Policy and Principle

Flaws (Gasp!) in the Wilderness Act

By Hillary Rosner, 8-02-05

The ongoing debate over what activities we should be allowed to pursue in wilderness areas is, on one hand, simply an offshoot of the larger issue of multiple-use management. America's federal public lands, which account for 28 percent of the country (about 650 million acres), belong to all of its citizens, and exactly what we can use them for has long occupied Congress, environmentalists, industry lobbyists, farmers, outdoor adventurers, city dwellers, and so on. It has spawned much of our federal environmental legislation, including the Multiple-Use, Sustained Yield Act (MUSY), the National Forest Management Act (NFMA), and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA).

But wilderness has special status in this country, both psychically and legally, and so the question of whether mountain biking or skiing or other activities should be permitted in wilderness areas is in some ways unique. The Wilderness Act of 1964 recognized a need to keep some parts of the country off-limits to development, "in order to insure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural conditions" (Section 2(C)). This explicit reference to preservation amounts to a recognition of the intrinsic value of wilderness—meaning that wilderness has an inherent value, beyond anything we might be able to do with it or use it for.

The same section of the Wilderness Act mandates that these areas "be administered for the use and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness, and so as to provide for the protection of these areas, the preservation of their wilderness character, and for the gathering and dissemination of information regarding their use and enjoyment as wilderness." In other words, we value wilderness for what it can provide to people: a setting, as Mark Woods writes in the essay "Federal Wilderness Preservation in the United States," for "certain outdoor recreational activities (and for solitude) that cannot be enjoyed in non-wilderness settings."

In the catalog of legislative doublespeak, the Wilderness Act is a gem.

From the beginning, it's unclear which motive is trump: are we preserving wilderness because it has intrinsic value? Or are we preserving it so that we can recreate in a slightly more wild setting than Yellowstone?

The Act goes on, as Woods also points out (you can find his essay in The Great New Wilderness Debate), to put limitations on wilderness preservation—to allow, for instance hardrock mining and mineral leasing, including any road-building and tree-cutting necessary, in places where there are pre-existing claims. "These exceptions," Woods writes, "indicate that wilderness preservation…can be overridden by various commercial and local interests."

Of course, today it seems incredible that the Wilderness Act ever made it through Congress at all—and it's painfully clear that compromise was necessary to ensure the bill's passage. But all this compromising in our attitudes toward natural places and things takes its toll on the American psyche. What does it say about our collective attitude toward wild places that even in the very legislation that recognizes wilderness's value, nearly a third of the Act's text is concerned with explicitly reminding us that consumption is king? And when even the preservation rationale itself relies partially on wilderness's value for human recreation?

Nitpicking the Wilderness Act seems as bad an idea in the current climate as criticizing the Endangered Species Act; with federal environmental laws under dangerous attack, it seems reckless to do anything other than vehemently defend them. But if the Wilderness Act is a true representation of our attitude toward wilderness, then we're in trouble—and the debate over whether or not to allow mountain biking in newly designated wilderness areas seems like a clear signal of distress. (For a great look at the arguments on both sides, see the comments on the first installment of this blog; things got pretty heated, and people are still posting to the discussion there.)

If we are ever to get anywhere with environmental protection in this country, we need—collectively—to recognize an inherent value in nature. In other countries and other cultures, this is self-evident. But here, protection of natural places, wilderness and otherwise, is always wrapped up in the question, "What's in it for me?" What's in it for us is a functioning planet, diverse ecosystems, and landscapes that—as Edward Rothstein writes in today's New York Times ("Mother Nature's Blockbusters"), "[leave] us both exalted and humbled."

For some reason, these things are not enough for us. We need to know we can extract resources—like oil or wood—if we want to, and bring along our high-tech gear to enhance our wilderness experience, whether it's mountain bikes, GPS devices, climbing cams, or Gore-Tex boots. There's a big difference, of course, between wanting to drill for oil in a wilderness area and wanting to hike it in waterproof shoes. But the base impulse may not be so different: it's about wanting to use the land in a way that's enjoyable or useful to us. My idea of wilderness might involve backpacking in solitude in order to remember that there was a world before humans; someone else's might be digging a hole in the ground to see what's inside, in order to taste what life was like for the first Westerners who settled in the harsh frontiers of the American West. Both are, ultimately, anthropocentric and, one could argue, somewhat selfish.

So is the argument about which high-tech gear it's okay to bring along to the wilderness—and the idea that unless you guarantee me the right to bring my favorite toy, I'm not going to help you preserve the land. Shouldn't we preserve first, before the land is gone, and argue about high-tech gear later?

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