IPP 503: Environmental Ethics

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Week 9: The value of wilderness

Wilderness

First must come the question: what is wilderness? Defining wilderness is difficult and controversial and it is widely understood and interpreted in different ways. Etymologically, the word "Wil" means will, self-willed, wilful and "Deor" is the old English for animal. "Wildeor" then meant wild animal - creatures not under human control, and technically "wilderness" is a
place where wild beasts live, not under human control. Dave Foreman, the founder of the radical environmental protection movement Earth First! calls it "self-willed land".

The most widely accepted definition is that found in Section 2c of the 1964 United States Wilderness Act:

'A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean …an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions, and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least 5000 acres, or if of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational or scenic value'.

This designation reflects a view that wildernesses are untouched, pristine parts of the natural world, formed without human agency and to be protected from permanent human presence. It is particularly significant because, as we shall see, debates about wilderness have primarily emerged from the US, and US understanding of wilderness has dominated international discussion.

Before moving on from definitions, it should be noted that wilderness has a number of powerful symbolic meanings. We might think of it as a "thick" concept rather than a "thin" one; it is not merely descriptive but also carries a kind of evaluative baggage along with it. This baggage varies, according to the context of use; it can mean a place of disorientation and confusion (including morally); it can mean a place where humans are absent, alien, not at home; or conversely, and positively, it can symbolise a kind of sanctuary, a place of refreshment, pure, "virgin", undefiled, an escape from civilisation.

Wilderness: from negative to positive

This mixture of positive/negative evaluations carried by the idea of wilderness is of very long standing. The hugely influential first English translation of the Latin Bible demonstrates this ambiguity. Wilderness meant the uninhabited, arid land, the "great and terrible wilderness" where people wander and where there is great thirst. It could be the place of God's curse. But it could also be a place of purification and communion with God - as when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness and subsequently angels ministered to him.

Popular medieval perceptions of wilderness were primarily negative - the wilderness as that against which humans struggle to live, a place swarming with demons, monsters, trolls, sprites and evil spirits needing taming, civilising and to be brought in harmony with the Divine Order. Many of the settlers in the New World took such views with them in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. They saw the wilderness as needing to be conquered and subdued; it was widely thought that this was what the Creator had intended humans to do. Puritan settlers on the East Coast of the US regarded the wilderness as evil, the indigenous people who lived in it as savages, and themselves as the civilised who should overcome the wilderness and make it productive. This "frontier tradition" - of rugged men pushing the frontier of wilderness ever further West in order to inhabit and work the land - forms one important strand of the US wilderness tradition.

But even as these views were growing amongst settlers in the US, other currents were stirring in Europe. Some Enlightenment thinkers began to argue that God as creator was revealed through nature - including wild nature. This lay the foundations for more positive views about wilderness and God. Could wilderness show the beauty and grandeur of God, rather than be home of devils?
Might sin be lodged in human hearts whilst the "wilderness" is unsullied and Edenic?

Such ideas were, of course, developed in the Romantic Movement in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. This complex and diverse movement emphasised the importance of mystery, solitude, spiritual awareness - and wild nature; the idea that nature should be viewed as an organism, not a machine; and that there was something "noble" about being a "savage". Native peoples could be viewed as untainted by the corruption of civilisation rather than as demonic denizens of the wild.

It was this more positive assessment of wilderness which led to the creation of the first National Park in the world at Yellowstone in the US in 1872. By this time the great American wilderness writers, Emerson, Thoreau and Muir were being widely read. Emerson's book Nature was published in 1834, and argued that nature was a human spiritual home, where it was possible for humans to get in touch with what is true about themselves. For Emerson, the wild acts as a vehicle for the divine/human relationship: and for this reason, it's been argued that although he valued wilderness highly, his valuation of it was instrumental, something humans use through which to access God.

