Inhabited Wilderness?

Transcription

1 Around the Campfire with Uncle Dave Foreman Inhabited Wilderness? The Rewilding Institute Issue Twenty-three July 14, 2009 Words matter. The other day I was plowing through a stack of things to read and came upon an eye-friendly brochure about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the need to keep it wild and from being trashed by oil and gas drilling. As I was reading it, though, a line jumped out that made me blow my stack. My friends know it doesn t take much to set me off. They like to laugh and say, C mon, Dave, tell us what you really think! I am known as a man of few euphemisms. What enkindled my brain-fire in the Arctic brochure? Just a little line, The Arctic Refuge is an inhabited wilderness. Why did they call it an inhabited wilderness? Because some folks hunt and fish; gather plants, roots and berries; and travel on these lands. (I m not going to name who put out the brochure, because I want this to be a wideswept rant and not targeted at one wilderness outfit. So, I ll call them the brochure bunch. ) I could let this go by without saying anything, but it is a teachable moment, as I think the jargon goes. To deal with this twisted thought of a wilderness being inhabited by people, maybe we need to know what acreage was being highlighted. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge sweeps over much of northeastern Alaska. It is 19.5 million acres. That s big. About the heft of Maine. Although 1

2 the whole refuge is wilderness and cared for as such by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, all of it is not legally designated as a Wilderness Area only 8 million acres are, which is still mighty big. We conservationists would like to have all of the refuge designated as a Wilderness Area, and of that we most want 1.2 million acres along the Refuge s northern edge where the Arctic Coastal Plain (or North Slope) flows down from the Brooks Range to meet the Arctic Ocean. Congress left the coastal plain out of the Wilderness Area in 1980 because it could not make up its mind then whether to shield the North Slope as Wilderness or let it be industrialized for the oil and gas that might underlie it. In a way, though, it doesn t matter if the so-called inhabited wilderness is the whole Arctic Refuge, just the Arctic Refuge Wilderness Area, or the North Slope in the Refuge but not in the Wilderness. All of it is worthy of Wilderness Area designation. So, in what follows, I m going to sweep it all together as wilderness. For longer than I ve been slugging it out for the wild, conservationists have thought of Big W Wilderness and little w wilderness. Big W Wilderness is what we call designated Wilderness Areas; little w wilderness is for lands that should be designated as Wilderness Areas but are not yet. Both kinds are wilderness on the ground, but only one is set aside, named, and shielded as such. New conservationists need to understand this, along with much more lore. All of the Arctic Refuge is either Big W or little w wilderness. Reading this inhabited wilderness line made me wonder. Did the brochure bunch know what the word inhabit truly means? Did they know anything about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Wilderness? Calling the Arctic an inhabited wilderness seems to be a way to set it 2

3 off from other Wilderness Areas so I wonder if they know anything about Wilderness Areas, the Wilderness Act, or the National Wilderness Preservation System? Because I know of the former good deeds of the brochure bunch, I know that at least some of their folks should know all these things. Nonetheless, they leave themselves open to such questions and to why they would cloud the meaning of wilderness. Let s sniff out some answers. Inhabit means that people live in a settled spot anything from a city to a homestead year after year. Inhabit does not mean that they wander through it as visitors on foot, horse, ski, dog sled, canoe, or raft. Inhabit does not mean that people hunt, fish, and gather plants there. It means that they live there. It does not mean that they dwell nearby or even on the edge. It means they live inside the acreage being called wilderness. The brochure did not say that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge wilderness had permanent settlements in it. And, in truth, it does not. Were part of it inhabited, that part wouldn t be designated as a Wilderness Area, or proposed for Wilderness designation, because the 1964 Wilderness Act says that Wilderness Areas are where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. (I do know of one designated Wilderness Area that has people living within its boundaries. It is the biggest Wilderness Area outside of Alaska, Idaho s River of No Return-Frank Church Wilderness Area. The inhabitants live on private inholdings along the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. These inholdings are the headquarters for cattle ranches. Besides dwellings, barns, and the like, there are irrigated pastures and hayfields, motorized farm equipment, and landing strips. These private ranches inside the Wilderness get mail and supplies flown in. Nevertheless, the River of No Return Wilderness is not called an inhabited wilderness since 3

