Opinion
You’re not the boss in wilderness
Published
3 months agoon
Posted By
AdminBy John Clayton WRITERS ON THE RANGE
When my friends and I encountered the fresh grizzly bear scat, we were deep in Wyoming’s Teton Wilderness, 20 miles from a trailhead. I’d seen grizzlies before—from the car. But this experience was on a whole other level. I felt vulnerable, nervous. I also felt fully alive.
That feeling owes much to the Wilderness Act, which became law 60 years ago, in 1964. When President Lyndon B. Johnson created a nationwide system of wild landscapes “untrammeled by man,” it gave physical expression to an unusual attitude toward land.
The attitude could be summarized as: In the wildest parts of America, humans come second. What comes first is the land, its water and its wildlife. If the grizzly that left those droppings had confronted us, and I’m glad it never did, we lacked the resources of civilization to protect us.
If I’d fallen off a cliff, there was no cell service to call 911. If a freak snowstorm made us cold, wet and miserable, all we could do was suffer. In wilderness, Mother Nature won’t kiss a boo-boo to make it better.
There’s something elemental about being on your own, exposed. You’ve made a choice based on your values about the outdoors. As a result, you feel the power of larger forces—and sometimes, if you’re lucky, even the power of yourself.
Before the Act became law, American culture prioritized pulling all the resources we could out of the land by drilling, mining, dam building, logging, over-grazing. We barged through habitat, flattened forests and plowed prairies. We replaced old growth with board-feet of timber, canyons with cubic meters of water, and grasslands with barrels per day of oil. We’re still doing that on 95% of public land.
But the Wilderness Act acknowledged that in some places, the land should be left as unexploited as possible. It defined wilderness as being “in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape.”
Preserving wildness calls for restraint. It calls for motorized users, e-bikers, mountain bikers, pilots, snowmobilers, technical climbers with hardware and drone flyers to recreate somewhere else. Yet hiking, hunting, boating, fishing and horseback riding are all allowed in wilderness, as well as grazing if grandfathered in.
The Act’s primary author, Howard Zahniser loved hiking in wild places and he was determined: In eight years of lobbying the Congress for The Wilderness Society, he helped rewrite the bill 65 times. By the time the Act overwhelmingly passed—73–12 in the Senate and 374–1 in the House—Zahniser had died of heart disease at the young age of 58.
The Act is often discussed in terms of the acreage it protects, now comprising 806 wilderness areas and 112 million acres, roughly half of that in Alaska. Yet it’s really about nature being the boss.
In wilderness, we recognize that always getting our way can devalue ecosystems. It can harm wildlife, clean water, fresh air and other widely shared resources. It can cause us to scorn Indigenous people’s connections to the land when we should be honoring them.
Wilderness is not the only place we embrace not getting our way, just as the U.S. Capitol building is not the only place we embrace democracy, and Civil War battlefields are not the only places we honor fallen soldiers. With wilderness as reminders, we can also consider not being the boss in a city park or backyard, while watching birds or growing native plants.
Threats to keeping wilderness wild, however, have never subsided. Sixty years have brought us innumerable technologies to help us get our way while recreating in nature. And as we’ve realized that making nature more accessible might make it more inclusive and its fans more diverse, some of us are tempted to relax recreational restrictions in wilderness.
That would miss the point. “We must remember always that the essential quality of the wilderness is its ‘wildness,’” Zahniser said. “We must not only protect the wilderness from commercial exploitation. We must also see that we don’t ourselves destroy its wilderness character in our own management programs.”
Honoring wilderness ideals is especially important today because it represents the same lesson that we should be learning from climate change: People can’t control nature. Thanks to the Wilderness Act, we can celebrate that some places remain free of our habit of changing everything—just because we can.
John Clayton is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that promotes lively dialog about the West. He lives in Montana and writes the newsletter Natural Stories.
Upcoming Events
may, 2024
Event Type :
All
All
Arts
Education
Music
Other
Sports
Event Details
Feeling worn out from the winter? Feeling bloated, low energy or foggy in the mind? Maybe it’s
more
Event Details
Feeling worn out from the winter? Feeling bloated, low energy or foggy in the mind? Maybe it’s just time to have a reset and boost your immune system!
