Around the Campfire with Uncle Dave Foreman
Inhabited Wilderness?
The Rewilding Institute www.rewilding.org
Issue Twenty-three July 14, 2009
Words matter.
The other day I was plowing through a stack of things to read and
came upon an eye-friendly brochure about the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge and the need to keep it wild and from being trashed by oil and gas
drilling. As I was reading it, though, a line jumped out that made me blow
my stack. My friends know it doesn’t take much to set me off. They like
to laugh and say, “C’mon, Dave, tell us what you really think!” I am known
as a man of few euphemisms.
What enkindled my brain-fire in the Arctic brochure? Just a little
line, “The Arctic Refuge is an inhabited wilderness.” Why did they call it
an inhabited wilderness? Because some folks “hunt and fish; gather
plants, roots and berries; and travel on these lands.”
(I’m not going to name who put out the brochure, because I want
this to be a wideswept rant and not targeted at one wilderness outfit.
So, I’ll call them the “brochure bunch.”)
I could let this go by without saying anything, but it is a “teachable
moment,” as I think the jargon goes.
To deal with this twisted thought of a wilderness being inhabited by
people, maybe we need to know what acreage was being highlighted. The
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge sweeps over much of northeastern Alaska.
It is 19.5 million acres. That’s big. About the heft of Maine. Although
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the whole refuge is wilderness and cared for as such by the U.S. Fish &
Wildlife Service, all of it is not legally designated as a Wilderness Area—
only 8 million acres are, which is still mighty big. We conservationists
would like to have all of the refuge designated as a Wilderness Area, and
of that we most want 1.2 million acres along the Refuge’s northern edge
where the Arctic Coastal Plain (or North Slope) flows down from the
Brooks Range to meet the Arctic Ocean. Congress left the coastal plain
out of the Wilderness Area in 1980 because it could not make up its mind
then whether to shield the North Slope as Wilderness or let it be
industrialized for the oil and gas that might underlie it.
In a way, though, it doesn’t matter if the so-called “inhabited
wilderness” is the whole Arctic Refuge, just the Arctic Refuge Wilderness
Area, or the North Slope in the Refuge but not in the Wilderness. All of it
is worthy of Wilderness Area designation. So, in what follows, I’m going
to sweep it all together as wilderness.
For longer than I’ve been slugging it out for the wild,
conservationists have thought of “Big W” Wilderness and “little w”
wilderness. Big W Wilderness is what we call designated Wilderness Areas;
little w wilderness is for lands that should be designated as Wilderness
Areas but are not yet. Both kinds are wilderness on the ground, but only
one is set aside, named, and shielded as such. New conservationists need
to understand this, along with much more lore. All of the Arctic Refuge is
either Big W or little w wilderness.
Reading this “inhabited wilderness” line made me wonder. Did the
brochure bunch know what the word “inhabit” truly means? Did they
know anything about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Wilderness?
Calling the Arctic an “inhabited wilderness” seems to be a way to set it
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off from other Wilderness Areas so I wonder if they know anything about
Wilderness Areas, the Wilderness Act, or the National Wilderness
Preservation System? Because I know of the former good deeds of the
brochure bunch, I know that at least some of their folks should know all
these things. Nonetheless, they leave themselves open to such questions
and to why they would cloud the meaning of wilderness.
Let’s sniff out some answers. Inhabit means that people live in a
settled spot—anything from a city to a homestead—year after year.
Inhabit does not mean that they wander through it as visitors on foot,
horse, ski, dog sled, canoe, or raft. Inhabit does not mean that people
hunt, fish, and gather plants there. It means that they live there. It does
not mean that they dwell nearby or even on the edge. It means they live
inside the acreage being called wilderness. The brochure did not say that
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge wilderness had permanent settlements
in it. And, in truth, it does not. Were part of it inhabited, that part
wouldn’t be designated as a Wilderness Area, or proposed for Wilderness
designation, because the 1964 Wilderness Act says that Wilderness Areas
are “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
(I do know of one designated Wilderness Area that has people living
within its boundaries. It is the biggest Wilderness Area outside of Alaska,
Idaho’s River of No Return-Frank Church Wilderness Area. The inhabitants
live on private inholdings along the Middle Fork of the Salmon River.
These inholdings are the headquarters for cattle ranches. Besides
dwellings, barns, and the like, there are irrigated pastures and hayfields,
motorized farm equipment, and landing strips. These private ranches
inside the Wilderness get mail and supplies flown in. Nevertheless, the
River of No Return Wilderness is not called an inhabited wilderness since
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the indwellers live on private inholdings and not on federal land.
