some way like the article advocates. I think that is article is a good one if one takes away from it the idea that humans have had an influence over almost all of the Earth's landmasses for thousands of year. The idea of wilderness, meaning a place where humans don't influence nature, is recent and probably partly stems from the depopulation of western North America from European diseases before Europeans began exploring the region. See the Louis and Clark expedition.
  - rch 7y ago
    I don't believe the article adequately addresses intensive industrial uses, e.g. oil and gas leases[1], which are potentially permitted on other categories of federally managed lands. It's also fairly disingenuous to claim that human activity is not allowed in wilderness areas: I'll be camping in a gorgeous wilderness area in Colorado this weekend. [1] https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/oil-and-gas/oil-and-gas-statistics https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/oil-and-gas...

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

> He filled thousands of human-free negatives with land he knew the Miwok had tended for at least four thousand years. And he knew that the Miwok had been forcibly evicted from Yosemite Valley, as other natives would later be from national parks yet to be created, all in the putative interest of protecting nature from human disturbance. The history of the conservation movement is rich white people screwing over poor brown people due to romantic notions of wilderness. Lest we think it is in the past, look at the current conservation movement and endangered species. If you look at the land animals most people want to save, these are mostly in areas where a lot of poor brown people live. The brown people are the ones who have their development curtailed and have to live with lions killing their cattle, elephants trampling their crops, etc.

hinkley 7y ago
I've heard similar complaints about John Muir. People get very, very touchy when you say bad things about John Muir. Having read Tending the Wild, I'm inclined to think that at least some of their complaints have merit. California 'wilderness' was considerably curated by communities that moved back and forth from foothills to shoreline with the seasons (are you 'semi-nomadic' if you keep moving between the same handful of locations?)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jariel 7y ago
  This notion of 'curation' in the article and in your comment stretches credulity. Aboriginals were not in a position to 'curate' or 'manage' much at all. Aside from some rare controlled burns here and there - they didn't have the capacity to 'curate' vast areas of land. More reasonably, their 'industrial footprint' was small by virtue of their near lack of modern industrialisation and their small population. They were light on the land, but let's not construe that with some kind of 'caretaker' moniker - this is a romanticism of another kind entirely. Finally, because aboriginals were present in some areas does not abnegate the notion that they were essentially pristine, i.e. this is not some kind of false romanticisation of the land by Westerners, rather, a mischaracterisation. Lacking a large agricultural base, large scale domestication of animals, an industrial base, large cities or even large populations, it's fair to suggest that such areas were in fact, by and large, pristine - certainly relative to the West. Treatment of aboriginals by whatever policy is an altogether different question.

lacker 7y ago

If you go to a place like Desolation Wilderness, one of the reasons they can keep it feeling like wilderness is by enforcing fairly strict rules on visitors. In particular, the rules around where you can hike, where you can camp, where you can start a fire, and what sorts of activities you can do there. In areas where the government doesn't enforce so many rules, there will be recreational vehicles, hunting, logging, all sorts of other disruptive activities. So ironically, the only places that can still feel like wilderness are the places where the government takes some action to keep it that way.

justinator 7y ago
Is it ironic thought? Many of those disruptive activities you list aren't allowed in places legally designated as, (Capital "W") Wilderness. https://wilderness.net/learn-about-wilderness/key-laws/wilderness-act/default.php https://wilderness.net/learn-about-wilderness/key-laws/wilde...
- mikelyons 7y ago
  But notice that it takes government enforcement to protect Wilderness, otherwise devils will do as they will.
- lacker 7y ago
  It just seemed ironic to me because I once naively thought that the wilderness was an area where nobody did anything, and the government didn't enforce any rules. Then I got some handout with a big list of forbidden activities and realized, the government puts a lot of rules on the wilderness. There seem to be far fewer rules on the national forests. As a result it feels less wild because there are more people there doing non-wild things like riding ATVs.
  - justinator 7y ago
    There's a finite amount of land in say, the USA. The way the public land managed is not so wishy-washy for sure. Perhaps it's easier to understand when you live (like me) in a State where 1/3 of the land is Public - you start getting very familiar with all the different designations and what they all mean. It's a little archaic.

davidw 7y ago

Wilderness Areas in the US are sort of like the John Wayne preservation act in that they seek to preserve this idea of the "wilderness" from our imaginations. Ok: ride in with a string of horses, shoot an elk with a rifle, and pack it out. Not ok: push a baby stroller around because ...wheels! That said, they're a good way of preserving areas.

ph0rque 7y ago
Just put a car seat on a horse... problem solved!
Pfhreak 7y ago
Baby wearing is definitely a thing. I much prefer carrying around my kid in a pack or sling to pushing her in a stroller. She seems to prefer it as well.
- davidw 7y ago
  Sure, it's more practical, but it's still an inane rule.

aazaa 7y ago

> “The time has come to rethink wilderness,” Cronon begins his essay. He goes on to challenge the widely held and decidedly romantic notion of environmentalists that “wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth.” The article doesn't contain many facts to support or refute this idea. For a lot of them, check out the books 1491 and 1493 by Charles Mann. Spoiler: the lands we think of as having been pristine prior to arrival by Europeans were in fact heavily manipulated and in some cases densely populated.

mistrial9 7y ago

warning -- the phrase "without humans" is an invocation of primal fears and anger amongst every sort of human mind that reads it.. It is a fairy-tale story intro, like "Once upon a time" .. the truth is, close to eight billion humans now live in every corner and crevice of this Earth.. there is no comparison to that, that is rational; instead we labor under stories like this..

jasonhansel 7y ago

BuzzFeed's (yes, I know) investigation of the WWF was very interesting for illuminating the effect of conservation initiatives on local populations: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomwarren/wwf-world-wide-fund-nature-parks-torture-death https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomwarren/wwf-world-wid...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
smnrchrds 7y ago
No yes, I know is necessary. BuzzFeed News [1] is a well-respected award-winning investigative journalism outlet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

spodek 7y ago

I recommend MacKinnon's The Once and Future World, which talks about the world before our population exploded and overtook the world. It's shocking how much more untouched nature there was, or however I should describe it. Fish were so dense in the ocean that boats would come to a halt in the middle of the Atlantic. Coral reefs several stories high and miles long. Lions roaming North America larger than in Africa. Armadillo-like animals the size of cars. Plenty more. I did a couple video essays on it: - http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the-once-and-future-world-8-9-19 http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the-once-... - http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-010-the-once-and-future-world-august-27-2019 http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-010-the-once-...

AtlasBarfed 7y ago
Flying in a plane, it's apparent the scale of industrialization, be it agricultural or otherwise, we've imposed upon the world.
- dTal 7y ago
  I think about this whenever I hear someone complain that windmills "spoil the natural landscape". There isn't a natural landscape - not anymore. Those pretty green fields and hedgerows you see in rural areas? As artificial as the Hoover dam, and as destructive to the former ecosystem. Unless you're putting windmills in Yellowstone National Park, you're not ruining anything that wasn't already ruined. (Also, it's ironic that despite the amount of criticism on aesthetic grounds they catch, compared to most things that generate power windmills are virtually ecologically invisible.)
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Aesthetic complaints seem to be largely nostalgia/conservatism based - anything new and functional is called ugly at first because they aren't used to it. See how the Eiffle Tower and trains were called ugly and now tearing it down would be unthinkable and old steam engines are considered picturesque.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]