The 1964 Wilderness Act Section 2(a)

Pasayten Wilderness Area © Dave Foreman

In the last gathering around our old wilderness campfire, I delved into how self-will (freedom from Man’s will) is the bedrock meaning of wild in wilderness and wildlife (wildeors).  The civilized world’s greatest welcoming of self-willed land came in the 1964 Wilderness Act in the United States.  This legislation was the end of eight years of long listening, coaxing, and rewrites in Congress and in public hearings across the nation.  Hikers, horse-packers, canoeists, hunters, anglers, climbers, birders, Nature lovers, and biologists boosted it.  The Wilderness Society’s Living Wilderness magazine carefully followed the whole tussle—citizen and agency, industry and Senator, for and against.  The Wilderness Society’s man in Washington, Howard Zahniser, wrote the first bill in 1956 and most of the later drafts.  His literary skill gave the Act the uplifting words and phrases that rest so cozily in our minds for recall.

The Wilderness Act holds at least four definitions of Wilderness.  I believe that all four are in keeping with the meaning and feeling of self-willed land.  Although the Wilderness stewarding agencies have worked tirelessly since 1964 to make quantitative checklists out of these definitions, feeling whether or not a landscape is wilderness is more in keeping with how the Wilderness Act was written.

The First Definition

The first definition is found in the statement of purpose for the Wilderness Act in Section 2(a):

In order to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition, it is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness.

Here and throughout the wilderness struggle, the drive has been to keep land from development—from being “spoiled” as conservationists once said.  Aldo Leopold, Benton MacKaye, Bob Marshall, and others who cobbled together the Wilderness Area Idea in the 1920s-1930s foremost wanted to shield the backcountry from cars and roads.  The title of Paul Sutter’s path-finding book shows this well: Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement.  The grand old man of conservation historians, Samuel Hays, writes, “[W]ilderness proposals are usually thought of not in terms of perpetuating some ‘original’ or ‘pristine’ condition but as efforts to ‘save’ wilderness areas from development.”  Wilderness Areas, then, are lands walled off from industrial civilization’s wrecking crew: “increasing population…expanding settlement…growing mechanization.”  Hays wrote against the “wilderness deconstructionist” misunderstanding that the Wilderness Area Idea came out of a romantic/literary wish for a “pristine America.”  Hays grounded his thinking in having been a grassroots booster of the 1983 Eastern Wilderness Areas Act and having read many newsletters, alerts, and pamphlets from wilderness clubs. Section 2(a) thus teaches wilderness defenders that first of all Wilderness Areas are a tool (the best tool) to keep lands and waters from being “developed”—or put under the will of Man.

The Second Definition

The second definition is the ideal:

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.  Section 2(c).

Written by Howard Zahniser, who, as a professional editor and writer, well understood picking the right word, this definition lines up with self-willed land in both of its two key phrases: “untrammeled” and “visitor who does not remain.”

Wilderness is where the works of man do not “dominate the landscape.”  Zahniser then chose the little-known word “untrammeled” carefully, and not just because it slips off the tongue sweetly.  Others earnestly chewed on Zahnie’s ears to get him to switch to another word because they thought untrammeled was little known and would be read by many as untrampled.  It is still often wrongly said as untrampled.  Nonetheless, untrammeled stayed in the Act, thanks to Zahniser’s knowledge and feeling for words.  Trammel is a fish net and also a hobble for a horse.  As a verb, trammel means to hinder the freedom of something.  Untrammeled, then, means that the will of something is not hobbled; it is self-willed.  Untrammeled land is the ground for evolution.  In his writings about exploring unmapped and unknown Alaska from 1929 to 1939, Bob Marshall used untrammeled “repeatedly in reference to the Brooks Range,” writes Arctic National Wildlife Refuge wilderness specialist Roger Kaye.  Polly Dyer, a Seattle wilderness leader still going strong in her nineties, knew the word from Bob Marshall and gave it to Zahniser as he began writing the Wilderness Act in the mid-1950s.  Untrammeled, then, might be little known to most, but was well known to the in-crowd of wilderness folks.  It was the word Zahniser wanted.  Untrammeled land is land whose ecosystems are self-regulating. Moreover, as Jay Turner shows in his new book, The Promise of Wilderness, Zahniser liked untrammeled because it was a fuzzy, not sharp word.  Thus, it lent itself more to feeling than to a checklist.

The last phrase in the untrammeled sentence also gives some folks heartburn: “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”  Men and women are only visitors or wayfarers in Wilderness Areas; we have no permanent settlements.  Many kinds of Wilderness Area foes bristle at this banning of dwelling.  My friend, philosophy professor J. Baird Callicott, has a hissy fit over this “received idea of wilderness.”  However, I believe this lack of long-lasting settlement is the key to wil-der-ness (will of the land).  Where humans dwell long, we trammel or fetter the willfulness of the land around our living spots and outward by stamping down our will.  How far?  This hinges on the population size and technological might of the band.

Think of Wilderness Areas as wild neighborhoods and we Homo sapiens who go into them as mild, friendly wayfarers wandering through.  We should follow the path of “minimum impact” to be good neighbors.  We also should be good naturalists so we know who our neighbors are in the wild.  Even if we hunt and fish and gather berries for subsistence, we are still wayfarers and not dwellers, notwithstanding how some think Alaskan natives “inhabit” Wilderness Areas.

Etymologically, ecologically, legally, these definitions for wilderness in section 2(c) agree: will of the land is at the heart of wilderness.

Section 2(c) of the 1964 Wilderness Act.

Next year (2014) will be the 50^th Anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, the strongest and most visionary step in history for protecting and keeping wild neighborhoods for the many Earthlings. Over this fifty years, the acreage of federal land in the United States set aside in the National Wilderness Protection System has gone from some 9 million to over 107 million.  Folks in all nooks of America have fought hard and selflessly to gain this outstanding win for wild things.  The Wilderness Act stands with the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights as a great gift from the United States to the world.

As we make merry for the Wilderness Act, let us keep the hard truth in the forefront: Protected areas, the tougher the better, are the best way to keep and hold the Tree of Life and its ongoing evolution.

In this and the next issue of Around the Campfire, I’ll look at what wilderness truly is and how the Wilderness Act sees it.

Wilderness and Will

The beating heart in the clash between Nature conservationists and resource conservationists (resourcists) is wilderness.  And the ways of thinking about wilderness in this brawl swirl around will.  Whose will?  Man’s will over the land—domesticating, taking, plundering, blighting?  Or will of the land—wilderness, Nature?  Man’s will over animals—taming, yoking, or killing?  Or self-willed animals—wildeors, wildlife?

