Unfortunately, some academics trapped by “indoor philosophy,” and now even many self-proclaimed social justice advocates (who seem mired in anthropocentric thinking), who should know better, argue that wilderness is an antiquated idea that ignores the fact that people over hundreds or thousands of years lived in those places, regarding wild nature “as a transcendent realm apart from the Native people who inhabited those realms.”    

Of course, from a “deep time” perspective,  even ten thousand years (or twice that) is but a tiny blip in ecological and geological time. Clearly, Wilderness in the truest sense really did and has  in point of fact has indeed existed for millions of years, longer before human beings arrived, even those so-called “Natives.”  
But aside from this observation, the rationale of the anthropocentric indoor philosophers is wrong for several other reasons.

Such “indoor philosophers” criticize our American fascination with wilderness and with National Parks because they believe this causes us to lose interest in the more mundane natural areas that lie all around us.  William Cronon, in an article entitled “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” claims that a romantic focus on the virtues of wilderness causes us to denigrate the Nature present in our own towns and cities, with the result that we fail to work to protect these areas from degradation.  He somehow thinks that by emphasizing wilderness, we overlook the devastation that is occurring right near our homes. But anyone who has attended a National Park campfire program, or taken a hike or went backpacking, always comes back with a new or renewed appreciation for the natural world.  Virtually all American nature writers, and even most typical NPS educational programs have for decades encouraged visitors to go back home and get involved in recycling, litter clean-up, and protection of natural areas and native plants in their own backyards.  Visitors to national parks and wilderness cannot help but be sensitized to the devastation occuring right near their homes in comparison, and a visit to a park often motivates them to do something about it!  Only “indoor philosophers” can claim otherwise.

Moreover, the obvious answer to Cronon’s concern is not to stop preserving wild country within our National Parks and Forest Service Wilderness Areas, but to use the beauty of these areas as a stimulus – as so many nature writers from Thoreau through Muir to Terry Tempest Williams  have done done  – to open our eyes to the beauty of more humble, more mundane examples of Nature that occur near our homes.

Sadly, opposing what has been called “America’s Best Idea,” – the National Parks – and even the very “Wilderness Idea” (See Wallace Stegner’s Wilderness Letter)  has now become one of the primary messages from social justice advocates who believe that  attacking “white supremacy” means we must  abolish the very concept of Wilderness. Close examination reveals that this “Big Lie About Wilderness” is a literary/philosophical construct little related to the Real Wilderness Idea that conservationists have used to establish the National Wilderness Preservation System.

As Mason Parker of Wilderness Watch says, “The Wilderness Act was not an attempt at returning to some idyllic, pristine past—it is a forward-thinking document that sought to minimize human impacts on these lands from the moment of their designation on, creating living, breathing, experiential textbooks that can teach us about evolution and adaptation—but we have to let them.”

The current arguments targeting the many white males who promoted the Wilderness Idea in the 20th century likes to “parse their writings by assigning intent to turns of phrase that never were written to trigger. Allusions are taken out of context; individuals are judged not by the times in which they lived but ridiculed for what they should have said or done, or how they should have acted. In hindsight, some historical figures in conservation are demonized and discredited for being imperfectly human or having not been saintly. Often lacking in today’s culture wars is larger context and nuance, for it is far easier and lazier to cancel than engage in complicated, uncomfortable discussions about how the cause of saving nature involves mortal beings, none of whom, on any side of any issue, are without flaws.” – Todd Wilkinson.

And one of the worst consequences of that negative criticism is that now there is a right-wing backlash against Wilderness, coming from the highest centers of power in Washington, D.C.  

Sadly, the Wilderness Idea is now under attack from both the Left and the Right.  Only by centering ourselves in the truth of the history of the Wilderness Act and the previous decades that led to its enactment can we restore the importance of Wilderness in America and around the world.

Here are some essays which attempt to correct this “big lie”:

• • Conflating Recreation With Conservation is Not Wilderness Preservation by Mason Parker and Katie Bilodeau  (Counterpunch, March 20, 2025)
  • Criticizing Muir and misunderstanding the foundation of American nature conservation by Bruce A. Byers (October 22, 2021)
  • Wilderness and Traditional Indigenous Beliefs: Conflicting or Intersecting Perspectives on the Human-Nature Relationship?
    By Roger Kaye, Polly Napiryuk Andrews, and Bernadette Dimientieff in Rewilding Earth (December 8, 2021)
  • Reclaiming Wilderness: It Tells Us Who We Are, and We Lose It at Our Peril by Kenneth Brower (June 4, 2014)
  • The Real Wilderness Idea by Dave Foreman (2000) (PDF)
  • Wallace Stegner’s The Wilderness Letter Still Rings True – Yellowstonian – In 1960, Wallace Stegner wrote about the enduring importance of wilderness in the modern world. He called wilderness “the geography of hope” and today it’s more vital than ever for wildlife.
  • Wally’s Dream Of A Wilder New West by Todd Wilkinson (including an interview with Mark Fiege) – Why it is wrong to castigate the series of white males who played important roles in advancing conservation.

    The list includes John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner,  and even recent takedown attempts in Jackson Hole aimed at Olaus Murie.  The obvious  counter-argument to their cancellation is that these people were by necessity writing from their own knowledge, and were products of their time and while not peerless or without fault, they spoke out for land and species protection when it was unpopular to do.  “To not read the words of white male conservationists, to pretend that they did not matter to the world that we have inherited, to dismiss them as objects of study from whom we can learn—is to make a virtue of denialism, censorship, and ignorance. You don’t have to like the conservationists in every regard if at all, but you are a fool if you refuse to take them seriously, read them, learn about them—and learn from them. ” Likewise “Lacking among some cancel culturalists is a coherent and honest articulation of what the alternative would have been. Yellowstone is held up by some as a symbol of ignominy. And it’s true that the Tukudika, the Shoshone people known as the Sheepeaters, most notably, were prevented from continuing to live seasonally and engage in subsistence activities after Yellowstone was created. But Yellowstone is only a tiny reference point in a continent-wide phenomenon of removal, genocide, and injustice. The larger value of Yellowstone, ironically, is that it was a bold pushback against Manifest Destiny, that the total sublimation of nature would not continue there and that it supported the idea that some natural places ought to be set aside as inviolate. That’s a concept that many tribes practiced with regard to certain places, in reverence for wildlife and the power they possessed as Native peoples expressed in traditional ceremonies.”