The Gale Norton Paradox

By Hillary Rosner, 7-17-05

I’ve just returned to Reykjavik after a week traveling around Iceland, through dramatically varied landscapes: glaciers and their flat, wide outwash plains; rolling tundra; barren, rock-strewn moonscapes; wetlands spilling onto lava fields framed by steaming vats of boiling mud; snow-spattered mountains looming over fjords. Weather can change in minutes from 65 degrees and sunny to 50 degrees with whipping wind and rain. It’s a lot to absorb in a week, though a few cappuccinos in a smoke-filled coffeehouse should help me digest. I’m looking forward to two days in civilization to wash clothes and send email before heading out for a backpacking trip across highland wilderness.

Out into nature, back to civilization. Out. Back. Rare is the civilized person who does not think this way, regardless of how much she might love and care for nature. This cognitive distinction between man and nature is fundamental to our way of thinking, as many philosophers—including Holmes Ralston III and Kate Soper—have noted. Other philosophers, such as J. Baird Callicott, ask whether that distinction is necessary, whether it might not be better for both man and nature if we ceased to view them as two separate entities.

This more holistic view has its obvious benefits: if we think of ourselves as part of nature we might be more inclined to protect it. But if you follow the argument to its conclusion, as philosophers love to do, you risk losing the rationale for wilderness designation and much of the legislation that protects wild places and things from man’s influence. For instance: If we are nature, then perhaps we don’t need to limit our own access to natural places.

But viewing ourselves as separate from nature has its problems as well. If man is outside of nature, then an anthropocentric point of view will value man over nature; anthropocentricism, or a human-centered view of the world, is overwhelmingly favored in the U.S.—as opposed to biocentrism or ecocentrism, which view the values and rights of humans as just one voice among many equally deserving of attention.

Last week a reader asked, among several good questions, “Why do we, as a country, simultaneously love and loathe the so-called wilderness? And when did we divide ourselves from it?� A Q&A with Interior Secretary Gale Norton in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine illustrates this paradoxical American attitude toward wilderness. Norton is widely viewed as the worst thing to happen to nature in this country since James Watt, Reagan’s famously anti-regulation, pro-property-rights Interior secretary. Among other policies that make environmentalists’ skin crawl, Norton supports weakening the Endangered Species Act; under her leadership, the agency has been notoriously opposed to new wilderness designation and the enforcement of environmental regulations.

In the Times interview, the secretary responds thus to a question about why national park attendance has fallen in the past five years: “Lots of people, in seeking solitude, go to areas besides the national parks. It's really disappointing to hike three hours to get someplace and find someone else camped there.� The interviewer then asks where one can go to find solitude. Norton replies, “It could be a wilderness area.� Asked where she herself vacations, she admits that her last trip was to the rainforests of Costa Rica. So even the seemingly wilderness-hating secretary of the Interior in the fiercely anti-environmental Bush administration likes to go camping in the woods. Go figure.

The history of American attitudes toward wilderness are, particularly in the West, tied up in frontier living—both in terms of conquering and taming the wilderness in order to live and farm on it, and of perceiving a virtually endless stretch of land that humans couldn’t possibly ever fill up. Anyone who’s driven across Colorado’s Front Range, through the monochrome subdivisions spreading across every possible acre of open land, can see the fallacy in the latter idea.

It’s easy now, from the comfort of my heated house with my four-wheel-drive station wagon in the driveway and all the food and clothing I need available within ten minutes, to scorn the idea of wilderness as the enemy. But out on the range in homesteading days when I needed to keep my family warm and fed, wilderness was just a place I couldn’t grow food, full of creatures that threatened my well-being. What remained of the notion of nature as the enemy was killed off in the 1960s with Rachel Carson and the beginning of mass environmental consciousness, and most people today—regardless of their political or religious beliefs—have at least an abstract appreciation for wild places and things.

The problem is that this doesn’t translate into an urge to protect them. We want to go camping in pristine places uncontaminated by other people, and then return home to wireless email and lattes—but we don’t see the paradox there.

“The etiquette of the wild world,� wrote Gary Snyder, “requires not only generosity but a good-humored toughness that cheerfully tolerates discomfort, an appreciation of everyone’s fragility, and a certain modesty.� Not exactly a description of contemporary American values…but perhaps not completely irreconcilable?
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