As I stumble beyond forty years in the fight for wild things, I’ve come to believe that conservation boils down to how far and deep Man’s will should spread over Earth and its wild things.  

In our slacker time, when toughness in thought and standards is too much to hope for, we often get into a snarl because of badly cast words.  Bud Man on his motorized tricycle, academic grandees, and just about everybody in between sling the word wilderness in sloppy ways, muddying the wrangle about land.  One who is not sloppy, historian Roderick Nash, writes that the word wilderness comes from the Old English Wil-deor-ness: “place of wild beasts.”  Wil: Wild, or willed.  Deor: Beast, or deer.  Ness: Place, or quality.

In a 1983 talk at the Third World Wilderness Conference in Scotland, philosopher Jay Hansford Vest, another thoughtful and careful scholar, also sought the meaning of wilderness in Old English and further back in Old Gothonic tongues.  He believed that wilderness means “‘self-willed land’…with an emphasis on its own intrinsic volition.”  He interpreted der as of the, not as coming from deor.  “Hence, in wil-der-ness, there is a ‘will-of-the-land’; and in wildeor, there is ‘will of the animal.’  A wild animal is a ‘self-willed animal’—an undomesticated animal—similarly, wildland is ‘self-willed land.’”  Vest shows that this willfulness is up against the “controlled and ordered environment which is characteristic of the notion of civilization.”  These early northern Europeans were not driven to wholly lord over wild things; thus, wilderness “demonstrates a recognition of land in and for itself.”

In Old English an animal was a deor, which holds on today as deer, only one of many deors.  After the Norman Conquest, deor was shoved aside by beast (Norman French), which was later mostly swapped for animal (Latin).  Each of these word-steps, I think, is a further jump away from the breathing being and thus holds less feeling for it—and for the beat of free life within it.  With deor, we likely think well of the being; but through beast then animal, we steadily think less of it as it becomes more abstract.  Beast and animal show far less heedfulness for self-worth than does deor; the word wildeor more than deor holds an understanding of the free self a wild thing has.  Wildeor is a word we need today if we are to find inborn good in wild things.  To me, at least, it is a nod that another has a freestanding self and calls for you to think well of it, unless you are to show yourself as an unworthy wight.  The meaning of wildeor is the bedrock for how we must deal with other Earthlings—lest the Anthropocene harshly and madly prunes it of leaves, twigs, and even great limbs.  Lovers of wild things should take the word wildeor to heart and to tongue.  The zeitgeist of Conservation vs. Conservation is that the struggle between wilderness/wildlife conservationists and resourcists in the twentieth century is over will in Earth.  Indeed, the whole tale of Man is over such will.  The answer to whose will? is not only two sides in the American public lands fight, but the underlying question of Man in its behaviorally modern kind of the last 50,000 years.

Founder of The Wilderness Society Bob Marshall saw will of the land in wilderness.  In 1930, he wrote that wilderness has “its entire freedom from the manifestations of human will.”  Two hundred years ago, George Gordon, Lord Byron, understood this, too.

Where things that own not man’s dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne’er or rarely been . . .

This self-willed-land meaning of wilderness overshadows all others.  Wilderness means land beyond Man’s will.  Land beyond Man’s will is a slap in the face to the arrogance of humanism—elitist or common man, capitalist or socialist, first worlder or third—and for the new überarrogance of the Anthropoceniacs; for all, it is also something to fear.

Wilderness and Evolution

Over sixty years ago, Aldo Leopold saw wilderness as the “theater” for the “pageant of evolution.”  Evolution is self-willed. The land where evolution can happen is self-willed land, outstandingly for big wildeors.  Ecologically, Wilderness Areas are “self-regulating ecosystems” in the words of Michael Soulé, the conservation biologist who best knows and understands wilderness.  Self-willed land is another way of saying self-regulating ecosystems.

Among the more thoughtful ecologists of our time were two National Park Service biologists, George Collins and Lowell Sumner.  In 1952, they flew into the eastern Brooks Range in Alaska to weigh that little-known landscape of millions of acres without roads or hamlets.  Though the eastern Brooks Range never became a National Park, in 1960 after a long back-and-forth it was set up as the nearly 10 million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Range (now Refuge) by President Eisenhower.  Aldo Leopold thought Sumner the best field naturalist he knew, but Sumner with his friend Collins was also a wilderness thinker at Leopold’s top rung on the ladder.  It’s a shame neither of them wrote books.  After wandering the landscape and talking around the campfire that summer, Sumner and Collins called for northeastern Alaska to be set aside as a wilderness—foremost a landscape-big wilderness where evolution could have “freedom to continue, unhindered and forever if we are willing, the particular story of Planet Earth unfolding here…where its native creatures can still have the freedom to pursue their future, so distant, so mysterious.”  Here they built on Leopold’s thought of wilderness as where “the pageant of evolution” played.

The tie between evolution and life and land being self-willed is strong, indeed it may well be the bedrock way of seeing wilderness.

–Dave Foreman
Sandia Wilderness Area

(Adapted from Chapter 1 of my forthcoming book Conservation vs. Conservation)

Please click here to read the original Campfire.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is five theories, wrote Mayr: (1) The nonconstancy of species; (2) descent of all species from common ancestors; (3) gradualness of evolution; (4) multiplication of species; and (5) natural selection.  These thoughts were world-shaking when Darwin first put them out.  And they are world-shaking yet today in much of the United States and other muddle-headed strongholds, such as Islamodom.  Although Darwin’s theories work well together without any grit between them, they are standalone theories.  Indeed, for most of the hundred years after 1859, few evolutionists bought all five of these theories.  It wasn’t until Mayr and others hammered out the evolutionary synthesis that all five of Darwin’s theories became widely acknowledged.  Mayr wrote that the evolutionary synthesis is “The achievement of consensus among previously feuding schools of evolutionists, such as experimental geneticists, naturalists, and paleontologists, taking place particularly in the period 1937-1947….”

Among the high-flown beliefs propping up the Weltanschauung of the West that Darwin overthrew were essentialism: all beings are unshifting breeds; finalism: “the belief that the living world has the propensity to move toward ‘ever greater perfection’”; and teleology: any shifts are goal-targeted or, in other words, things do not happen by luck, fluke, or serendipity. This last may be the hardest for even learned, thoughtful folks to choke down.  But as the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould so brightly and sharply warned:

[T]he worst and most harmful of all our conventional mistakes about the history of our planet [is] the arrogant notion that evolution has a predictable direction leading toward human life.

This is such a needed acknowledgement that I must linger on it for a few more lines.  Man is not the unerring outcome or endpoint of hundreds of millions of years of “life’s descent with modification,” but is, rather, a happy or unhappy (hinging on what kind of Earthling you are) happenstance.  We were not “meant to be.”  Nor is anything Man has done in its flicker of time been meant to be.  We happened to become, just as did the Curve-billed Thrasher getting a drink right now from the birdbath outside my window.

