Wild Salvation at the Wilderness Congress

By Hillary Rosner, 10-06-05

The power of religion to shape environmental views and policy is getting a lot of ink of late, particularly the growing divide between the pro-environment Creation Care movement and the anti-environment forces of the Christian right (increasingly under attack from within their own community) holding fast to the archaic view that God made Earth for humans to plunder.

The role of religion and spirituality in wilderness conservation was a theme of several sessions throughout the jam-packed 8th World Wilderness Congress, which concluded Thursday. At a panel on meanings of wilderness, John C. Nagle, a law professor at Notre Dame University, put an interesting spin on the popular subject of wilderness’s spiritual values. Nagle pored over transcripts of the early ‘60s testimony leading up to the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, and he was struck by how often those who testified mentioned spirituality. Housewives, ranchers, oil executives, members of Congress—they all, Nagle said, hit the same themes. They described wilderness as a place of encountering God, a place of spiritual renewal, a place of solitude and escape. They described wilderness as land the way God created it. While the spiritual language didn’t make it into the text of the law, it was clearly a powerful tool for gaining support—something that’s particularly interesting today when the most evangelical American Christians tend also to be those most opposed to wilderness preservation.

Roger Kaye, a wilderness specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, touched on a related issue in a talk called "Wilderness and the Human Spirit." Kaye pointed to writings of wilderness conservation greats like Thoreau, Muir, and Bob Marshall in which they all described what I think of as the Grand Canyon effect—the power of nature to inspire awe, to make you feel small and insignificant and yet also a part of something impossibly large and incomprehensibly great. He compared this to the "commonality of all religions": "the feeling that one belongs to something greater than oneself."

Harvey Locke, an accomplished Canadian conservationist who is strategic advisor to the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative (a grand plan to create a wilderness corridor from northern Wyoming all the way to the Canadian arctic), also described the spiritual power of wild lands. Yellowstone became the U.S.’s first national park, he said, "because you could not look at it and still be hard-hearted."

On a less serious note, Gary Tabor of the Wilburforce Foundation—which funds wilderness projects in the Western U.S. and Western Canada--spoke of a "compassionate conservation agenda," which contains many of the same basic tenets as the Bush agenda. It’s pro-life: the more biodiversity, the better. It’s faith-based: focused on predator-pray relations. It embraces intelligent design: a lot of thought, planning, and science must go into conservation design. And it is concerned about WMDs: the ability of species to weather mass disruptions. Who said environmentalists and neo-cons have different agendas?

The Wilderness Congress brought together 1200 people from around the world, to talk about conservation initiatives from the grassroots to the global. There are amazing projects underway all over, like the Canadian Boreal Initiative’s plan to protect a large section of the 1.5 billion acres of boreal forest across Canada; or the creation of a new wilderness area in Mexico that will link several preserves around Big Bend National Park. But perhaps the most inspiring project I heard about is taking place in South Africa, where today there are 800,000 AIDS orphans and by March there will be more than a million. Using wild lands as a force for social change, Andrew Muir, director of South Africa's Wilderness Foundation, has dreamed up Umzi Wethu—which translates as "our home"—a plan to house, feed, counsel, and educate the country’s AIDS orphans, train them as conservationists, and send them to jobs in the booming national parks and eco-tourism industry. Muir hopes, he said, to "restore balance through the healing power of nature."


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