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 environmentbusters 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, allpowerful 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 publicrelations 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 trailbuilding 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 machinegunned 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.
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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
11
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
12
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 biggame 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. . . .
13
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.
14
Source 4 Grand Tetons and Snake River, Ansel Adams (1941)
15
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
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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.
17