It’s that time of year again, to refresh, renew and revitalize!
The community cleanse utilizes the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda in order to help detoxify the body and reboot the digestive system, plus going through the process with a community of others makes it all that much easier to get through it successfully. It is not a time of starvation or deprivation, we eat 3 (or 4) meals each day and take specific herbs to assist the process of releasing toxins. It is designed to be a two-week cleanse, but it can be customized to the length of time that you are able to commit to and dates can be flexible if need be. You are also welcome to do it from a distance if you won’t be in Big Sky this spring!
What it includes: digestive herbal supplement and body oil (specific to your needs), 4 cleansing and rejuvenating herbal formulas, 7 days of the Ayurvedic cleansing food, a booklet of information on the step-by-step process and some recipes, weekly meetings and daily email support through the process.
Investment: 1st Timers ~ $370 Repeat Cleansers ~ $340 | Register by Apr. 17th and Save $25
Time
1 (Wednesday) 12:00 pm - 14 (Tuesday) 12:00 pm
Location
Santosha Wellness Center
169 Snowy Mountain Circle
Event Details
Feeling worn out from the winter? Feeling bloated, low energy or foggy in the mind? Maybe it’s just time to
more
Event Details
Feeling worn out from the winter? Feeling bloated, low energy or foggy in the mind? Maybe it’s just time to have a reset and boost your immune system!
It’s that time of year again, to refresh, renew and revitalize! The community cleanse utilizes the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda in order to help detoxify the body and reboot the digestive system, plus going through the process with a community of others makes it all that much easier to get through it successfully. It is not a time of starvation or deprivation, we eat 3 (or 4) meals each day and take specific herbs to assist the process of releasing toxins. It is designed to be a two-week cleanse, but it can be customized to the length of time that you are able to commit to and dates can be flexible if need be. You are also welcome to do it from a distance if you won’t be in Big Sky this spring!
What it includes: digestive herbal formula and body oil (specific to your needs), 4 cleansing and rejuvenating herbal formulas, 7 days of the Ayurvedic cleansing food, a booklet of information on the step-by-step process and some recipes, weekly meetings and daily email support through the process.
1st Timers ~ $370 Repeat Cleansers ~ $340 | Register by Apr. 17th and Save $25
Time
1 (Wednesday) 5:30 pm - 14 (Tuesday) 5:30 pm
Location
Santosha Wellness Center
169 Snowy Mountain Circle
Event Details
NY FASHION BRAND LAFAYETTE 148 DEBUTS IN BOZEMAN MAY 7-11 Wendy Euler of Goodbye Crop Top to host a multi-day style pop-up in Bozeman with private shop and sip events
Event Details
NY FASHION BRAND LAFAYETTE 148 DEBUTS IN BOZEMAN MAY 7-11
Wendy Euler of Goodbye Crop Top to host a multi-day style pop-up in Bozeman with private shop and sip events to experience fully the pre-fall 2024 line ahead of market availability.To book a private shopping appointment, call or text 406-320-5000. Launch Party May 9th 4-8 PM in Bozeman.
Time
may 7 (Tuesday) - 11 (Saturday)
Event Details
Join us on May 10 – 12 to pick up pet waste and seasonal trash to keep our rivers and trails clean.
more
Event Details
Join us on May 10 – 12 to pick up pet waste and seasonal trash to keep our rivers and trails clean.
During spring runoff, pet waste left behind by a long winter has the potential of making its way into our local streams and eventually into the Gallatin River if not picked up and properly disposed. Join the Gallatin River Task Force and our community partners the Big Sky Community Organization (BSCO) and the Big Sky Sustainability Network Organization (SNO) for a community clean up to keep pollution out of the river.
With pet waste representing the fifth-largest source of water-quality degraded pollution across the upper Gallatin River, we need your help! Join us in an effort to keep these harmful pollutants from reaching the Gallatin. Get a group of friends together and sign up to participate.
We will be at the Big Sky Community Park for supply pick up from 9am-5pm, and then you/your team can choose from some of BSCO’s beautiful trails to help clean.
Time
10 (Friday) 9:00 am - 12 (Sunday) 5:00 pm
Location
Big Sky Community Park