Wilderness folks should know that the Wilderness Act reads that a
Wilderness Area is “federal land.” This means that spots of private land
(inholdings) inside the outer line of a Wilderness Area are not thought of
as “in” the Wilderness, so the homes on the inholdings in the River of No
Return do not make it an inhabited wilderness.)
If the Arctic Wilderness is unlike other Wilderness Areas because
people “hunt and fish; gather plants, roots and berries; and travel on
these lands,” does this mean that the other six hundred some Wilderness
Areas do not let people go in them or hunt, fish, and gather berries? This
is an untruth sometimes made by foes of Wilderness Areas—that people
are locked out, but this is wrong. So long as motors or mechanized
equipment are not used, Wilderness Areas are open to all kinds of
comings and goings, such as hiking, camping, backpacking,
horse/mule/burro packing, llama packing, cross-country skiing, dog
mushing, canoeing, rafting, berry grazing, lovemaking, and so on. Outside
of Wilderness Areas in National Parks, hunting and fishing is given the nod
in most, as is the friendship of puppy dogs. So, the Arctic Wilderness in
this way does not break away from other wildernesses.
But maybe inhabit was for setting the Arctic Wilderness off from
other Wilderness Areas because of how much use it gets. Is the Arctic
Wilderness so overrun that it seems to be inhabited alongside other
Wilderness Areas?
Far from being a heavily tramped wilderness, I would say that the
Arctic NWR Wilderness is about the least trod wilderness I’ve been to.
Three years ago, I spent three weeks canoeing two hundred miles there.
But for my five friends and the bush pilot who dropped us off and picked
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us up, I saw no one else, nor did I see but little to show that others had
been there. Thinking about it, those three weeks were the longest I’ve
gone without seeing others. Afterwards, our bush plane dropped Nancy
and me off at Arctic Village on the south end of the wilderness. From this
little Gwich’in town to Kaktovic, an Inupiat settlement on the Arctic Ocean
is a span of 150 miles. Again, the Arctic NWR is 19.5 million acres and
the designated Arctic NWR Wilderness Area is 8 million acres. As I said,
this is big. Flying over such man-empty land for hours gives you
blitheness that there are a few big sweeps of the world not overrun by
naked apes.
Now, let’s look at another Wilderness Area: The Sandia Mountains
Wilderness Area in the Cibola National Forest of New Mexico. This
Wilderness Area is my backyard. Before I hurt my back, I could get to the
Wilderness Area boundary on foot in five minutes from my suburban home
in Albuquerque—two blocks-worth of sidewalks and two hundred yards of
dirt track in the City of Albuquerque Open Space—to kiss the Wilderness
Area sign. From the other side of my house—to the west—is about 18
miles of cityscape, broken only by the narrow band of the Rio Grande.
The Sandia Wilderness is 37,000 acres; it is split in two by a tramway and
ski area, which makes the whole next to me about 20,000 acres. From
my neighborhood over the Wilderness to the first home on the east side
is about five and a half miles. While there are no built trails and no signs
in the Arctic Wilderness, the Sandia Wilderness is webbed with built trails
and lots of trail signs. You are likely to meet ten or more people on most
of the trails while on a day hike. The Sandia Wilderness is almost hemmed
in by settlement, with Albuquerque to the west, Placitas to the north,
Sandia Park and subdivisions and ranchettes to the east, and Interstate
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40 and scattered dwellings to the south. About 800,000 people live
around the Sandia Wilderness Area, whereas the two villages on the edge
of the Arctic Wilderness have a few hundred people.
One way to look at the heft of the human footprint in a Wilderness
Area would be to reckon something I’ll call the yearly “PDA.” First, count
the number of person-days (PD) of wilderness visitors. If a total of 1,000
people visit the wilderness in a year and stay an average of three days,
then there are 3,000 person-days. A is acreage. If the wilderness is
10,000 acres, divide that into the person-days and you get a yearly PDA
of .3. Were we to do that for each one of the six hundred plus wilderness
areas in the United States, where would the Arctic Wilderness Area come
in? If not at the bottom, then somewhere in the bottom 1 percent of all
areas. The Sandia Wilderness, on the other hand, would likely be in the
top 10 percent for PDA.
So, the Arctic could not be called inhabited because of a heavy
human footprint. The Sandia Mountains Wilderness Area has far, far more
of the sight, smell, and blare of Man than does the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge wilderness. In no way is the Arctic wilderness inhabited alongside
the Sandias. Let me underline, though, that none of this means the
Sandia Wilderness is inhabited. It gets more visitors than does the Arctic.
That’s all.