Web tip

Much of Emerson's writing, including Nature, is available on the web at:
http://www.transcendentalists.com/emerson_essays.htm

Thoreau (1817-1862) spent more time actually in the wild, and built a log house in the semi-wilds where he retreated for two years. From this retreat emerged his famous book Walden, advocating a simple existence, where one could live without distraction and look beyond the "surface of things". Living in solitude in the wild, Thoreau maintained, leads to self understanding and the recognition of other species as kin. Living in the wild, for Thoreau, was truly living:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." (Thoreau (1854; 1965 ed) Walden (New York: Harper and Row)

 

Web Tip

Much of Thoreau's writing (including all of Walden) and pictures etc are available on the web at:
http://www.thoreau.niu.edu/

and another useful site is http://www.walden.org/

Perhaps the most important wilderness writer of all was John Muir (1838- 1914). Muir was born in Scotland and emigrated to the US with his family at 11. To avoid the Civil War draft, he moved to live in wilderness in Canada and later Yosemite, where he lived for 6 years, and wrote My First Summer in the Sierra. Muir was fundamental in developing the idea of National Parks in the US, and also founded the influential wilderness protection organisation, The Sierra Club. Muir regarded the wilderness as a sacred place, not threatening but a place for human self-discovery. In wilderness, humans become part of "the Lord's great animal family" - indeed, part of a great interlocking creation. As Muir famously said - pre-empting the later deep ecology movement - "when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is hitched to everything else in the Universe." He maintained, in some sense anyway, that non-human species had rights:

"The antipathies existing in the Lord's great animal family must be wisely planned, like balanced attraction and repulsion in the mineral kingdom. How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of the rest of creation! Although alligators, snakes etc naturally repel us, they are not mysterious evils. They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God's family, unfallen, undepraved and cared for" Muir (1992 ed.) 'A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf' in John Muir: The 8 Wilderness Discovery Books (London: Diadem Books) p.18

He also considered that in going to the wilderness people could find peace and security:

"… overcivilised people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life" Muir 'Our National Parks' op.cit. p. 459

(Statue of Muir as a boy in his Scottish home town)

 

Fundamental to Muir's view was the idea that although the wilderness was vital to human health and well-being, it also had intrinsic value independent of any usefulness to humans and deserved human protection.

Web Tip

Unsurprisingly, John Muir's work is all available on the web as well, in a comprehensive website run by the Sierra Club. See:
http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/

http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/

Muir's defence of wilderness, and his passionate writing about it, ignited a widespread and long lasting attachment to the idea of wilderness in the United States. The 1964 National Wilderness Act, from which the earlier definition derived, established a National Wilderness Preservation System, and gave Congress the power to designate wilderness. The Act also provided for the designation of 54 wilderness areas. In 1968, the wilderness system in the US was expanded, and by the end of 1994, there were 631 designated wildernesses in the US, covering 104 million acres of land in 44 states.

Despite this system of wilderness designation, wildernesses in the US remain under threat, as the recent controversies over oil pipelines in Alaska demonstrate. This has led to the growth of a variety of wilderness protection groups of different degrees of radicalness. These groups (often influenced by deep ecology) both emphasise the intrinsic value of wilderness, and have developed practices to protect it. More radical groups practice "ecotage" or "monkey-wrenching" damaging or destroying equipment being used to develop wilderness. Environmental ethics in the US has often had a close relationship to those involved with the defence of wilderness in one form or another.

Wilderness and Environmental Ethics

The idea of wilderness has always been important in environmental ethics. In the first volume of the journal Environmental Ethics, the philosopher William Godfrey-Smith published an article in which he argued that wildernesses are valuable for human beings in a variety of ways. Like Muir, he maintained that they provide places of spiritual refreshment and renewal. He also argued that wildernesses are important scientific resources; that they protect potentially useful biological diversity and that they provide areas for human recreation. Alongside these human values, Godfrey- Smith suggested that wildernesses have non-use or intrinsic values, and that they should be included as part of the human 'moral community'.

Most recently in environmental ethics, however, wilderness has been one of the most contentious issues. Indeed, there has been considerable debate about the very idea of wilderness.
We are going to spend most of the rest of this section looking at some of these claims and controversies, beginning with a notorious contribution by William Cronon.

Cronon's fundamental point in this article is that the idea of wilderness, and our experiences in wilderness, are not "natural" (meaning of non-human origin) but rather, culturally constructed.