We only happened to be.

This may be the hardest and most frightening teaching from evolutionary biology and paleontology.  It might well be some of why most H. sapiens do not believe biology has much to do with us.  That we were not meant to be, but only happened to be is likely the most revolutionary idea in Man’s tale.  But this slap at our cheeks is not the worst wound to our overweening, selfish gall.  The hurt goes deeper.  Not only were we not meant to be and are only the happenstance of a string of flukes that could have gone other ways—but no abstractly intelligent kind of life with the inner might or craft to make a technological civilization overlording Earth was meant to be.  In other words, no being with our abstract reasoning and skill in taking over Earth was meant to be or was inevitable thanks to built-in design features in the unfolding of biology, as even some evolutionary biologists want to believe.

–Michael Soulé and Bruce Wilcox

 Steve McCormick, the President of TNC in 2005, wrote, “We need to move past the place where we see people as essentially enemies of nature.  We need to break down the barriers between urban and rural, between set-asides and sustainable use, between ‘us’ and ‘them.’” These are upset-the-apple-cart words to wilderness and wildlife conservation.  They butt heads with what the founders of the Society for Conservation Biology believe.  Michael Soulé and Bruce Wilcox wrote in the first chapter of the 1980 landmark book Conservation Biology that “nature reserves” are “the little fragments of landscape where Man expects to preserve nonhuman life.”  Moreover, they wrote, “Nature reserves are the most valuable weapon in our conservation arsenal.”  The heart and soul of conservation biology is the optimum design of protected areas or wild havens.  The bedrock work of the wilderness and wildlife conservation network for well over one hundred years has been setting aside wild havens of sundry kinds.  When TNC lost that wisdom, they lost most of their worth for conservation.  What Soulé and Wilcox write is wise and free of gall, with a goal of keeping all life and evolution’s hope for life tomorrow.  On the other hand, McCormick’s words about doing away with set-asides highlight how TNC’s target shifted in the early 1990s under John Sawhill by taking on “working” cattle ranches and “working” sawtimber forests.  The shapers of TNC today aim to raise institutional money from and rub shoulders with the movers and shakers of the industrial world.

TNC’s new road has long been the way of hard resourcism and Man’s overweening gall.  It is worrisome what this could mean for the scores of little reserves long owned and cared for by TNC as toughly sheltered wild neighborhoods for threatened wildeors and ecosystems.  Members and donors need to know how well TNC is going to care for awesome spots such as Sonoita Creek and Ramsey Canyon in Arizona.  What does “breaking down the barrier between set-asides and sustainable use” truly mean?  Why, it means nothing less than the end of protected areas.  The “barrier,” after all, is the barbed-wire fence that keeps hungry cattle, yahoos on ATVs, and firewood-cutters out of the lush, tangled, healthy Sonoita Creek riparian forest where live birds and grow wild blossoms that seldom can be seen elsewhere in the United States.  This “breaking down the barrier” whim belittles the whole thought of wild havens.  It goes against what we have learned about Man and wildlands.  It rings of the way the U.S. Forest Service spoke against Wilderness Areas.  It is pissing on the lore and bequest of conservation, public and private, since Yellowstone National Park was withdrawn in 1872.  The only way “to move past the place where we see people as essentially enemies of nature” is for people to quit being the enemies of nature.  The best way we have found to do that is with “set-asides.”  And barriers—by wall or law or armed wardens—are the only way to keep landscalping out of the loveliest, most winsome, and wildly tangled “hot spots of biodiversity” in The Nature Conservancy’s “portfolio” of land and water riches.  Not so long ago, The Nature Conservancy was all about sheltering the “Last Great Places.”  Not only have they dropped that campaign, they do their best to hide that they ever did it.

Matchless “hot spots” of biological diversity have been bought and set aside by TNC over the years; that work is far and away the most worthwhile thing TNC has done, and for buying and caring for such “hot spots of biodiversity” TNC earns backing—but only for such work.  The Nature Conservancy’s help in buying bottomland-woods in Arkansas for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker stands out.  I don’t know now if an Ivorybill was truly seen, but big steps were taken to keep and rebuild the best kind of neighborhood for it.  Whether or not any Ivorybills are there, a throng of other Earthlings now have a better home in the White River bottomland big woods.

Within the staff of The Nature Conservancy are conservationists of all kinds working on keeping whole the best homes for wild things.  Alack, they are now being wedded to resource managers who want to show how wildlife and their neighborhoods can be healthy without “set-asides” and where gas is drilled, trees are logged, cows eat the grass, and tucked-away plots are sold to high rollers for get-away starter castles.  In a way, we see the whole twentieth-century dustup between resource conservationists and Nature conservationists being replayed within the organization and lands of The Nature Conservancy today.  Resourcism has won hands down.

The Nature Conservancy’s Shameful “Stewardship”

TNC’s cocksure garden-path has led to sundry other stumbles that harm the soundness of TNC’s biodiversity “reserves” and bigger “working” landscapes, and TNC’s fellowship with conservationists. Wildlovers among TNC’s members and donors and in other conservation clubs have been aghast at how TNC has cared for some of its lands and for the wildlife living there and upset at how badly TNC has worked with smaller conservation clubs and teams.

Setting aside small to middling natural areas is what TNC did wonderfully well, but lording over sweeping empires of “working” timberlands in the Northeast and big cattle ranches in Wyoming is a whole other thing.  Ten years ago, the Los Angeles Times found that “Nearly half of the 7 million acres that the conservancy said it is protecting in the United States is now being grazed, logged, farmed, drilled or put to work in some fashion.” Since then, the “working land” sleazy, sneaky scam and misspeak has become even more the overlord of TNC holdings. I now think of TNC as a business kind of the “multiple-use” United States Forest Service.  Under Sawhill and McCormick, TNC’s resource management was said to be done with a light touch, with “biodiversity” the “resource,” and with ecological restoration the goal.  That’s the spin—but other things have been seen on the ground.  (It’s gotten worse, as we’ll see, with Peter Kareiva as TNC Chief Scientist; biodiversity is no longer even the stated goal.)  For one, the head of the Wyoming TNC office in the 2000s, who wangled cattle-grazing onto TNC lands, had an anti-wolf bumper sticker on his office wall, a scientist who worked there then has told me.  In one western state, wildlovers began calling The Nature Conservancy “The Open Space Conservancy” in the early 1990s; in the Northeast, wilderness watchdogs griped unhappily about “The Logging Conservancy.”

