The Wilderness Blog

Eating, Sleeping, and Breathing Wilderness (In a Convention Center)

By Hillary Rosner, 10-04-05

The 8th World Wilderness Congress in Anchorage is a wilderness wonk’s fantasy, a weeklong whirlwind of PowerPoint presentations, data dumps, and impassioned pleas for conservation. After attending just two days of it (and even with a kayaking interlude in the Chugach mountains), my head is throbbing, my mind overloaded, and I think the only thing that will help me unwind is a long vacation in the wilderness.

In the meantime, though, there’s some pretty amazing stuff going on around the world on the wilderness conservation front. As Peter Seligmann, CEO and chairman of the board of Conservation International, said yesterday morning, we have come to a period of “unprecedented opportunity and unprecedented urgency� for conservation. The time is now, Seligmann implored the crowd of hundreds from around the world, "to elevate conservation to its rightful place among global leaders and make wilderness a core global value."

There are wilderness people here from various African countries including South Africa and Burkina Faso, as well as from India, Australia, Germany, Norway, Canada and Mexico, to name just a few places. They’re talking about whether to drill in ANWR, how to protect Mali’s desert elephants, the need for wilderness preserves that straddle national boundaries, how to use wilderness values to save South Africa’s AIDS orphans, ways to measure human beings’ footprint on the world’s oceans, the economics of wilderness conservation. The Native Lands and Wilderness Council is meeting here—a group of indigenous people from around the world coming together to ensure that people are not removed from wilderness. Interestingly, most native tribes in North America have no word for "wilderness"; the closest translation is a word that means "our home."

There are scores of delegates from the Rocky Mountain West, including federal land managers, biologists, economists, lawyers, and representatives from conservation groups. There are so many Missoulians here that they even had their own poster session, the Missoula Area Wilderness Forum, where I met George Nickas, executive director of Missoula-based Wilderness Watch.

"People like to think, 'It’s designated, let’s move on,'" Nickas said of capital "W" wilderness areas (where the term is legislative rather than simply descriptive), the focus of his group’s efforts. But, he said, just because land is legally designated wilderness doesn’t mean we can simply leave it alone. Wilderness areas can—and often do—suffer from what Nickas calls "creeping degradation," caused by everything from motor vehicle use to grazing to impact from scientific research—like helicopters conducting vegetation surveys in sensitive backcountry areas.

Also at the Missoula forum was Nicky Phear of the University of Montana’s Wilderness Institute. The Institute’s Wilderness and Civilization program, celebrating its 30th birthday, admits 25 college students for a year-long immersion in field-based and classroom learning. The Institute also runs a citizen science initiative, begun this summer, which takes nonscientists on backpacking trips with specific wilderness monitoring tasks, such as surveying weeds. All the data collected is given to land managers and scientists studying the area.

This sort of volunteer effort will become increasingly vital as the budgets of the land management agencies continue to shrink—and as money for wilderness shrinks even more. Connie Myers, director of the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center, also in Missoula, will be talking to land managers on Wednesday about implementing successful volunteer programs—although, as Myers pointed out, "the problem is that the more successful you are at using volunteers, the more penalized you are." Meaning that if you run a great program on little money, you'll get Congress saying, "Hey, you guys did great when we slashed your budget last time, so now we’re gonna do it again and see how creative you can really get."

Creative conservation strategies are abundant here, though of course it always comes down to money. Over drinks the other night, I spoke to Bozemanite Ray Rasker of the Sonoran Institute about the rise of wilderness bills that are actually rural development initiatives that come with wilderness provisions. I’ll be writing more about these in the weeks ahead.

The best soundbite I’ve heard so far is from Alaskan writer and cultural anthropologist Richard Nelson, who said that the true meaning of "patriotism" is "allegiance to the earth on which a nation stands." "Conservation," Nelson said, "is the most elemental form of patriotism."

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