4 the indwellers live on private inholdings and not on federal land. Wilderness folks should know that the Wilderness Act reads that a Wilderness Area is federal land. This means that spots of private land (inholdings) inside the outer line of a Wilderness Area are not thought of as in the Wilderness, so the homes on the inholdings in the River of No Return do not make it an inhabited wilderness.) If the Arctic Wilderness is unlike other Wilderness Areas because people hunt and fish; gather plants, roots and berries; and travel on these lands, does this mean that the other six hundred some Wilderness Areas do not let people go in them or hunt, fish, and gather berries? This is an untruth sometimes made by foes of Wilderness Areas that people are locked out, but this is wrong. So long as motors or mechanized equipment are not used, Wilderness Areas are open to all kinds of comings and goings, such as hiking, camping, backpacking, horse/mule/burro packing, llama packing, cross-country skiing, dog mushing, canoeing, rafting, berry grazing, lovemaking, and so on. Outside of Wilderness Areas in National Parks, hunting and fishing is given the nod in most, as is the friendship of puppy dogs. So, the Arctic Wilderness in this way does not break away from other wildernesses. But maybe inhabit was for setting the Arctic Wilderness off from other Wilderness Areas because of how much use it gets. Is the Arctic Wilderness so overrun that it seems to be inhabited alongside other Wilderness Areas? Far from being a heavily tramped wilderness, I would say that the Arctic NWR Wilderness is about the least trod wilderness I ve been to. Three years ago, I spent three weeks canoeing two hundred miles there. But for my five friends and the bush pilot who dropped us off and picked 4

5 us up, I saw no one else, nor did I see but little to show that others had been there. Thinking about it, those three weeks were the longest I ve gone without seeing others. Afterwards, our bush plane dropped Nancy and me off at Arctic Village on the south end of the wilderness. From this little Gwich in town to Kaktovic, an Inupiat settlement on the Arctic Ocean is a span of 150 miles. Again, the Arctic NWR is 19.5 million acres and the designated Arctic NWR Wilderness Area is 8 million acres. As I said, this is big. Flying over such man-empty land for hours gives you blitheness that there are a few big sweeps of the world not overrun by naked apes. Now, let s look at another Wilderness Area: The Sandia Mountains Wilderness Area in the Cibola National Forest of New Mexico. This Wilderness Area is my backyard. Before I hurt my back, I could get to the Wilderness Area boundary on foot in five minutes from my suburban home in Albuquerque two blocks-worth of sidewalks and two hundred yards of dirt track in the City of Albuquerque Open Space to kiss the Wilderness Area sign. From the other side of my house to the west is about 18 miles of cityscape, broken only by the narrow band of the Rio Grande. The Sandia Wilderness is 37,000 acres; it is split in two by a tramway and ski area, which makes the whole next to me about 20,000 acres. From my neighborhood over the Wilderness to the first home on the east side is about five and a half miles. While there are no built trails and no signs in the Arctic Wilderness, the Sandia Wilderness is webbed with built trails and lots of trail signs. You are likely to meet ten or more people on most of the trails while on a day hike. The Sandia Wilderness is almost hemmed in by settlement, with Albuquerque to the west, Placitas to the north, Sandia Park and subdivisions and ranchettes to the east, and Interstate 5

6 40 and scattered dwellings to the south. About 800,000 people live around the Sandia Wilderness Area, whereas the two villages on the edge of the Arctic Wilderness have a few hundred people. One way to look at the heft of the human footprint in a Wilderness Area would be to reckon something I ll call the yearly PDA. First, count the number of person-days (PD) of wilderness visitors. If a total of 1,000 people visit the wilderness in a year and stay an average of three days, then there are 3,000 person-days. A is acreage. If the wilderness is 10,000 acres, divide that into the person-days and you get a yearly PDA of.3. Were we to do that for each one of the six hundred plus wilderness areas in the United States, where would the Arctic Wilderness Area come in? If not at the bottom, then somewhere in the bottom 1 percent of all areas. The Sandia Wilderness, on the other hand, would likely be in the top 10 percent for PDA. So, the Arctic could not be called inhabited because of a heavy human footprint. The Sandia Mountains Wilderness Area has far, far more of the sight, smell, and blare of Man than does the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge wilderness. In no way is the Arctic wilderness inhabited alongside the Sandias. Let me underline, though, that none of this means the Sandia Wilderness is inhabited. It gets more visitors than does the Arctic. That s all. Thus, I am left wondering why the brochure bunch wanted to call the Arctic Refuge wilderness inhabited. Well, the folks who pick berries and hunt in it are the two native bands in greater northeastern Alaska, the Gwich in and the Inupiat. If native people visit and use a wilderness does this make it an inhabited wilderness? Let s look at the Sandia Wilderness again. On the west, some of the Sandia Wilderness meets 6