One of the great little-known leaders of the conservation network in the last half of the twentieth century is Huey Johnson of California.  He was The Nature Conservancy’s first Western region manager some forty to fifty years ago and then Secretary of Resources for California Governor Jerry Brown.  In 2002, he said, “I knew the founders of this organization [The Nature Conservancy] on a first-name basis, and they would be turning over in their graves” about the drilling, grazing, logging, and so on being done by TNC on its lands.

The Nature Conservancy was started and long run by naturalists; ornithologists and birders were much of the backbone of the outfit.  For a score of years, though, bird lovers have been harsh chiders of TNC’s phony stewardship.  What should be one of TNC’s most carefully and lovingly stewarded reserves is the Texas City Prairie Preserve, a 2,263-acre home for the highly endangered Attwater’s Prairie Chicken, in the oil patch of east Texas.  In 2002, there were only forty of the prairie grouse left in the whole world, down from tens of thousands not long ago.  Half of the last birds live on the TNC preserve.  The Conservancy also runs a thickly spread natural gas drilling and pumping business on the less than four square miles they own for the prairie chicken.  Oh, TNC also grazes the “preserve” with cattle.  A TNC spokesman said of the drilling and grazing, “We believe the opportunity we have in Texas City to raise significant sums of money for conservation is one we cannot pass up.”  He further said TNC was “convinced” the industrialization on the little “reserve” wouldn’t hurt the Attwater’s Prairie Chickens.  But the president of The Wildlife Society and the man who knows prairie chickens best, Clait Braun, said, “There are no data to indicate that the Attwater’s prairie chicken can coexist with oil and gas drilling.”  And “The Nature Conservancy is speaking out both sides of its mouth: ‘We can have this wildlife, and we can make money, too.’ … Well, that’s not true.  They’re exploiting the Attwater’s prairie chicken to make money.”  The Wildlife Society, by the way, is not known as an activist or hardcore bunch—it is a professional society for wildlife biologists.

Fishy land deals with big backers thrust The Nature Conservancy into the news spotlight and before Congress in 2005 thanks to a series of deep-digging investigative articles in The Washington Post.  It seems some rich folks were giving TNC big bucks to buy nature reserves and then getting a slice for a lovely, hideaway holiday home site.  As the story was about to break, I got a call from the President of TNC (McCormick) asking me to talk to the Post reporters about how much good the Conservancy had done.  As a well-known “radical conservationist” but longtime friend of TNC, he hoped I could offset some of the shady dealing harm.  Though I had growing qualms about TNC, I thought of doing his bidding—I liked him and, darn it, I still loved The Nature Conservancy.  But after calling some better in the know, I couldn’t do it.  I felt badly.

I was taken aback by this shoddy behavior—I never thought such dirt would get stuck to the boots of TNC.  It helped me see what kind of bigwigs were now helping to call the shots in the Conservancy.  Was real estate overwhelming wild neighborhoods on TNC’s to-do list?  As a share of their so-called “portfolio?”  (Beware any land-shielding group that calls their reserves a portfolio; you know business has too big a seat at their table.)  This shady deal-making said something about the kind of folks coming into TNC as staff, trustees, and donors.  Now The Nature Conservancy was full of big players and high rollers, not frumpy-looking folks with binoculars and beat-up old hats.

Some TNC members and donors became wroth when the stewards of a Nature Conservancy ranch in Kansas poisoned hundreds of prairie dogs on the TNC-owned land.  Moreover, they put out the worst poison for the job and they failed to get the legally needed permit for poisoning from the right agencies in Kansas.  Now, this “reserve” is in a benighted county in Kansas that bans prairie dogs (maybe they will next ban clean air).  TNC holds that they did the poisoning so that none of their prairie dogs would slip over to ranches owned by crotchety wildlife-haters.  They thought playing whack-the-varmints with such neighbors would lead to the county leaving alone the prairie dogs in the middle of TNC’s ranch.  This grisly behavior has led some landowners from Atlantic to Pacific to drop out of easement deals with TNC and some donors to write off TNC.  Wildlife shielding clubs and some scientists were madder than hell when news of the sin came out (along with TNC’s forlorn spinning).  We can lay this sad tale side-by-side with a gain for prairie dogs in Mora County, New Mexico.

Brian Miller, steward of the Thaw Charitable Trust’s Wind River Ranch on the Mora River, sees healthy prairie dog towns as key for rebuilding the former cattle ranch’s land health (he did his Ph.D. on black-footed ferrets and is widely acknowledged for knowing prairie dogs, the prey for ferrets).  Mora County also had a throwback ordinance against bringing prairie dogs into the county.  It had gone through with little thought a few years earlier when these anti-prairie dog ordinances became the thing to do in hinterland counties.  Well, everyone loves Brian and he is a great neighbor to the ranchers around Wind River Ranch.  The County Commission tossed the ordinance and the neighbors didn’t object to starting the prairie dog colony on the Wind River Ranch. Brian has since run some workshops on Wind River to show how prairie dogs are good for grasslands and takes visiting school groups to the colony.

For at least thirty years, TNC has often dealt with other conservationists in a cheeky and smarter-than-thou way.  But only in the last ten years have they worked against land-shielding goals held by other conservationists.  Does the leadership of TNC know how disliked TNC is among other conservationists?  Or even among some of its own staff?  Former members?  I’ll give just two tales of how TNC has gone against others.  Since the 1930s, conservationists have worked to shield the lands of the Colorado Plateau.  Nowhere else in the world is there such a landscape: an eye-stretching dryland of sandstone slickrock, weathered by wind and rain and frost into buttes, slot canyons, and arches, with mighty canyons carved by big rivers flowing with the snowmelt-water of high mountains far away.  Not only was this the last truly unknown landscape in the Lower 48 states; it held the biggest roadless area until Glen Canyon Dam flooded the heart of it in the 1960s.  President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes worked for a four-million-acre National Monument in the 1930s.  World War II put aside Ickes’s hope that Roosevelt would proclaim it.  In the 1960s, Kennedy’s Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall worked hard for an 800,000-acre Canyonlands National Park, smaller indeed than Ickes’ great dream and even smaller after the senators and representatives of Utah and the West wore it down (at 337,570 acres, the Park ended up less than half of what Udall wanted and less than one-tenth of what Ickes wanted).  Since then, we’ve worked to make it bigger and to set up Wilderness Areas on BLM and National Forest lands nearby.  As long as he lived, Udall spurred us to make the Park bigger.

