
The Myth of a Wilderness Without Humans - anarbadalov
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-myth-of-a-wilderness-without-humans/
======
spodek
I recommend MacKinnon's _The Once and Future World_ , which talks about the
world before our population exploded and overtook the world. It's shocking how
much more untouched nature there was, or however I should describe it.

Fish were so dense in the ocean that boats would come to a halt in the middle
of the Atlantic. Coral reefs several stories high and miles long. Lions
roaming North America larger than in Africa. Armadillo-like animals the size
of cars. Plenty more.

I did a couple video essays on it:

\- [http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the-
once-...](http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the-once-and-
future-world-8-9-19)

\- [http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-010-the-
once-...](http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-010-the-once-and-
future-world-august-27-2019)

~~~
AtlasBarfed
Flying in a plane, it's apparent the scale of industrialization, be it
agricultural or otherwise, we've imposed upon the world.

~~~
dTal
I think about this whenever I hear someone complain that windmills "spoil the
natural landscape". There isn't a natural landscape - not anymore. Those
pretty green fields and hedgerows you see in rural areas? As artificial as the
Hoover dam, and as destructive to the former ecosystem. Unless you're putting
windmills in Yellowstone National Park, you're not ruining anything that
wasn't already ruined.

(Also, it's ironic that despite the amount of criticism on aesthetic grounds
they catch, compared to most things that generate power windmills are
virtually ecologically invisible.)

~~~
Nasrudith
Aesthetic complaints seem to be largely nostalgia/conservatism based -
anything new and functional is called ugly at first because they aren't used
to it.

See how the Eiffle Tower and trains were called ugly and now tearing it down
would be unthinkable and old steam engines are considered picturesque.

------
anarbadalov
The fact that native people have been displaced from their lands in the name
of conservation isn’t news to all, but this is an elegant and erudite piece of
writing — and a good distillation of that troubling history — all the same.
Mark Dowie, a decorated journalist and former editor & publisher of Mother
Jones, sheds light on the tortured semantics of the words “nature” and
“wilderness,” and how conflicting views of wild nature created a rift between
indigenous people and misguided conservationists for over a century.

disclosure: I work on the MIT Press Reader, where the article — an excerpt
from Dowie's book "Conservation Refugees" — is published. We're a non-profit
press and the Reader is a space where we post excerpts, essays, and interviews
with our authors.

~~~
rch
However well written, it's frustrating to see an otherwise thoughtful work
disregard the benefits of protecting public lands under the Wilderness Act,
which is to the best of my knowledge the only robust means of doing so.

~~~
njarboe
And there are vastly larger areas of public lands that are not protected under
the Wilderness Act (Forest Service, and BLM lands) where human activity is
still allowed. These could be managed in some way like the article advocates.

I think that is article is a good one if one takes away from it the idea that
humans have had an influence over almost all of the Earth's landmasses for
thousands of year. The idea of wilderness, meaning a place where humans don't
influence nature, is recent and probably partly stems from the depopulation of
western North America from European diseases before Europeans began exploring
the region. See the Louis and Clark expedition.

~~~
rch
I don't believe the article adequately addresses intensive industrial uses,
e.g. oil and gas leases[1], which are potentially permitted on other
categories of federally managed lands.

It's also fairly disingenuous to claim that human activity is not allowed in
wilderness areas: I'll be camping in a gorgeous wilderness area in Colorado
this weekend.

[1] [https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/oil-and-
gas...](https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/oil-and-gas/oil-and-
gas-statistics)

------
lacker
If you go to a place like Desolation Wilderness, one of the reasons they can
keep it feeling like wilderness is by enforcing fairly strict rules on
visitors. In particular, the rules around where you can hike, where you can
camp, where you can start a fire, and what sorts of activities you can do
there.

In areas where the government doesn't enforce so many rules, there will be
recreational vehicles, hunting, logging, all sorts of other disruptive
activities.

So ironically, the only places that can still feel like wilderness are the
places where the government takes some action to keep it that way.

~~~
justinator
Is it ironic thought? Many of those disruptive activities you list aren't
allowed in places legally designated as, (Capital "W") Wilderness.

[https://wilderness.net/learn-about-wilderness/key-
laws/wilde...](https://wilderness.net/learn-about-wilderness/key-
laws/wilderness-act/default.php)

~~~
lacker
It just seemed ironic to me because I once naively thought that the wilderness
was an area where nobody did anything, and the government didn't enforce any
rules. Then I got some handout with a big list of forbidden activities and
realized, the government puts a lot of rules on the wilderness.