7 Sandia Pueblo. The Sandia Mountains are key to the being of the Sandia people. The New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, other conservationists, and Sandia Pueblo worked together with the New Mexico congressional delegation to pass legislation acknowledging the meaning of the Sandia Wilderness to Sandia Pueblo and acknowledging that they could hunt, gather plants, and undertake spiritual practices in the Wilderness (under the same nonmotorized requirements that apply to anyone). Moreover, the legislation gave another layer of shielding to the Sandia Wilderness by acknowledging Sandia Pueblo s wish to keep it wild and by saying that they should be consulted on management. About forty miles to the northwest of Sandia Pueblo and Sandia Mountain Wilderness is Zia Pueblo and the Ojito Wilderness Area. The Zias and wilderness friends worked together to get the Ojito made a Bureau of Land Management Wilderness Area. The Zia people hunt, gather plants, and have spiritual spots in the Ojito Wilderness. Neither Sandia Mountain nor Ojito Wilderness Areas are thought by anyone to be inhabited, so hunting and plant gathering by Gwich in and Inupiat peoples in the Arctic Refuge wilderness should not be thought of as inhabitation, either. Saying that the Arctic Refuge wilderness is not inhabited in no way slights the Gwich in and Inupiat folks, just as it doesn t slight the Sandia and Zia folks to say the Sandia and Ojito Wildernesses are not inhabited. So, I am left wondering what the brochure meant? An ill-founded way to highlight the core worth of the Arctic wilderness to the Gwich in and Inupiat? An unthinking step to make the Arctic stand out? Or carelessness? I know, I m a cranky, nitpicking, old fart. But I am not blowing this issue out of proportion. Words do matter. When conservationists get 7

8 something so wrong as calling a Wilderness inhabited because people travel through it and hunt and gather berries, it is a big deal. We lose our believability when we do such things. And not just the bunch that did the brochure loses believability; all wilderness conservationists do. Furthermore, we mumble and undercut the meaning of Wilderness Areas. This plays into the hands of wilderness foes. The heart of Wilderness Areas is that they are places where humans are visitors who do not remain. To talk about a designated Wilderness Area as inhabited helps those who would tear down what Wilderness Areas are. It gives ammunition to those who want to let people live in protected areas around the world. I can see this being brought up at the World Wilderness Congress in Merida, México, this fall, to ask why protected areas should not have human settlements in them. I can also see it being brought up by energy-industry lobbyists to members of Congress. Look, they say, waving the brochure around, Even the conservationists say the place is inhabited. So, it s not pristine. It can t be designated as wilderness, and we won t be hurting any wilderness if we drill there. As I think more about this, it strikes me that by whatever yardstick we could use to call the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge an inhabited wilderness, we could call every Wilderness Area in the United States an inhabited wilderness. This makes the thought of wilderness meaningless, which might be the goal of some postmodern deconstructionists, but it cannot be what wilderness defenders want. To keep conservationists from making stumbles like this in the future, let me make some recommendations. 8

9 Please think through what you say or write for how it might be out of step with what conservationists have said or done in the past, and for how it could harm the shielding of wild things tomorrow. For short-term gain, do not make long-term mistakes. Do not fall for trendy postmodern deconstruction of what we ve done to keep wild things wild. People who want to work for a wilderness outfit should read Roderick Nash s Wilderness and the American Mind, Doug Scott s The Enduring Wilderness, and The Wilderness Society s The Wilderness Act Handbook. If they haven t, they should read all three their first month of employment. Every wilderness bunch should have on hand someone who knows the lore of the wilderness movement: a staffer, board member, or volunteer who can check what the group prints or says for truth and for thoughtfulness. I do that sometimes for the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance and would do it for others, too. I know Doug Scott does it when asked. Those who run training retreats for conservationists should bring in history, science, philosophy, and policy along with the nuts-and-bolts of organizing and media. And when individuals or groups botch things, they should be called on it. Words matter. Coming soon: A North American Wolf Recovery Vision and The Solar Power Threat to Wild Deserts. Dave Foreman, Sandia Mountains Wilderness 9

10 To receive Around the Campfire or to unsubscribe, contact Susan Morgan at mail to: Please forward Dave Foreman s Around the Campfire to conservationists on your address book and to conservation discussion groups to which you have access. We apologize if you receive multiple postings. Permission is given to reprint Dave Foreman s Around the Campfire so long as it is published in its entirety and with this subscription information. It will make a good regular feature for your group s newsletter, either printed or electronic. Please contact Susan before reprinting it, particularly if you want to print a shorter version. Dave Foreman s Around the Campfire also appears on The Rewilding Website; past issues are archived there and available. The blog feature on The Rewilding Website also posts comments from readers. Dave Foreman s Around the Campfire has no subscription charge. It is funded by the Rewilding Partners, who are donors to The Rewilding Institute. If you like Dave Foreman s Around the Campfire, please go to for information on how to support all the work of The Rewilding Institute. Copyright 2009 by Dave Foreman. 10