In the fall of 2010, Utah conservation clubs met with then-Senator Robert Bennett’s staff about filling out Canyonlands National Park with some of the public lands next to it.  Clubs and teams from the fairly mellow Grand Canyon Trust to the tough Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) “all had well thought out proposals for park ‘completion.’  The Nature Conservancy stood out in their opposition to park expansion as it might affect grazing at the Dugout Ranch,” wrote Brooke Williams of SUWA.  So much for TNC showing how livestock grazing could be done in way that fit with land protection.  When an opening to enlarge one of America’s greatest National Parks came along, TNC was more worried about a few scrawny cows for which it has a permit on BLM land that would be put in the Park than in the wildland itself.  Here TNC behaved like a run-of-the-mill benighted rancher, caring about their commercial grazing and not about a great hope for the land.  They tipped their hat on how they saw the Canyonlands in a press release about their “partnering” with the Dugout Ranch, which leases thousands of acres of public land for cattle grazing.  The press release began, “The Colorado Plateau is a landscape in crisis.  Climate change coupled with increasing human demands are threatening the region’s natural resources and communities.”  Whoa.  What about the local communities scalping the land for over one hundred years?  It’s the wild things and wilderness of the Colorado Plateau that are threatened, but TNC doesn’t talk about that.

In Maine in 2011, a state court turned down a “sprawling resort and residential development in the Moosehead Lake region” by the big logging and land development business Plum Creek, widely thought a thug by wildlovers.  Conservationists and sportsmen cheered the ruling that would stop the wrecking of one of Maine’s loveliest and most loved landscapes.  Plum Creek appealed the ruling.  Then The Nature Conservancy jumped into the legal case—by joining Plum Creek in its appeal.

I could keep going with sad tales from my files, but they would only be more of the same.

What you can do

If you are a member of TNC, scold the leadership for their shameful stewardship.  If you know of like outrages on TNC preserves, please send me the information.  If you want to give money to buy private land for protection, give money and bequests to the Wilderness Land Trust, which buys private inholdings in Wilderness Areas to stop development.  www.wildernesslandtrust.org.

Dave Foreman

Adapted from Take Back Conservation

Click here to read the original Campfire which includes references and footnotes.

                                                –Steve McCormick, President of The Nature Conservancy, 2005

 Conservation strategies that lack meaningful core areas are naive, arrogant, and dangerous.

                         –Reed Noss and co-authors

The Nature Quisling

Along with the murky pull of enviro-resourcism away from wild-things-for-their-own-sakes conservation, I see some once-leading conservation outfits tiptoeing away from protected areas.  Tiptoeing?  I wrote that a few years ago; I fear it is no longer the right word.  Now it is more of a trot, or even a gallop.  Here the wonderful old Nature Conservancy (TNC) stands out as a quisling to the “Nature” it once shielded on scores of matchless hot spots of biodiversity all over the United States.  The quote above from Steve McCormick, then-President of The Nature Conservancy, forsakes the underlying beliefs and work of conservation; instead it states the beliefs and work of resourcism.  The shift began about 1990 under John Sawhill, who was TNC’s President before McCormick.

I was on the founding board of trustees for the New Mexico Chapter of the Conservancy in the 1970s and think I’ve been a member since the Late Stone Age.  I long had a credit card that backed TNC.  But I dropped my membership a few years ago after I saw that big business had more or less taken over TNC, and that TNC had hired top staffers who were resourcists, not wild conservationists, who saw Nature not as the Tree of Life to be loved and sheltered, but as raw goods to gobble for growing billions of Men.  I did not want to believe this takeover of TNC by energy, mining, logging, and grazing businesses and so I put off believing what I knew until I could no longer shut my eyes to it.

The overthrow of The Nature Conservancy by big business and get-ahead resource managers plays out in ugsome shifts in how TNC cares for its lands and the wild things that dwell therein, and in TNC’s thinking—philosophy, ethics, politics, and even in how the new TNC bosses see the science of biology.

There is a load of dirt in The Nature Conservancy’s “portfolio” for us to look at here.  Again, I’m not alone in my glumness.  Some of America’s leading biologists are deeply unhappy or cussedly angry over what a few sly ladder-climbers more at home with tycoons than raccoons have done to the once-great Nature Conservancy.  They’ve done this hand-in-hand with donors and board members from big business—foremost from extractive industry and polluters, from mining, logging, energy, agriculture, chemical, development, and other landscalping and befouling multinationals.  Grassroots conservationists have grown more and more upset as they see The Nature Conservancy going over to the dark side.

End of Protected Areas for TNC

In 2007, the executive director of a statewide wilderness club in the West told me what he and many of his fellows in the wilderness protection network thought, “TNC has totally lost its way.  Apparently it is protecting private land so that it can even more scientifically exploit it for human benefits.  And TNC donors thought their money was going to preserve habitats for wild species.”

The beliefs laid out in McCormick’s opening quote to this chapter are much more than a shift in how conservation should work; they are a wholesale spurning of what Nature conservation has been for over one hundred years.  They also cast off what had driven The Nature Conservancy from its founding to its slipping away from conservation under John Sawhill in the 1990s.

Protected areas are the hallmark of conservation.  It is what we do.  It is what we have done since Yellowstone.  The Wildlands Project book Continental Conservation says bluntly, “Conservation strategies that lack meaningful core areas are naive, arrogant, and dangerous.”  Resourcism, on the other hand, calls for resource extraction, “sustainable development,” and management of whole ecosystems without protected areas or with only a few tokens (ecosystem management).  Continental Conservation warns, “Such approaches assume a level of ecological knowledge and understanding—and a level of generosity and goodwill among those who use and manage public lands—that are simply unfounded.”  The new honchos of TNC are overbrimming with godlike gall in their belief that they can run wild things better than wild things can run themselves.  Their new outlook gives the heave-ho to 1960s-1970s pollution fighter Barry Commoner’s teaching “Nature knows best.”  The “Nature” TNC now wishes to “conserve” is more garden than wilderness, no longer self-willed but willed by kindly, wise TNC gardeners, who tell beavers, “Dam here, not there.”  “This high, no higher.”  “Our neighbors fear some of you are going to come on their land, so we’re going to kill half of you, okay?”  The Nature Conservancy now sees biodiversity as a natural resource, not as the Tree of Life to be loved and defended for its own sake.

We can see the harm done by the new TNC in two landscapes—the United States and the world.  Here, I’ll throw my rotten tomatoes at what TNC is doing in the US; I’ll go after their worldwide misdeeds in the forthcoming True Wilderness.  Here, I’ll take the TNC tale of woe only up to the rise of their chief scientist Peter Kareiva.  In True Wilderness, I’ll deal with his freakish, farfetched rewriting of what conservation is, and how he thinks he should be acknowledged as the leader of worldwide conservation.

And what did they think about what they saw?

