The Socioeconomic Environment

WMDs and the Wilderness

By Contributing Writer, 10-17-05

By John Rember

Weapons of Mass Destruction in America's wild places? Hardly. My version of WMD stands for Working Mother, Desperate, and it's not the presence of single mothers in wilderness areas that worries me, it's their absence.

That single working mothers could become an endangered wildland species occurred to me years ago, when I observed that you could sit with a tool box on the shores of Idaho's Redfish Lake and serve humanity well by fixing the bikes of the kids whose fathers weren't there.

Times have changed, and not just because helping the children of strangers is no longer seen as evidence of a good heart and a selfless nature. It's also that Redfish Lake, like a lot of the West's other recreational assets, has become less and less available to the working poor.

One thing that hasn't changed. Most of those working poor are single mothers who have to work at low-paying jobs to house and support their kids. Fathers are gone. Child-support or VA benefits are too low or nonexistent. Idaho's status as a Right-to-Work state guarantees low wages, and the cost of raising children guarantees that those low wages won't be enough.

Children used to be brought to Redfish Lake for a weekend or summer vacation that didn't cost much and was in sharp contrast to the urban distress that many of them were raised in. The increase in camping fees, the price of gas, the gradual change of lakeshore camping from low-cost informal recreation to a technology-intensive, reservation-requiring, motorhome-based, urban-focused ritual has kept them at home.

That's worrisome. Kids who don't get to the woods can't learn its lessons, and the most important of those lessons involves seeing the natural world as it is-a delicate interbalance of living and cognitive systems-rather than as its portrayal as groomed parkland on TV.

Camping out offers unprogrammed experience at a time when most experience, if you're a poor kid, is programmed, from your video games to your dumbed-down school curriculum to your advertising-generated fantasies, which leave you wandering the aisles of mall shops, sick with unappeasable need.

Down the road 20 years, the news is not good. This country is creating a class of people who will not only lack money and decent schooling, they will lack experience with the natural world. Even now they are proto-zombies, living in the realities of commodity that occupy the other sides of the screens they stare into.

Exactly what does this have to do with wilderness? In 20 years when it comes time to make policy for public wild lands, you're going to have a massive group of voters for whom everything, even wilderness, is a commodity. Wilderness advocates have placed their faith in the 1964 Wilderness Act, without paying attention to how the Act's meaning is changing in a world that increasingly resembles the set of Grand Theft Auto. The danger is that wilderness will be seen as reserves of minerals or timber, or the view part of a doughnut of valuable view-lots, or the backdrop for aggressive games or a for-profit museum. It's a short step from any of those visions to selling it all off to address national defense needs.

If you think I'm being alarmist, you haven't been watching the transformations of the last 20 years. The Forest Service has gone from being a service agency to a police agency. Wilderness management, deliberately starved for funds, has come to depend on volunteer labor for basic maintenance. Public campgrounds are administered for private profit. The very concept of public land is under attack from the Bush Administration, as shown in its treatment of the atmospheric commons, National Parkland, the Arctic wildlife refuge and transfers of National Forest to private interests. The future-itself a commons-has been claimed and colonized by the architects of our staggering national debt.

Given such developments, lands already in the wilderness system should not be regarded with complacency. The Wilderness Act is not sacrosanct, and it can be changed either through additional amendment, through legal attenuation, or through further reduction in maintenance funds.

Long term, the only way that wilderness will survive in this country is if we get enough young people out in it so that they won't elect people who would make it a commodity. It's fashionable among wilderness advocates to scorn Boy Scouts, but a lot of Boy Scouts have grown up to become wilderness advocates. Funding programs to get people of limited means out in the woods-the children of WMDs in particular-is essential education in non-monetary values.

The current geriatric nature of the ski industry provides an example of what happens when you depend on people learning a difficult skill and then price them out of any arena where they can learn it. Understanding the wild is a far more difficult skill to acquire than learning how to ski, and people who value wild lands need to make it easy for the poor and fractured families of our communities to spend time in the woods.

Right now it's cheaper to buy a PlayStation 2 than to pay for a week-long camping trip for even one person. Think of PlayStation as a cheap introduction to the way the world works, and a debased lesson on human motives and aspirations. Think about the result of ten or twelve years of video gaming on a kid's world view.

Too often we miss the human dimension of wilderness. Wilderness is a human concept, and if you look at it closely you can see that it is more than just a legal one. It's an educational concept that comes out of a matrix of belief that suggests that experience in the natural world will make better human beings. That's not the matrix of belief that is generating any recognizable current social policy, whether it be toward our wild areas or our WMDs.

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