There seem to be far fewer rules on the national forests. As a result it feels
less wild because there are more people there doing non-wild things like
riding ATVs.

~~~
justinator
There's a finite amount of land in say, the USA. The way the public land
managed is not so wishy-washy for sure. Perhaps it's easier to understand when
you live (like me) in a State where 1/3 of the land is Public - you start
getting very familiar with all the different designations and what they all
mean. It's a little archaic.

~~~
a0-prw
There's a finite amount of land on earth, so, yeah.

------
jasonhansel
BuzzFeed's (yes, I know) investigation of the WWF was very interesting for
illuminating the effect of conservation initiatives on local populations:
[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomwarren/wwf-world-
wid...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomwarren/wwf-world-wide-fund-
nature-parks-torture-death)

~~~
smnrchrds
No _yes, I know_ is necessary. BuzzFeed _News_ [1] is a well-respected award-
winning investigative journalism outlet.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News)

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> He filled thousands of human-free negatives with land he knew the Miwok had
> tended for at least four thousand years. And he knew that the Miwok had been
> forcibly evicted from Yosemite Valley, as other natives would later be from
> national parks yet to be created, all in the putative interest of protecting
> nature from human disturbance.

The history of the conservation movement is rich white people screwing over
poor brown people due to romantic notions of wilderness.

Lest we think it is in the past, look at the current conservation movement and
endangered species. If you look at the land animals most people want to save,
these are mostly in areas where a lot of poor brown people live. The brown
people are the ones who have their development curtailed and have to live with
lions killing their cattle, elephants trampling their crops, etc.

~~~
hinkley
I've heard similar complaints about John Muir. People get very, very touchy
when you say bad things about John Muir.

Having read Tending the Wild, I'm inclined to think that at least some of
their complaints have merit. California 'wilderness' was considerably curated
by communities that moved back and forth from foothills to shoreline with the
seasons (are you 'semi-nomadic' if you keep moving between the same handful of
locations?)

~~~
jariel
This notion of 'curation' in the article and in your comment stretches
credulity.

Aboriginals were not in a position to 'curate' or 'manage' much at all. Aside
from some rare controlled burns here and there - they didn't have the capacity
to 'curate' vast areas of land.

More reasonably, their 'industrial footprint' was small by virtue of their
near lack of modern industrialisation and their small population.

They were light on the land, but let's not construe that with some kind of
'caretaker' moniker - this is a romanticism of another kind entirely.

Finally, because aboriginals were present in some areas does not abnegate the
notion that they were essentially pristine, i.e. this is not some kind of
false romanticisation of the land by Westerners, rather, a
mischaracterisation. Lacking a large agricultural base, large scale
domestication of animals, an industrial base, large cities or even large
populations, it's fair to suggest that such areas were in fact, by and large,
pristine - certainly relative to the West.

Treatment of aboriginals by whatever policy is an altogether different
question.

------
aazaa
> “The time has come to rethink wilderness,” Cronon begins his essay. He goes
> on to challenge the widely held and decidedly romantic notion of
> environmentalists that “wilderness stands as the last remaining place where
> civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth.”

The article doesn't contain many facts to support or refute this idea. For a
lot of them, check out the books _1491_ and _1493_ by Charles Mann.

Spoiler: the lands we think of as having been pristine prior to arrival by
Europeans were in fact heavily manipulated and in some cases densely
populated.

------
mistrial9
warning -- the phrase "without humans" is an invocation of primal fears and
anger amongst every sort of human mind that reads it.. It is a fairy-tale
story intro, like "Once upon a time" .. the truth is, close to eight billion
humans now live in every corner and crevice of this Earth.. there is no
comparison to that, that is rational; instead we labor under stories like
this..

------
davidw
Wilderness Areas in the US are sort of like the John Wayne preservation act in
that they seek to preserve this idea of the "wilderness" from our
imaginations.

Ok: ride in with a string of horses, shoot an elk with a rifle, and pack it
out.

Not ok: push a baby stroller around because ...wheels!

That said, they're a good way of preserving areas.

~~~
Pfhreak
Baby wearing is definitely a thing. I much prefer carrying around my kid in a
pack or sling to pushing her in a stroller. She seems to prefer it as well.

~~~
davidw
Sure, it's more practical, but it's still an inane rule.