I tussle with these questions as I shuffle through the fallen leaves of my family tree.  I wonder about them as I look out over a gray Chesapeake Bay from Maryland’s Calvert Cliffs State Park southeast of Washington.  Fall flocks of ducks fly in from the north.  I tease at them as I seek scattered plots of big woods along Virginia’s Rappahannock River south of Washington.

My father’s first forefather in the raw English settlements of the New World was Robert Tyler, who died in 1674 in Calvert County, Maryland.  I wonder how he saw this fresh new world.  What did he think about the wealth of the Bay—the foot-long oysters stretching in beds for miles, the fish so thick they could be scooped out in baskets, the ducks blotting out a fall sun?

First in my mother’s line in the New World was Charles Dodson.  Born in Scotland in 1649, he came to the tidewater of Virginia sometime before 1670 and farmed along the western bank of the Rappahannock River—only thirty or forty miles away from Tyler.  What did he think about the big woods?  The trees that rose and rose before their first branches?  Trees greater than any he believed could be as a boy in Scotland?  Trees so big that it took the linked arms of three or four men to reach about the trunks?

What did they think about a Nature so big, so far beyond their mind’s eye on the other side of the Atlantic?

Their thoughts have not come down the kinship line with their names.  And so I wonder.  My forebears came to a world far from the cutover woodlots of the British Isles, far from the sheep-packed fields, far from wolfless and bearless hills and bergs.

As for the forests, in 1632, Thomas Morton wrote of spruce trees in northern New England that were twenty feet about. William Cronon writes of the white pine: “The average height of a mature grove might be well over a hundred feet, with a few trees as much as five feet in diameter and 250 feet in height.”

Scattered between early settlements (often found on cleared Indian fields left after epidemic disease brought by the earliest European seafarers to set foot on dry land in the Americas) and stretching west seemingly forever, my forebears found a temperate deciduous forest beyond their dreams and without a match in all the world.  More species of trees grew in Virginia and Maryland than in Europe from Ireland to the Urals.  And what trees!  There were ents in those days. The tulip poplar grew over 200 feet tall and more than twenty feet about.  The American chestnut spread its great limbs over a quarter of an acre (think of four trees shading a whole football field).  Sycamores were thick-trunked and rose high along rivers, mighty oaks climbed the Piedmont to the Blue Ridge where tall white pines, spruce, and fir came down the heights from the north.  No wonder the tale grew of how a squirrel could run from the Chesapeake west 750 miles to the Mississippi River without ever meeting the ground.

But where is that forest today?

The Frontier Century runs from 1785 when Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance to govern western territories in the United States to 1890 when the Census Bureau declared that the frontier had closed.  Throughout the Frontier Century, the squirrel’s endless forest from the Atlantic to the Mississippi was hewn down.  The Great Eastern Forest came under a two-axed whack—from settlers hacking farms out of the wilderness and from timber companies skinning the land for fast pay dirt.

Quick shearing of the forest came first in New England.  William Cronon writes, “New England lumbering used forests as if they would last forever.” As early as 1682, twenty-four sawmills were cutting boards in Maine. Grasping as logging was, though, Cronon warns us that “the lumberer was not the chief agent in destroying New England’s forests; the farmer was.”  By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, New England but for Maine was mostly stripped.  New Hampshire was 95 percent forested in the 1600s.  By 1880, tree cover was down to 47 percent, and most of this was ecologically poor—spindly second or third growth and scrub, not the lordly old growth once darkening the hills and dells.  Much the same holds for Vermont and southern Maine.  Steve Trombulak and Chris Klyza of Middlebury College write that “the percentage of Vermont that is forested went from an estimated 95 percent in 1620, to 25 to 35 percent around 1850 to 1870….”

As settlers spread over the ridges throughout the trans-Appalachian frontier, they, too, hacked down the forest for farms.  French wayfarer Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed their feelings about the big woods on the Michigan settlement edge in 1831:

[The pioneer] living in the wilds…only prizes the works of man.  He will gladly send you off to see a road, a bridge, or a fine village.  But that one should appreciate great trees and the beauties of solitude, that possibility completely passes him by.  [Americans are] insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature, and they may be said not to perceive the mighty forests that surround them till they fall beneath the hatchet.  Their eyes are fixed on another sight…peopling solitudes and subduing nature.

The most straightforward utterance of the settlers’ thoughts about the Great Eastern Forest came from the matchless American frontiersman and Indian killer, Andrew Jackson, at his presidential inauguration in 1828:

[W]hat good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute.

Historian Michael Williams believes that over 100 million acres of the Great Eastern Forest were chopped down before 1850.  Between 1850 and 1859, however, another forty million acres were cut, “equivalent to roughly one-third of all clearing carried out during the previous two centuries.  It was a decade of maximum impact on the forest.”

After the easily reachable timber of New England and southern New York was cut in the 1700s, logging companies worked into the far backcountry of Maine and the Adirondacks.  Their more swashbuckling brethren shoved the timber edge west.  After the Civil War, big logging businesses took over the North Woods of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, which gave the timber industry its age of heroic legend.  From the 1870s on, the ransacking of the virgin White Pine forests in the North Woods set a new yardstick for land lust, and a mighty folk hero—Paul Bunyan—had to be crafted to match the deed.  Never before had so much forest fallen so swiftly.  Even some within the timber industry spooked.  The owners of the Black River Falls sawmill told the Minnesota legislature, “In a few years, the wealthiest portion of the pineries will present nothing but a vast and gloomy wilderness of pine stumps.”  They had good reason for their worry: Logs passing Beef Slough, a Chippewa River channel above the Mississippi River, went from “12 million feet in 1868 to 274,367,000 feet in 1873.  On the neighboring Black River the traffic rose from 6 million feet in 1864 to 195,398,830 feet in 1873,” wrote Frederic Merk. These are jumps of 23-fold in five years and 32.5-fold in nine years, respectively.

Paul and the Blue Ox did their work well for the timber kings.  The Northern Hardwoods and Great Lakes Pine Forests were chopped to smithereens in a few short years.  Lumbermen had run after the American forest from the Atlantic to the Great Plains over the millrace of the Frontier Century, scalping it in New England, stripping it bare in Pennsylvania, New York, and Michigan, and plundering it in Wisconsin and Minnesota.  All the while they told Americans not to worry—the trees were without end.

And Americans, true children of the frontier, believed as frontiersmen always believe.  And still believe.

Dave Foreman

Three Gun Spring Canyon

Adapted from my forthcoming book Conservation vs. Conservation: The Fight for America’s Last Wild Things, the fourth in the For the Wild Things series.

To wit: In 1995, William Cronon wrote

[We must] abandon the dualism that sees the tree in the garden as artificial—completely fallen and unnatural—and the tree in the wilderness as natural—completely pristine and wild.  Both trees in some ultimate sense are wild….

