When I worked for the U.S. Forest Service I strongly believed in expanding wilderness designations in the United States. There's something so compelling about the idea of supporting and conserving wild and untrammeled landscapes. I'd hazard that most Americans have never heard of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and think of the term "wilderness" as a vague description of a landscape characteristic rather than a rigid set of legal protections, and I bet that even fewer understand the scope of how many acres of land fall under these protections. It can be intoxicating to be in the know, and there are few things as satisfying as disappearing into the backcountry for a week or two and truly finding refuge from modern life.
But, the author is fundamentally correct about the relationship between humans and natural areas. The untrammeled nature of officially designated wilderness areas is a myth. The degree of trammeling of course varies by area and over time, but it's there no matter where you look. To the extent that we continue to put stock in this concept of "untrammeled by man", we do a disservice to the history and continued existence of indigenous Americans. Also, we needlessly hamstring our own management actions which compound into real threats on the very thing the act set out to protect. Increasingly I think to myself "no more wilderness" and advocate for proposed wilderness study areas to have a management designation more closely aligned with their intended use: National Recreation Areas.
I agree with everything you said, but I suffered a huge rush of blood to the head when you used the word "recreation." When I look at a government-managed area and see the word "recreation," I immediately think of 4-wheelers and motorboats, driven by people who have just drunk an entire ice chest full of beer, throwing trash out the window, possibly carrying firearms regardless of any rules.
I think we need to think about management in a graded way, with different areas having different mandates and different policies, with different restrictions on usage, and all working together in a way that repairs what we have damaged, and working together with policies for land that isn't government-managed.
However, we have to be prepared to stand up for restrictions that a lot of people aren't happy with. A lot of people aren't happy that we don't log and mine natural parks. If we give in to the "common sense" of people like that, on the reasoning that "nothing is truly wild," we'll lose the rest of what we have, and very quickly. The moment you use a word like "recreation" in connection with a federally-managed piece of land, people are going to assume it's for partying and drunk-operating noisy vehicles. And they're going to call you elitist and out-of-touch for pushing back. We absolutely need to fight those battles, even without a blind and absolute belief in "wilderness."
If the challenge here is on conceptual framing of wild lands, if there were to be any movement from the word and concepts tied to "wilderness", why not something like "stewarded"? This recognizes, for example, historical Indigenous practices of managing land without allowing for plunder or party. Instead, it elevates wilderness as something to be protected, cherished, and looked after - also in opposition to the neglect of "wilderness".
We do have that. A designated "Wilderness Area" is the most strict classification. Restrictions in these areas (which cover large majorities of our national parks) are:
- No motorized vehicles
- No permanent buildings - this even means bathrooms and bear boxes many places. Stephen Mather Wilderness (North Cascades National Park) is currently doing surveys asking about if they should install more of them or add more bathrooms.
- Limited trail signage
- No "trammeling" which essentially means: don't mess with natural processes.
These Wilderness Areas are very different from Federal Recreation Areas, yet you can still "recreate" in a Wilderness area seeking solitude and nature.
If you have been to any national parks recently I think you would understand the "recreation area" designation. The most accessible parks are now so crowded it no longer feels like a wilderness. Just streams of people trying to experience rare places. A place like Zion gets 9.5 million visitors a year.
Even "leave no trace" outdoor practices leave some trace. Multiply that by the number of visitors and the impact is obvious.
in practice, the current fight against conservation of nature (on the grounds of humans having lived in the given area or having influenced it - a popular argument today) will do nothing except destroying what's left of it. the fact that people once used to live "in nature" without doing major damage doesn't mean that today's people with access to today's tools are likely to live like that. regardless of the past, in the present, designating areas as off limits to people is the most likely way to preserve nature by far.
(There might be a counterargument to this; I have not found it in the article)
I think the person you were replying to was making a slightly different point. They were talking about Wilderness as a legal designation in the US, as distinct from wilderness as a concept.
When an area is designated as a Wilderness, that requires a certain style of management that might or might not be appropriate for the area and is very hard to change. More flexible management options are often a good thing, and there are lots of options for managing federal lands (NRAs, NCAs, etc) that don’t come with the strict rules of a Wilderness but are still pretty limited in what they allow.
