The twofold myth of pristine wilderness: Misreading the wilderness act in terms of purity

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 30, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 381-399

  Friskics, Scott ^a  

^a Fort Belknap College   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 58849091066     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics200830441     Document Type: Review

References (42)

1. Ramachandra Guha, "Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique," in The Great New Wilderness Debate, ed. J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), pp. 231-45.
2. Cronon and Callicott give their respective accounts of the received wilderness idea in the following essays: William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness: or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. and W. Norton, 1995), pp. 69-90; and J. Baird Callicott, "The Wilderness Idea Revisited: The Sustainable Development Alternative," in Callicott and Nelson, The Great New Wilderness Debate, pp. 337-66.
3. Callicott, "The Wilderness Idea Revisited," p. 351.
4. Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," pp. 82-86.
5. The anthology by Callicott and Nelson, The Great New Wilderness Debate, provides a great overview of this debate and includes essays representing a wide variety of perspectives.
6. Callicott, "The Wilderness Idea Revisited," p. 339.
7. Ibid., p. 349.
8. J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson, "Introduction," in Callicott and Nelson, The Great New Wilderness Debate, pp. 3-4.
9. Callicott, "The Wilderness Idea Revisited," p. 348.
10. Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," pp. 80 and 85.
11. Callicott, "The Wilderness Idea Revisited," p. 349.
12. "Wilderness Act of 1964," Public Law 88-577 (16 U.S.C. 1131-1136), 3 September 1964.
13. Mark Woods, "Federal Wilderness Preservation in the United States: The Preservation of Wilderness?" in Callicott and Nelson, The Great New Wilderness Debate, p. 135.
14. In addition to this common sense approach to describing the relative naturalness of a given landscape, a variety of more formal-even quantitative-definitions of naturalness have been put forward recently. Callicott, Crowder and Mumford give three examples of such definitions in their essay "Current Normative Concepts in Conservation," Conservation Biology 13 (1999): 22-35.
15. Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 133-34. Thanks to Mike Welsh for pointing out this literary footnote to our wilderness travels.
16. Woods, "Federal Wilderness Preservation in the United States," p. 135.
17. Quoted in Doug Scott, The Enduring Wilderness: Protecting Our Natural Heritage through the Wilderness Act (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum Publishing, 2004), p. 2.
18. Ibid., p. 127.
19. Woods, "Federal Wilderness Preservation in the United States," p. 135.
20. Quoted in Scott, The Enduring Wilderness, p. 79.
21. See Woods, "Federal Wilderness Preservation in the United States," p. 136; and Scott, The Enduring Wilderness, pp. 79-82.
22. Occasionally, the purity definition of wilderness gets resurrected. Most recently, former Congressman Richard Pombo (R-CA) used purity arguments to temporarily derail the passage of the Wild Sky Wilderness Act (Washington). He claimed that the area in question, which is within an hour's drive of Seattle, was not pristine enough to merit consideration as wilderness. In 2008, President George W. Bush signed the act into law.
23. Woods, "Federal Wilderness Preservation in the United States," p. 136.
24. Ibid., p. 137.
25. Ibid., pp. 136-37.
26. Ibid., p. 137-38.
27. Guha, "Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation."
28. Callicott, in "The Wilderness Idea Revisited," p. 339, attributes the phrase to Roderick Nash.
29. See both Callicott, "The Wilderness Idea Revisited," and Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," for their respective presentations of this argument.
30. See William M. Denevan, "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492," in Callicott and Nelson, The Great New Wilderness Debate, pp. 414-42.
31. Quoted in Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 27.
32. Two excellent, book-length studies on this subject are Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness and Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek, American Indians and National Parks (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998).
33. Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," p. 79.
34. Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness'' p. 39.
35. Callicott, "The Wilderness Idea Revisited," p. 349.
36. Daniel B. Botkin, Discordant Harmonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 6.
37. Callicott, "The Wilderness Idea Revisited," p. 349.
38. Ibid., pp. 354-55.
39. The currently proposed Beaverhead-Deerlodge Partnership in southwestern Montana offers a prime example of how such an understanding of wilderness finds practical expression. Developed by a coalition of conservation groups and locally owned and operated timber companies, the proposal presents a citizen-based forest management plan that addresses issues of wilderness designation (over 570,000 acres), sustainable timber harvesting, fuels reduction, wildlife habitat restoration, watershed protection, and off-road vehicle use within a larger, landscape-level context.
40. Henry G. Bugbee, "Wilderness in America," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42 (1974): 614-20.
41. The idea of wilderness as a sabbath place can only be mentioned here; however, it merits much greater attention as we think through the meaning and value of wilderness in contemporary American life.
42. Wendell Berry, Farming: A Handbook (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 16.