First of all, I know of no one who says that a garden tree is wholly “fallen and unnatural” and a wilderness tree is thoroughly “pristine and wild.”  This is make-believe.

Nonetheless, the trees are unalike down to their roots in dirt and being.  To think both are wild is to show a misunderstanding of what wild is.  One could also say that a gorilla flinging turds at gawkers from its concrete and steel-bar zoo cage and a gorilla foraging for wild celery with its bunch on the slopes of the Virunga Volcanoes are both “ultimately wild.”  Or that a battery hen in a coop so tiny she cannot turn around and a free-flying gyrfalcon in the Brooks Range are both wild.

Here we come to befuddlement between wild and biological.  Biology is found in our bodies, in the battery hen, in the garden tree.  Biology comes with being alive.  Life is biology.  Wild splits away from biological in at least two ways.  The first is that wild things are free of Man’s will; they are self-willed.  They are not in a cage or a zoo cell; neither are they highly bred fruit trees planted by Man in a garden.  Second, wildness is the whole wild neighborhood.  A mountain lion in the Gila Wilderness is more than itself: it is a tangled bundle with everything near it.  A 400-year-old Douglas-fir in an old-growth forest is more than itself since it is caught up with everything about it, from the mycorrhizal fungi in the damp, dank, dark forest floor to the spotted owl in its limbs to the winter rains of the Pacific Northwest.  The Doug-fir in the big wildwood is a splinter of a mostly self-willed neighborhood.  The garden tree is a sprout in a Man-willed neighborhood.  There is an unlikeness—and the unlikeness is wild.

This said, let me acknowledge that I spend time in my backyard of four espaliered apple trees, a peach tree, four cherry trees, a plum tree, an apricot tree, grape vines, daffodils, tulips…a calico cat, a gray tabby, and a fluffy black cat.  As I type this, I have dirt under my fingernails from pulling up grass among my tulips and Chama (the calico) is on my lap.  Wilderness, no.  A garden, yes.  Do I like it?  You bet I do.  But I do not play a mind-game that it is wilderness, nor do I have even an inkling that thanks to it I can live without wilderness.  I love my old cats prowling the garden, but I need mountain lions prowling the wilderness, too.  Mountain lions cannot live in gardens!  Like all my friends, I blend wilderness and civilization in my own life.

But what of wildness and wilderness?  Our old Concord teacher, Henry Thoreau, said, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”  True, so true.  But a deeper truth is that in Wilderness Areas is the preservation of wildness.  Wildness cannot be without land or sea.  Wilderness is stead.  Self-willed land.  The home of wildness.  Moreover, in this sad day and age, unwarded wildness likely will not last for long.  To keep wildness, we need wild havens (protected areas)—the tougher the better, such as Wilderness Areas.

For indoor thinkers, wildness can be a Platonic abstraction, an “essence” like “treeness,” but wilderness is down to Earth—like big woods and slickrock slots.  Wilderness deconstructionists like intellectual abstraction, but they shy from true being; I think they would rather play with essence not hardness.  Paul Shepard warned, “The garden is abstracted from the world as a whole.”

And thereby, although alive, it is not wild.

Dave Foreman

Waiting for the first daffodil with my big, old gray tabby friend on my lap

This Campfire is drawn from my forthcoming book, True Wilderness.

Click here to read the original “Campfire.”

Anticonservation attorney Karen Budd-Falen stamps her foot down that federal land agencies must “protect the economic or community stability of those communities and localities surrounding national forests and BLM-managed lands.”  Then-Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska (later governor), at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee hearing on the Forest Service, January 25, 1996, said, “These people [loggers in southeast Alaska] are great Americans.  Blue collar Americans.  They work hard and look to us for help.  We should be able to help them.…I have constituents out there who are real people, and they are entitled to a job.…These people rely on the government to provide them with a sustainable livelihood.”  It might be fair for Murkowski to call on the federal government to underwrite jobs for his folks.  However, he should not call himself a conservative Republican and should come clean that he is a welfare socialist. (Alaska is by far the most socialistic state in the union, its make-believe rugged individualism notwithstanding.)  And, by the way, who is not a “real person?”  I wonder if those who fling the line about have been watching too many vampire and zombie shows on television.  I would say that corporations are not real persons, even though they have been blessed with personhood by twisted law.

Here’s what philosophers call a “thought experiment.”  Daydream that these lines from Smith, Budd-Falen, and Murkowski came instead from a Democratic member of Congress, say a black woman from East St. Louis.  Why, the Republicans would be all over themselves calling her a socialist, even a communist.  Some might have heart attacks, their wrath boiling enough to pop arteries.  But, when said by other Republicans, it’s good, old, all-American conservatism and free-marketism.  Their rugged individualism is a toddler’s rugged individualism.  You don’t have to be a world-weary political scientist with a Ph.D. to be clever enough to understand that all this job talk by right-wingers is a two-fold scam.  One, it’s raw meat to toss to gullible voters, who, if they were smart enough to vote for what’s good for them, would never vote for such Republicans.  Two, forsooth, it’s meant to get government handouts to big business under the hoax of helping them make jobs for “great Americans, blue-collar Americans.”

Not only do these so-called conservatives back government job-making and handouts for resource extraction businesses, the subsidies they back help the worst players stay in business.  Without government help, the ecologically most harmful ranchers and loggers on public lands would not make it.  At the heart of a free market is business wipeout.

Jared Diamond, a wide-roaming scientist who lays out eye-burning bright insights in his books, enlightens us on this tangle when he writes that in Australia and the United States, “rural people are considered honest, and city-dwellers are considered dishonest.  If a farmer goes bankrupt, it’s assumed to be the misfortune of a virtuous person overcome by forces beyond his control….” This Myth of Rural Moral Superiority has been used like a never-dying gunslinger to uphold the wants of the old-timey economic elite in the West (and elsewhere).

©2012 Dave Foreman

It is a few months later than I would have liked, but the next Rewilding Institute book, Take Back Conservation, is at last with Raven’s Eye Press in Durango.  It will roll off the press in time for Yule gifts (hint, hint).  In Take Back Conservation I weigh what is wrong with our wilderness and wildlife family today and lay out the steps to get us back on track.  By the way, among our wrong-way steps are two from the last sentence: Too many of our leaders and even grassroots conservationists don’t see our network as a family anymore, and the conservation network to many is no longer first and foremost about the good of wilderness and wildlife.  Among the steps for which I call in Take Back Conservation is bringing natural history back to the fore.  What follows in this Campfire are two steps from the book about how to raise natural history again.

• Rebuild natural history as craft and science, and bring it back as the keystone of conservation.