Thus, I am left wondering why the brochure bunch wanted to call
the Arctic Refuge wilderness inhabited. Well, the folks who pick berries
and hunt in it are the two native bands in greater northeastern Alaska,
the Gwich’in and the Inupiat. If native people visit and use a wilderness
does this make it an inhabited wilderness? Let’s look at the Sandia
Wilderness again. On the west, some of the Sandia Wilderness meets
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Sandia Pueblo. The Sandia Mountains are key to the being of the Sandia
people. The New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, other conservationists, and
Sandia Pueblo worked together with the New Mexico congressional
delegation to pass legislation acknowledging the meaning of the Sandia
Wilderness to Sandia Pueblo and acknowledging that they could hunt,
gather plants, and undertake spiritual practices in the Wilderness (under
the same nonmotorized requirements that apply to anyone). Moreover,
the legislation gave another layer of shielding to the Sandia Wilderness by
acknowledging Sandia Pueblo’s wish to keep it wild and by saying that
they should be consulted on management.
About forty miles to the northwest of Sandia Pueblo and Sandia
Mountain Wilderness is Zia Pueblo and the Ojito Wilderness Area. The
Zias and wilderness friends worked together to get the Ojito made a
Bureau of Land Management Wilderness Area. The Zia people hunt,
gather plants, and have spiritual spots in the Ojito Wilderness.
Neither Sandia Mountain nor Ojito Wilderness Areas are thought by
anyone to be inhabited, so hunting and plant gathering by Gwich’in and
Inupiat peoples in the Arctic Refuge wilderness should not be thought of
as inhabitation, either. Saying that the Arctic Refuge wilderness is not
inhabited in no way slights the Gwich’in and Inupiat folks, just as it
doesn’t slight the Sandia and Zia folks to say the Sandia and Ojito
Wildernesses are not inhabited. So, I am left wondering what the
brochure meant? An ill-founded way to highlight the core worth of the
Arctic wilderness to the Gwich’in and Inupiat? An unthinking step to
make the Arctic stand out? Or carelessness?
I know, I’m a cranky, nitpicking, old fart. But I am not blowing this
issue out of proportion. Words do matter. When conservationists get
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something so wrong as calling a Wilderness inhabited because people
travel through it and hunt and gather berries, it is a big deal. We lose our
believability when we do such things. And not just the bunch that did the
brochure loses believability; all wilderness conservationists do.
Furthermore, we mumble and undercut the meaning of Wilderness Areas.
This plays into the hands of wilderness foes. The heart of Wilderness
Areas is that they are places where humans are visitors who do not
remain. To talk about a designated Wilderness Area as inhabited helps
those who would tear down what Wilderness Areas are. It gives
ammunition to those who want to let people live in protected areas
around the world. I can see this being brought up at the World Wilderness
Congress in Merida, México, this fall, to ask why protected areas should
not have human settlements in them. I can also see it being brought up
by energy-industry lobbyists to members of Congress. “Look,” they say,
waving the brochure around, “Even the conservationists say the place is
inhabited. So, it’s not pristine. It can’t be designated as wilderness, and
we won’t be hurting any wilderness if we drill there.”
As I think more about this, it strikes me that by whatever yardstick
we could use to call the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge an “inhabited
wilderness,” we could call every Wilderness Area in the United States an
“inhabited wilderness.” This makes the thought of wilderness
meaningless, which might be the goal of some postmodern
deconstructionists, but it cannot be what wilderness defenders want.
To keep conservationists from making stumbles like this in the
future, let me make some recommendations.
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Please think through what you say or write for how it might be out
of step with what conservationists have said or done in the past, and for
how it could harm the shielding of wild things tomorrow.
For short-term gain, do not make long-term mistakes.
Do not fall for trendy postmodern deconstruction of what we’ve
done to keep wild things wild.
People who want to work for a wilderness outfit should read
Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind, Doug Scott’s The
Enduring Wilderness, and The Wilderness Society’s The Wilderness Act
Handbook. If they haven’t, they should read all three their first month of
employment.
Every wilderness bunch should have on hand someone who knows
the lore of the wilderness movement: a staffer, board member, or
volunteer who can check what the group prints or says for truth and for
thoughtfulness. I do that sometimes for the New Mexico Wilderness
Alliance and would do it for others, too. I know Doug Scott does it when
asked.
Those who run training retreats for conservationists should bring in
history, science, philosophy, and policy along with the nuts-and-bolts of
organizing and media.
And when individuals or groups botch things, they should be called
on it.
Words matter.
Coming soon: “A North American Wolf Recovery Vision” and “The
Solar Power Threat to Wild Deserts.”
Dave Foreman, Sandia Mountains Wilderness
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Copyright 2009 by Dave Foreman.
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