Non-Wilderness designations do mean having to place more trust in the people on the ground and the agencies involved. You might or might not think that’s appropriate. But what OC and the article both say is that we have to make those decisions with the mindset that “no management” isn’t the default or best option, and often people hear the word “wilderness” and assume that it is.
As someone who loves long, mellow rides on my mountain bike, I'm conflicted about Wilderness areas. I like the idea of protecting more land, but the idea that you can ride horses into a Wilderness area, shoot an elk and pack it out, but can't push a stroller in (because wheels) or ride a bike seems kind of odd in terms of the impactfulness of those activities.
I'd love it if things were mostly left up to local decision makers. Some trails aren't appropriate for bikes and that's fine, Wilderness area or no. Some trails within Wilderness areas would be no problem at all for bikes.
And tactically, maybe environmentalists would gain some allies if they weren't trying to push cyclists out.
And despite all that, the FAA can still route a large percentage of all air traffic on approach to a major international airport right over the top of the “wilderness area”.
Nothing like listening to few hours of planes on approach to SeaTac to spoil the whole “untrammeled by man” thing.
(Not that I have a good solution to this problem. Air traffic noise abatement involves a ton of tradeoffs)
I too love biking in the woods. But I would oppose your specific policy prescription (leave it up to local decisionmakers) on the grounds that I would expect OHVs, loggers, etc to lobby against the aims of the current designation in small or big ways.
Pardon my french, but fuck no. I think "Wilderness" is a perfectly appropriate designation for the intended use of these lands-to keep man-made impact on them as little as possible. The fact that it's not "historically accurate" doesn't diminish the value of the label in its intended use.
I feel designated wilderness areas (at least in my state, CO) could benefit from MORE regulation because they are trammeled to hell by cattle. Additional protections only improve these areas.
Also, I did not realize the Wilderness designation had anything to do with indigenous Americans. Is that a thing?
A forest turns solar energy into wood, locking up that energy in an inedible form. Grass, on the other hand, can be eaten by grazing animals and turned into meat. If you're living off the land but not farming, then you'd prefer it to be covered in grass instead of trees.
Grazing animals can prevent grassland from reforesting by eating the tree shoots, but they can't knock down mature trees. There is some evidence paleoindians would burn down forests to expand grasslands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_bison_belt
Thus, in some parts of the US, you can stand on a hill, look out at miles of apparently untouched land without a single permanent structure, but is as artificial and manmande as a golf course, crafted from thousands of years of invisible labor.
Maybe the mythology is just a tool to get people on-board with the idea of preserving certain areas to the extent they are preserved.
Some American Indians loathe the patronizing idea that they were/are nobles in-tune with nature. They may not have exploited nature with mechanized efficiency, but at least some tribes took what they needed when they needed without the hippie vision of harmonious balance and they engaged in violence and war when it made sense to do so —kind of like other groups of humans elsewhere.
Some native tribes in the Northeast (and probably elsewhere but I know of them specifically) conducted controlled burns of large sections of forest to clear them for farming.
There’s a theory the current state of the Amazon is the product of heavy cultivation. Hence its high quantity of edible plants. I’m not sure the degree of acceptance that theory has though.
I know nothing about the issue but I hear recreational use and I immediately picture people driving 4 wheelers and dirt bikes through pristine land and I'm like nope.
Another commenter said the same thing. I'm curious about the association because I spend a lot of time in my local state/national parks with recreational rules. I think I've run into a dirtbike once and never seen an ATV (although I see their tracks).
I'm sure it's geo-dependent, but I wonder if there's a wider media narrative driving the association.
Consider that without allowing some of that kind of use, there might not be enough political willpower for more “hardcore” things like wilderness areas. It’s a delicate balance between preservation and access and you (politically) cannot have one without the other.
I have yet to see a coherent philosophy that is able to differentiate between human communities and “the natural world” in a way that isn’t totally arbitrary
The distinction between wild or natural is completely arbitrary human made, and has no actual reflection on reality that I can tell
Humans are not the only set of organisms to radically change landscapes - Ants, wasps, locusts and beavers perfectly demonstrate that.
