Dear HCN,
In his interesting piece
on disputes about creating new wilderness areas, Jon Margolis dubs
the William Cronon critique of the wilderness ethic post-modernist,
meaning that it’s mostly about an impressionistic appraisal of
wildlands (HCN, 9/27/99).
Margolis misses the
point here; Cronon’s analysis is more substantive than that. The
modern wilderness movement believes that wilderness exists apart
from human presence, and that notion is built into the Wilderness
Act of 1964. The act’s roots are in the romantic notion of a
pre-Columbian America unmarked by human hand. It’s romantic because
we know that pre-Columbian communal owners had been managing and
manipulating their environment for millennia before Columbus
arrived.
The original misunderstanding was a
product of the devastating impact of Old World diseases the
Europeans introduced here. The rapid spread of smallpox and other
diseases wiped out entire tribes, creating a depopulated landscape.
But human emptiness was a momentary condition. Taking a longer
view, the Native Americans were here from the outset of the land’s
change from one dominated by the Ice Age.
There
was never a time after the glaciers when the land and its wildlife
evolved separately from human cultures. Of course, their impacts
didn’t have the immense impact of industrial civilization. But they
did have an important impact, and for us to presume an absence of
human influence on North American landscapes is so far from logical
as to be fantastical.
With our wilderness ethic
of nature apart from man we are attempting to create a condition
for which there is no precedent in this geological era, on this
continent. Fortunately, our attitudes are evolving. We now approve
the burning of wilderness by lightning-set wildfires. But we need
to go further. In pre-Columbian times, man-set fires were as
natural as any other kind, and we may need to learn to burn with as
much fervor as they did if we are to retain or regenerate healthy
and wild land.
Regardless of how we finally come
to use fire, we need to rethink the wilderness ethic. Scholars like
William Cronon, who question the intellectual underpinning of the
current wilderness ethic, are not paving the way for development
but for more trenchant thought. Only a wilderness vision more
realistic than the present one will stand the test of
time.
William R.
Dickinson
Tucson,
Arizona
The writer is a
professor emeritus of geology at the University of Arizona and a
former president of the Geological Society of
America.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline We need a new vision for the wild.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
