The Big Lie Against Wilderness

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.”    

This misplaced attack is often grounded on a misinterpretation of the writings of John Muir. It is based on the quite mistaken impression that John Muir would  have been surprised to learn that places like his beloved Hetch Hetchy Valley he enjoyed in 1871 was not really a wilderness but rather a landscape managed by California Indians long before he or any other Euro-American ever set eyes on it. But the real facts are that Muir was actually acquainted with the Indians in question, was photographed in conversation with them, and in various accounts describes their “huts” on the floor of Hetch Hetchy. Muir knew full well, and firsthand, that Indians used the valley, appreciating their light ecological footprint and their careful stewardship of the land. He also knew and appreciated the vast difference between Native American and Euro-American impacts on the land. Muir wrote, “How many centuries Indians have roamed these woods nobody knows, probably a great many. It seems strange that heavier marks have not been made. Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than birds and squirrels.”  As author Kenneth Brower says,  “It is time for those of us who know wilderness, and who understand the idea of it, to wrest that idea back from its hijackers, a coterie of academics and historians too clever by half and stuck too long at their desks. We need, first, to reestablish what wilderness isn’t, because it isn’t what they say it is. No wilderness advocate–not Muir or anyone else–ever said wilderness means no people. Seasonal visitation by humans does not disqualify a place as wilderness, nor does subsistence use of it.”

The concept of “wilderness” sometimes gets painted with a very broad brush as being dismissive of indigenous uses. The argument is that to Native Americans, there was no such thing as “Wilderness” because Native people lived so close to the land. The Wilderness Idea is criticized as ignoring Native people’s longstanding presence on the North American landscape. But there are actually are analogs to wilderness in indigenous cultures.  For example, the Nez Perce refer to some mountainous areas  as “people-less”  lands.  And in most Native cultures, these are places where there were no or very few settlement areas.  The village sites would be located close to water and in hospitable environments; the high mountain peaks were cold with less game in the winter, so they were only places that they traveled and hunted and fished in only during the warm weather months. Those places would be deliberately uninhabited, restricting activities there to ceremonial, spiritual, or seasonal hunting and gathering purposes – all of which remain compatible with the concept of Wilderness today.  Clearly there  were sacred places that Indigenous people did not visit, or would leave alone for certain times of the year. Even today, the Mission Mountain Tribal Wilderness is closed for parts of the year in order to protect grizzly bears.  That’s what wilderness really is – a place for the “more than human” beings to live undisturbed. In that sense, the Wilderness concept enshrined in the Wilderness Act of 1964  is the most anti-colonial thing to come out of Congress as it pertains to public lands.  Many of the places we know and love today that are currently designated wilderness would have most certainly been logged or mined over by this time without that protection.  Certainly those Native Americans who still hope to conduct their cultural practices must be able to do so in non-industrially modified landscapes. Quite plainly, the concept and conservation approach labeled “wilderness”  is completely compatible with Indigenous lifeways and principles of caring for Mother Earth, treading lightly, and caring for the coming generations – especially the non-human and not just the non-human beings. Clearly, “Wilderness” – with a “big W” is by definition land predominantly shaped by natural processes and free of extended human habitation – and that is a concept which aligns closely many Native Americans views and practices pertaining to “settled” and largely “un-settled” areas of their homelands.

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 any human beings arrived anywhere, even those so-called “Native.”  

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.  

While later Cronon recanted his view, many still believe 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.

These misguided readers of Cronon’s original essay fail to recognize that Cronon himself, in 1996, explained that he was not talking about modern wilderness preservation campaigns, and offered an apology that was as much a recantation as an explanation of his argument: “I have not argued that we should abandon the wild as a way of naming the sacred in nature. I have merely argued that we should not celebrate wilderness in such a way that we prevent ourselves from recognizing and taking responsibility for the sacred in our everyday lives and landscapes.” [William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: A Response,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 56,5.]

Although that “big lie” was thoroughly put to rest decades ago, it has recently  become one of the primary arguments by social justice advocates – who should know better – who assert that in order to attack “white supremacy” means we must  abolish the idea 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.  These supposedly liberal voices are unwittingly falling into the “big lie”  that the Forest Service and the timber industry once used to oppose wilderness designations with their “purity pitch,” which has been long since repudiated – by the Wilderness Act itself and the entire wilderness management profession. Here are some essays which attempt to correct this “big lie”:

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, as Todd Wilkinson explains, like 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.”

The list of “white males” criticized today by misguided opponents to the concept of Wilderness  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.  

As Todd Wilkinson continues, “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.”

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.

The revisionist ideas of what wilderness means reveals a huge ignorance of the actual history of the modern movement … even the 1970 Environmental Handbook Prepared for the First National Environmental Teach-In (aka a “Earth Day, April 22, 1970), included an incisive essay about “Wilderness” by Kenneth Brower (son of noted environmental leader David Brower) which talked about how it was the wilderness “that enabled Eskimo shamen, their minds a product of the taiga, tundra, and sea ice to travel on spirit journeys…” He explained that as a child “I became a ten-year -old expert on injustices against the American Indian and an historian of Western Indian wars.” Brower spoke as well how his own first memories of the wilderness of the Sierra Nevada included the people, like “Tommy Jefferson, a packer, a full-blooded Mono Indian.” Similarly, many other promoters of ecological consciousness of the 1970’s promoted recognition of Native American cultures, such as Gary Snyder in his book The Old Ways.  Wilderness activists in the 1970’s grew up reading books like Vine Deloria’s God is Red and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” and protecting “wild” landscapes was understood as being in honor of Native Americans as well as a place for modern recreation.  For example, activists from the 1970’s to the present respect and work in partnership with the Gwich’in natives in their fight against the oil industry, which wants to drill all the wilderness of the Alaska’s North Slope. Concern for Native American welfare has long been part of the environmental movement.

And this concern can be traced back all the way to John Muir and other advocates of national parks. Painters George Catlin, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and photographers like Edward Curtis pictured Native Americans in ways that alluded to their harmony and ecological integration with the land. It was actually 20th century bureaucrats who actively sought to remove Native Americans from their lands, not the originators of the conservation movement.

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