Exercise

(You must have been wondering where all the exercises were for this block - they come now and it is a big one that will take some time)

1. How do you react to Cronon's claims that - in the US at least:

a) the modern environmental movement is the grandchild of romanticism
b) that wilderness has become "sacralised" and carries core cultural values
c) that wilderness is a fundamental part of a US myth of national identity
d) that wilderness is associated with a particular construction of rugged individualist manliness
e) that wilderness is part of a new quasi-religion of Nature

2.Cronon argues (p.384) that ideas about wilderness must be alienated, because "the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land." Is he right?

3.The problem we've already encountered several times in this module also rears its head again in Cronon's article. Are humans apart from, or part of nature? If true nature must be wild, the human presence must pollute it. But if humans pollute nature, they are set apart from it. (This is one of the issues raised by the 1964 definition of wilderness at the beginning of this block). On p. 487, Cronon suggests there is a misanthopic thought going on something like "if nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves". How does Cronon suggest tackling such a thought?

4. Cronon also argues (p.484-5) - an argument echoed by Callicott below - that concentrating on the idea of wilderness distracts from thinking about everyday life lived beyond wilderness - and its environmental consequences. Should we forget wilderness and think about sustainable lifestyles? On p.489, he talks about urban environments, arguing that if wild land is what is accorded supreme value, then urban and less wild land becomes devalued, and their problems passed over. Is he right?

5. This leads Cronon on to ask a social justice question: is it rich, middle class people who like to go into wilderness and ignore the environmental problems in the urban areas where they live? - problems which primarily face the poor and often ethnic minority groups? We will consider this further in the "urban" part of this block.

6. Does the idea of wilderness "privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others"? (p.491). Is this bad?

7. Do you think (as some critics have argued) that Cronon wavers about whether there actually is "a wild" or not? If he does think so, how does he characterize it?

8. How far do you think Cronon's analysis extends beyond the United States to the UK? Does his analysis hit home here, too?

When you have sketchy answers to each of these questions choose one to place on the discussion site - one you think is persuasive or one to which you could find no satisfactory answer or indeed any that you want to share with other students.

Some of Cronon's arguments against the idea of wilderness - as well as some new ones - also emerge in a debate between the environmental ethicists J.Baird Callicott and Holmes Rolston in The Environmental Professional in 1991. (The full debate is reproduced in Callicott and Nelson (eds.) The Great New Wilderness Debate University of Georgia Press 1998 pp.337-393.)

Callicott presented three key arguments against the idea of wilderness.
First, he argued that the idea of wilderness in the US is fundamentally ethnocentric, because it ignores the fact that the land had been occupied and managed by native Americans for thousands of years before the arrival of European settlers.

Second, he argues that the idea of wilderness is an ecologically static, unchanging one, as it were, 'pickling the land in aspic'.

Third, he argues that the idea of wilderness presupposes an undesirable fundamental separation of human beings from the land, resting on the belief that all human alteration of pristine nature degrades it, with the practical result that wildernesses become small 'temples' to nature, whilst outside wildernesses the destruction of the environment continues. The idea of wilderness, he argues, 'avoids facing up to the fact that the ways and means of industrial civilization lie at the root of the current global environmental crisis'. These objections to the wilderness idea, as Callicott tries to make clear, does not mean that wilderness areas in practice should be opened to development; particular wildernesses may in practice be important wildlife sanctuaries. Rather, Callicott, like Cronon, argues, humans should focus on sustainable development where humans live in harmony with ecosystems, instead of on the idea of wilderness.

