Can We Still Call it Wilderness?

**This transcript comes from an earlier broadcast of this episode. There may be some changes to the audio you hear above.**

Now, if you’ve ever visited Shenandoah National Park, chances are you spent some time taking in its grand views from the comfort of your car. Running north-south across the ridge line through the entire 105-mile span of the park is the famous Skyline Drive. That drive is actually emblematic of the crucial role that driving has played in the development of national parks all over the country.

Well, in 1935, the very same year that Shenandoah became a park, a group of outdoors enthusiasts concerned about this trend, got together to fight this trend. One of them was a forester named Aldo Leopold.

PAUL STUTTER: He called national parks, “vast, overcrowded hospitals, coping with an epidemic of aesthetic rickets.” That’s my favorite Leopold quote.

BRIAN: This is historian Paul Sutter.

PAUL STUTTER: The point was that the automobile had created a kind of impetus to zip out into these wild places and experience them briefly, and then just keep moving on.

BRIAN: The group that Leopold and his fellow conservationists founded was called the Wilderness Society. In the tradition of John Muir, they believe that you had to take time to be in nature. You couldn’t appreciate wilderness with a quick pit stop at scenic sites.

PAUL STUTTER: Some of these were fairly sophisticated ecological thinkers. But they weren’t necessarily concerned, foremost, about the ecological impacts of roads and automobiles. They were concerned about the ways in which roads and automobiles were driving the modern into even the most remote and wild spaces on the continent. And they wanted to protect some of those spaces from that kind of intrusion.

BRIAN: What began as an effort by a few guys who wanted to tromp around in the woods in peace, soon grew into a much more high-stakes endeavor. That’s because by the 1940s, cars no longer seemed like the biggest threat. Much more serious were the massive public works and resource extraction programs fueling America’s wartime boom. And because the majority of these timbering, mining, and damming projects were taking place on federal lands, the Wilderness Society focused its efforts in the belly of the beast, Washington DC.

They hired on a new public relations chief, a guy who worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service, named Howard Zahniser. Over the next two decades, Zahniser dedicated himself to building a broad base of support for wilderness preservation. One that included urban easterners. People, in other words, like himself.

PAUL STUTTER: He was an advocate for wilderness areas, even if he knew he would never see them. And I think he, more than any of this early generation of wilderness advocates, made an argument for the importance of wilderness areas, and just knowing that they’re there. That in this world we live in, surrounded by all of this development, it’s important to know that there are landscapes out there that are truly wild. That are places where humans can go and really be surrounded by the forces of nature. Humbled by them, even.

BRIAN: Zahniser envisioned a new federal system that would designate and protect a network of public lands in advance of any threat, so that activist wouldn’t have to go to bat for specific areas each time they were threatened. In 1956, Zahniser introduced the first draft of legislation that would do just that. And while opposition to this bill quickly materialized among mining, timber, and agricultural interests, Zahniser’s effort to win over the American public couldn’t have come at a better time.

America’s postwar economic boom meant that people had more disposable time and more money on their hands. And at the same time, there was growing consensus that American life should be about more than simply the quest for wealth and power.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson described his vision for a Great Society in 1964, he talked about a government that would help improve the quality of life in American cities, the quality of education in American schools, and the quality of the water, air, and land in America’s countryside.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty, or wonder at nature, his spirit will wither, and his sustenance be wasted.

BRIAN: Eight years, 18 congressional hearings, and 66 drafts after it was first introduced, Congress passed the Wilderness Act, nearly unanimously. And President Johnson signed it into law in 1964.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: The Wilderness Bill preserves for our posterity, for all time to come, nine million acres of this vast continent in their original and unchanging beauty and wonder.

ED: In the 50 years since, those nine million acres have ballooned into 110 million acres. But consistent throughout has been the law’s definition of wilderness. Places, quote, “untrammeled by man. Where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” The law goes on to say that these places should have a quote, “primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.”