Humans are not the only set of organisms to be altruistic or communal
Humans are the only animal who have the ability to destroy all other animals, and that seems to be the only distinction that we make - eg boils down to might makes right,
So I would love to hear somebody give me a proof of why this distinction in scale rather than kind, is actually a worthwhile ETHICAL differentiator, such so we can actually reason about what that difference implies in a way that doesn’t make artificial or arbitrary distinctions or appeal to self interests alone
No one cares that humans and wasps and beavers all change the landscape over time. What makes humans exceptional is that we can decide how we change the landscape, understand the impacts, and can choose which impacts on nature are desirable. Animals don't have the ability to really consider the impacts of their actions on the world around them, but we do which imparts onto us a higher level of responsibility.
We've already poisoned every living thing and every source of water on the planet with toxic "forever" chemicals we created. They're in the rain that falls. The body of every newborn creature is polluted by them before they draw their first breath. That's just so fundamentally different from "But look at this ant hill" that it's hard to imagine why anyone can't see what sets humanity apart or would consider that difference to be an arbitrary distinction.
We're capable of causing more harm. We're capable of understanding the harms that we cause in ways other animals simply aren't. We're also capable of deciding not to cause harm. We're capable of intentionally making different choices that can help protect and preserve the environments we live in. Our deliberate choices and their impacts on the world compared to the actions and outcomes of every other animal on the plant is about as far from an arbitrary distinction as it gets.
I think there are more precise definitions, but it requires more understanding. You can talk about protecting native species and there are moral arguments for that. Although I am not sure how much that actually drives people. For many nature seems to be an almost religious topic with binary views routed in self interest. You just have to talk to solar or wind objectors to realise that.
I live in the UK and the situation is pretty extreme. People love nature passionately. But most of what people view as natural is degraded farmland. The National Parks are all landscapes that only exist directly from human intervention (usually sheep, grouse, mining, forestry). And many of the protected areas have people living in them that get outsized property prices and endless tourism.
There are healthy, sustainable ecosystems, and there are unhealthy, unsustainable ecosystems.
While ants, wasps, and beavers can change a landscape to benefit them in an unsustainable, unhealthy way that will lead to their destruction, I think you have to indulge a bit of wishful thinking to not realize they are less likely and less capable of doing so than humans.
We'll need to set order in our own home before we look to the ants, the wasps, and the beavers.
We can engineer more sustainable food production systems at multiple levels. Would you consider terracing a whole mountain to maximize water use to be sustainable? The initial impact is quite destructive but the result is a more sustainable and persistent food producing ecosystem. We can also use the natural landscape but cultivate the species that grow in the ecosystem (food forest).
I believe we are meant to be the gardeners of the planet. Improving available food in an ecosystem invites more living things. It is a positive feedback loop. If we focused on building closed loop ecosystems that also provide food and materials we could be a benefit to all life. Focusing on not changing the "wild" is a negative view. We are the expert species at forming our environment. We should shape it so it provides for us and the rest of the critters.
In fact, it muddies the question itself by distracting away from measurable criteria towards vague and general, broad sweeping conceptual ideas of “Unhealthy” “Unsustainable”
It is simple as, biodiversity is preferable to a monoculture. The specifics of achieving that is murky and may seem arbitrary, but the overall goal is pretty clear. Humans are the only organisms that can reason about it, so human should act like the "adults in the room" and practice stewardship to maintain some level of biodiversity, regardless of what was human caused or non-human caused.
> Humans are the only animal who have the ability to destroy all other animals,
Even that is only theoretical. Let's say that we were to wipe out a great amount of life on earth with a thermonuclear war or something, a lot of life would remain, even if we are talking about bacteria and other microorganisms. But even deep sea life that exists below a certain depth would likely remain largely unaffected.
I'm on the fence about whether I agree with this. The way I see it, if you look at beavers, ants, or trees, they change the landscape but they do it based on behaviors that are encoded in their genes. That means a beaver can create a lake, but its descendants have to be able to live with that using the same slow-changing genetic programming, otherwise they die off. With humans, we can adapt new ways to live in the altered environment, even if it would have been incompatible with the lives of our ancestors. If we kill off all the salmon and whales, for example, within a generation or two we can pivot to factory-farmed chicken and petroleum. Once we've tapped that out we can do soy protein and windfarms.
