Narrowing the Wilderness Focus
By Hillary Rosner, 7-03-05
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Since it's summer, and half the cars driving through Boulder are carrying mountain bikes, it seemed like a good time to return to the subject of mountain biking in the wilderness, which inspired such heated debate here a few weeks back. But writing on the topic really drove home what's become increasingly apparent to me over the past month: it's tricky to separate wilderness from other environmental issues, and from broader Western issues in general. Start talking about mountain biking in wilderness areas and you're immediately drawn into discussions of open space use, growth and sprawl problems, decision-making processes, environmental politics, and on and on and on.
All of these are relevant to wilderness. But my mission here was a little more focused, and I'd like to try to get back to it. I want to get at three central questions: What is wilderness? Does it still exist? And why should we care, anyway?
It's easy to get sidetracked, since these questions open a million different possible topics to discuss. Which is why I'm going to spend the next week—while I'm traveling in Iceland—coming up with a strategic plan for exploring and perhaps even answering them. I've got a stack of books several feet high that I'm reading for the first, second, or third time, but I'm always open to reading-list suggestions. I'd also welcome your thoughts on any aspect of this topic: If you've got the definitive answer to any (or all) of these questions, please get up on the soapbox and preach.
Meanwhile, I'll be reporting from Iceland the next three weeks. If anyplace in Europe still qualifies as wilderness, it's likely to be found in Iceland's largely uninhabited interior.
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Comments
I am a friend of Chris and Mark's and live in the NY area (NJ to be precise). I am a real estate developer, mostly housing in NJ and NYC but also in Colorado. Most of my early work was focused on affordable housing, but now I do a lot more market rate rental housing. I am a firm believer in all good responsible development efforts including transit oriented development patterns (most important I think), green building techniques, and diversity of uses and diversity of incomes within development.
I admire your efforts to get at "what is wilderness and why do we care?" I have nothing to add other to say that caring about wilderness is for many people simply an innate unexplainable passion that cannot be answered by "why" any more than why my 4-year old son's favorite colors are red, green and orange in that order.
However, another question, which you have not asked, is why are we losing wilderness and what if anything can we do about it? This "why?" is a very complicated one but there are reasons, some good and some bad, for why wilderness is disappearing. Certainly population growth is a major factor, largely due to people living longer and people with less opportunity in other regions of the world moving to this great land of ours. It gets really interesting when we start asking questions like - is the tradeoff of population growth due to longevity of human life and immigration patterns from less prosperous nations worth the loss of wilderness? This is not an easy question to answer.
There is also a prosperity argument, which is certainly less defensible as we may have actually been more prosperous in prior generations without Hi-def TV and cellphones, once you include free time, connection to loved ones, etc. in the definition of "prosperity" (Prosperity is certainly as hard to define as wilderness).
Recently I was working on a real estate development project in NJ adjacent to the Garden State Parkway that was halted by new protection environmental regs in NJ. The site had never been developed before, but was hardly wild given that the noise and perhaps vibration of the Parkway rumbling next door was so invasive. It would have made a nice development site for many who commute by car since it next to one of the two biggest highways in the state, and certainly would control VMT to the extent that someone was not driving 30 minutes to get to the Parkway. The site would also have housed 50 low income households, but not anymore. So was the right result acheived? I don't know but I do know that one could make a compelling argument on either side.
Anyway, I thought I would add my two cents and I would love to exchange thoughts further in the future.
Jon Vogel