And that, says science writer Emma Marris, leaves a whole lot open to interpretation.

EMMA MARRIS: The very notion of wilderness is a cultural concept. And the two parts of that that are enshrined in the Act, the idea that wilderness is primeval, and the idea that wilderness is on untrammeled, are our ideas about what counts as wilderness. The idea that it should look the same as it did in the old days, and the idea that it should not have any human influence.

ED: Marris is among a group of contemporary ecological thinkers, who says that it’s not really possible to have untrammeled land and primeval land in the same place.

EMMA MARRIS: You can’t have uncontrolled and historically contiguous. If it looks like it did when Europeans first came to North America, or when it was made, designated a wilderness, then that’s usually because there has been some management.

ED: Take Yellowstone National Park.

EMMA MARRIS: Yellowstone, of course, is a landscape that all Americans feel belongs to them, even if they’ve never been there. And people have a lot of really strong feelings about what it should look like. And most people want it to look like the way it did the year it was made a park, back in the 1800s. So it is managed to look that way.

And a lot of that work is somewhat obscured. As a tourist to the park, you don’t really see that. You don’t see how hard they worked reintroducing wolves, and doing careful work with some of those streams, and trying to get the beaver back. I mean they’re working their butts off to make it look like nobody’s touched it.

And so there’s a paradox there. If you really left Yellowstone alone, if you really let it go wild, and just walked away from it, it might look like a very different place.

ED: But Marris says, we couldn’t really leave Yellowstone alone, even if we tried. In the age of climate change, even places we think of as remote are being actively shaped by humans.

EMMA MARRIS: If you said, it’s not wilderness if humans have influenced it, well then, there’s no wilderness. Because even a place where no one has ever been, no one has ever stood there, there’s still 35% more carbon dioxide there because of our activities. The climate is still changed. So there really is no place that’s uninfluenced by humans. And pretty much no one is going to dispute this.

ED: So, if we want our land to look primeval, we have to get involved. We have to trammel it. On the other hand, if we decide our wilderness has to be untrammeled, it would mean letting it succumb to climate change, and all the species loss that would entail. Marris thinks that true wildness is a threat to a lot of our so-called wilderness. And yet, Marris does see a value in wildness for its own sake.

She envisions a new kind of wild space. One that is allowed to grow up in places where species aren’t threatened. Perhaps in certain post-industrial landscapes, or abandoned farmland. These places would be completely untrammeled, without any active management at all.

And they would be places where we could observe nature at work. And nature that, yes, includes the processes set in motion by humans. And change, something written out the Wilderness Act of 1964, would be embraced as, well, natural.

EMMA MARRIS: But what I don’t know, and what I will be very interested to see, is which kind of land will inherit the title of wilderness. Will it be the land that looks the way it did back in the 1850s, when lot of these places were first mapped and surveyed. Or will it be the places that are not managed, that are going to start looking very strange and interesting, and with lots of nonnative species. I don’t know which one is going to get to be called wilderness in another 50 years.

ED: That was author and environmentalist, Emma Marris. Her book is called Rambunctions Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. We also heard from Paul Sutter, history professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He’s the author of Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement.

[SONG – IGGY POP’S I’M A REAL WILD CHILD]

PETER: That’s going to do it for us today. But we’re eager to hear your thoughts about the proper role of humans in the wilderness. Is it time to put the Wilderness Act behind us, and embrace our role as active managers of wild spaces? Or are the wild parts of our country best left alone?

ED: Leave a comment on our website, backstoryradio.org. We tweet at backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

BRIAN: Today’s episode of BackStory was produced by Tony Field, Nina Earnest, Andrew Parsons, Kelly Jones, Bruce Wallace, and Robert Armengol. Emily Gattic is our digital producer, and Jamal Millner is our engineer. BackStory’s executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.

Major support for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Additional funding is provided by Weinstein Properties, by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment, and by History Channel, history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is professor of history emeritus at UVA. and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.