I keep going back to Leopold’s insight about those who cannot live without wild things for how it grabs so well and thoroughly the inner being of wilderness and wildlife conservationists.  It’s why I name those who shield wildlife and wilderness Cannots and wildlovers.  Overall, we wildlovers want to know something about the wild things we hold so dear.  We learn about wild things through the craft of natural history, either as folk naturalists or as scientific authorities.  Once upon a time, most conservationists knew something about the birds, wild blossoms, trees, and such in their neck of the out-of-doors.  Once upon a time, biology was mostly natural history—botany, ornithology, mammalogy, herpetology, ecology, and so on.  Nowadays, many leaders and staffers of conservation clubs and teams are more knowledgeable about and enthralled with political things than wild things.  Knowing political things is good, too, but their natural history skills and feeling of wonder in the big outside are often scant.

Nowadays, it seems most biologists are “lab rats” who seldom if ever go outside for their science.  Even some conservation biologists are lightweights when it comes to natural history.  Peter Kareiva, head scientist for The Nature Conservancy, says, “I’m not a biodiversity guy.”  As for me, I feel naked without my binoculars. Once upon a time, college biology departments offered a slew of natural history courses and many were field courses.  Among the most wanted college classes, even for nonbiology majors, were natural history field courses.  To wit: the only elective Nancy took while working on her master’s degree in nursing at the University of Arizona was a field course on the natural history of the Sonoran Desert taught by the legendary Paul Martin.  Natural history courses are fading from biology departments today, somewhat owing to how few biology faculty can teach such classes now.

Reed Noss, of the University of Central Florida and one of the world’s top conservation biologists (and unmatched in bringing conservation biology to the conservation network), believes that the root of what is wrong with conservation biology today is the fading of natural history.  Tom Fleischner, of Prescott College in Arizona, worries about the overall loss of natural history and has started a campaign to build up natural history as the core of biology and as a love for conservationists.  Bringing together a wide sweep of authors, he has edited a book, The Way of Natural History, whose chapters underline why natural history is so key. (You can buy this wonderful little book from The Rewilding Institute—see the order form at the end of this Campfire.)

©2012 Dave Foreman

In the years following Earth Day, environmentalism, once regarded as the self-serving indulgence of a privileged elite, became ‘America’s cause’….

–Phil Shabecoff - A Fierce Green Fire: The American   Environmental Movement

The Myth in a Nutshell

Earth Day, April 22, 1970, gave birth to the long-in-the-womb overhauling of the American conservation movement into the environmental movement.  By 1970 the conservation movement was tired, stodgy, and cut off from a growing and shifting America.  Since Rachel Carson‘s Silent Spring, which came out in 1962, folks had grown ever more aware of and worried about the evil banes befouling their air, water, soil, and bodies.  With the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969, thickening smog in coughing cities, and the Cuyahoga River through Cleveland flashing afire on June 22, 1969, the onslaught against our living space was in everybody’s face.  The upper-crust conservation movement, which had never found a snug home with Americans, was straightaway made “relevant” with a new target on threats that mainly harmed people—smog, poisons in our food, filthy rivers, traffic jams, unsafe Pintos, and thoughtless, uncaring, and even evildoing big businesses.  Conservationists had been a band of hikers, bird-watchers, mountaineers, and sportsmen.  Environmentalists are mothers, fathers, and children.  Deep woods with tall trees rolling on for miles, wildlife, and National Parks are okay, but when you get right down to it, what comes first are human health, safety, and quality of life.  Today, the environmental movement has cast its net wider to haul in social justice, anticolonialism, feminism, animal rights, and Green politics, on top of fighting pollution and shielding wilderness.

So goes The Myth of the Environmental Movement.  In sundry shapes it is ballyhooed by academics and the news business, and believed in by the public, politicians, and many of those who belong to conservation and environmental clubs.

It is also wrong.

John Muir would sit down beside a blossom new to him and get to know it.  Let’s sit down here on our path by The Myth of the Environmental Movement, sunder it petal by petal, root by root, and try to tease it out.  We can deal out this myth into four belief-heaps:

(1) First and foremost, The Myth of the Environmental Movement holds there is one widespread folk gathering that cares about pollution and Endangered Species, urban transportation and wilderness, human health and “ecology.”

(2) Earth Day 1970 is touted as when conservation broadened into the lively, likable, and mighty environmental movement.  Veteran New York Times environmental reporter Phil Shabecoff wrote, “In the years following Earth Day, environmentalism, once regarded as the self-serving indulgence of a privileged elite, became ‘America’s cause’….”

(3) Before Earth Day, the Myth says that conservation was waning, unknown to most Americans, and politically weak.  In 1971, even mindfully farsighted and canny human ecologist Paul Shepard wrote, “By 1970 the long-standing but obscure crusade for conservation, once dominated by ‘nature lovers’ and modestly aimed at a mixture of amenities and improved land use, had abruptly graduated to the first rank of national concerns.”

(4) Environmentalism is above all about human health.  Back in 1994, the founder of the National Association of Physicians for the Environment (NAPE), Dr. John Grupenhoff, said, “Every environmental problem is or will become a health problem.  Therefore, pollution prevention is disease prevention.” (I don’t know where NAPE is today, but it or something like it is sorely needed.)

Let me slice up each of these beliefs, and then we will look more thoroughly at this vampish little myth with our pocketknife, tweezers, and hand lens, so we can see how environmentalism and conservation are not the same.

First of all, I do not believe there is an “Environmental Movement.”  Rather, I see work to keep wildlands and wildlife as the conservation movement or network, and the job to halt the harm technology does to human health and quality of life as the environmental movement, which would be better called the human health network.  My friend David Quammen, author of Song of the Dodo and maybe the best writer on biodiversity, thinks much like me.  In a 1999 interview, he said, “The preservation of biological diversity and the cleaning up of the human environment are not a single enterprise.…Conservation and environmentalism are not the same thing.”  In his column for Outside magazine, “Natural Acts,” he had a few years earlier written, “The term ‘environment’ implies a set of surroundings for some central, preeminent subject.  That central subject…is human life.  Therefore the very word ‘environment’ entails a presumption that humanity is the star of a one-character drama around which everything else is just scenery and proscenium.”  He went on, “Environmentalism is not in its essence perverted.  It’s just an understandable campaign of self-interest, by our species, with potentially dire implications for the world at large.  What does seem perverted is confusing environmentalism with conservation.” I wish more of my conservation friends would take these words to heart and clean up their language.  Muddling conservation with the name “environment” is not only wrong, it is harmful to shielding wild things.

Adapted from Chapter 1 in Take Back Conservation. The book, second in the For the Wild Things series by Dave Foreman will be published this fall.

Please click here to read the entire Campfire.