However, Rolston fundamentally rejected this analysis. He maintains that many parts of the US landmass currently thought of as wilderness were very little used by native Americans, as they are 'high, cold, arid, and difficult to traverse on foot' so it cannot be said that native Americans fundamentally changed their nature. He also argues that humans are not excluded from wilderness areas, they are merely prevented from making particular kinds of uses of wilderness, which would destroy the natural systems present there. Underpinning Rolston's arguments is a profound awareness of the values present in wilderness areas. Like Godfrey-Smith, Rolston argues that these include values for human beings including the culturally symbolic value of wilderness to Americans. But, also like Godfrey-Smith, as we saw in Block 3, Rolston insists that ecological systems, species and individuals all carry intrinsic value, a value not created by human beings and not dependent on human use or appreciation. In wilderness, these values are manifested most fully; the presence of human beings in these areas would undermine the continued existence of such values. From this perspective, Rolston argues, the designation of wilderness areas is absolutely central to the protection of natural values: a view held by a number of environmental ethicists and wilderness campaigners. The wilderness defender Reed Noss, for instance, like Rolston, argues that that wildernesses carry intrinsic values, that huge wild areas are valuable for their own sake. Indeed, to operate healthily with ecosystems containing big predators like wolves, wildernesses may need to be very large: Noss recommends that about 50% of the US should be returned to a wilderness condition to enable the maintenance of biodiversity.

Whilst this debate has been continuing in the US, attacks on the wilderness idea have come from beyond the US. An important contribution came from India, by the writer Ramachandra Guha:

Guha's article offers a critique of the wilderness idea from the position of developing countries where the idea of wilderness is being imported from the US. He argues that the designation of wilderness areas in developing countries can be devastating to local communities, and that the wilderness idea is the latest in a series of colonial imports.

Questions:

1. What are Guha's main criticisms of Deep Ecology (as a series of bullet points)?

2. Guha considers that the wilderness protection movement when it appears outside the US is a form of imperialism - and that such imperialism is particularly displayed by the work of preservationist biologists. Do you agree? Could biologists operate without a desire to preserve what they are studying? Is this necessarily imperialist?

3. Is conservation really a fourth Western "crusade" along with Christianity, commerce and 'civilisation'?

4. How do you think Guha would respond to international "Debt for Nature" swap policy initiatives, where developing countries can have their debts cancelled if they agree to set aside biologically sensitive areas as nature reserves?

5. Guha is particularly sensitive to the "persistent evocation of Eastern philosophies by deep ecology". In what ways does he object to this? Do you accept his position? Can you think of arguments that might counter it?

6. Guha clearly considers the American wilderness preservation movement to be the product of, and to co-exist with a rich consumer culture. Are the two necessarily linked? Are there ways in which a wilderness preservation movement may threaten, rather than reinforce, a rich consumer culture?

7. Looking more closely at "Project Tiger" - How might each of these individuals articulate their views on the Project?

a) A representative of the Worldwide Fund for Nature
b) A person in Lancaster donating money to Project Tiger
c) A deep ecologist "representing" the tiger
d) An ecotourist, who has just paid several thousand pounds for a tiger-watching and conservation-experience holiday
e) A local person who has previously lived in the tiger reserve and now works intermittently in an urban slum
f) A local person who has turned to illegal tiger poaching for a market in Chinese medicine

8. A project such as Project Tiger highlights value clashes, and the ways in which the different interests of those (humans and non-humans) with and without power are represented. How might one weigh up such competing value-claims? Are there any ways of reconciling them?

Think about how Singer, Regan, Taylor and Leopold might react.
9. Guha describes himself as a "sympathetic outsider". Is he sympathetic? Is he an outsider?

Exercise

Please send your answer to question 8 to the discussion site

Summary of Wilderness

In this section, we have seen something of the complex nature of the term "wilderness" and debates about it in environmental ethics. We have considered:

1) the cultural history of the term wilderness, and the ambiguity of the symbolic world associated with it;
2) how wilderness was at the heart of the writing of the great c19 nature-writers, Emerson, Thoreau and Muir, and how they had an important effect in "sacralising" wilderness
3) how subsequently defence of wilderness became a popular cause in the US
4) that, more recently there have been a range of criticisms of the idea of wilderness as: ethnocentric, separating humans from nature, encouraging neglect of non-wilderness environments, colonial and imperialist, ecologically flawed and misanthropic
5) and also a range of defences of wilderness as a site of spiritual renewal, a place offering a huge range of values to all humans, and also the location of individual living things and ecosystems/species which carry intrinsic value, independent of their usefulness to humans.

These web notes were written by Clare Palmer