I say I'm on the fence because on a longer time scale, that kind of mental adaptation might not be that much different from genetic adaptation and we'll still have to find equilibrium or die out.
As far as the ethics question goes, if we use the most basic model and say that the ethical thing is that which promotes the most "good-life-years per capita" versus "bad-life-years per capita", where capita means one of the sentient residents of the planet, there are a few ways to look at it:
1. Ethics is just a fiction that humans have made up to support the prisoners' dilemma style of cooperation game we play, and there's no real answer.
2. The billon or two twilight years of our planet are better spent in rough equilibrium, where tigers exist, but most animals get some time to stretch in the sun, nuzzle their young, etc.
3. Life in equilibrium is actually cold, brutal, and short for most of the sentient animals involved, so providing a higher level of comfort for a population of ten billion people is better, even if it eventually crashes.
4. The experience of a human counts more than that of an animal, so a high human population with a decent standard of living for a long enough time pushes the needle past what a much longer natural equilibrium would achieve.
I saw you palm that card! Utilitarianism is anything but "the most basic model" of ethics. If you want to argue from it, do so honestly rather than try to smuggle it in as an unexamined postulate.
The concept of "pristine wilderness" is indeed a myth, shaped by Euro-American ideas of nature as something untouched by humans. Indigenous peoples have been actively managing and shaping landscapes for thousands of years, through practices like controlled burns, multi-cropping, and sustainable harvesting. However, colonial narratives of the "frontier" ignored this history, framing these lands as wild and uninhabited, which justified their conquest and later shaped early conservation policies.
These narratives still impact our policies today. When we frame conservation as keeping nature "untrammeled by man," we erase indigenous histories and practices that have long sustained ecosystems. IMO, conservation efforts that aim to separate humans from nature often harm both, as seen in the forced removal of indigenous peoples from national parks. A more nuanced approach would recognize that human interaction with nature isn’t inherently destructive and that indigenous stewardship offers valuable lessons in sustainable land management. Embracing this perspective could lead to more effective conservation policies and a healthier relationship with nature, where human presence is viewed as potentially harmonious rather than inherently damaging.
It's an ideal appreciated by Europeans, but especially by Americans. We don't like people spreading to every single uninhabited nook & cranny and consuming every possible resource. America has a lot of uninhabited places. That's not an invitation for people the world over to consume and devour and combust and mine and destroy these places, as many of them have done to their own homes.
You've seen the headlines plenty of times: declining populations of species, particularly insects, bees. The natural world deserves some refuge and respite from human colonization. We've cultivated crops and powerful technology, let's cultivate some wilderness too. Wild growth is beauty and temperance. It's saying, "I've eaten enough, that I don't need to eat this, let wild beauty flourish here." Do not strive to eat the world, eat just enough.
And indigenous populations were comparatively small, and there were vast areas they simply didn't go (or need to go).
I think the wild needs the respect of Gimli toward the Glittering Caves - we can help it, we can improve it, but only slowly and carefully (partially because we don't know what we don't know).
I feel extremely conflicted reading something like this. On one hand, everything you said is technically true. On the other hand, when I think of who benefits politically from debunking the myth of wildness, it's the people who want to allow unlimited private exploitation of public lands, log and mine national parks, and act like any place with rocks and trees is of equal value to any other place with rocks and trees.
In truth, the idea of wilderness is a useful heuristic that simplifies incredibly complex questions about the functioning of ecosystems and their worth to us.
Labeling it a myth is a way of destroying its value as a heuristic without offering any replacement, leaving people unable to explain and defend policies that prevent unchecked commercial exploitation of public lands.
The alternative is to not only learn from, appreciate, and re-install traditional and indigenous practices in conservation efforts as much as possible, but also try and expand our idea of nature to include the conservation of species in landscapes that do not conform to the traditional sense of pristine wilderness.
It is about respecting those who live on the planet with us, and the wilderness myth allows the people you speak about exploit everything other than a very narrow idea of what is wild, and valuable.
While the heuristic is useful for, say, a rainforest eco-system, it actively de-values the plains/ grasslands/ marshes ecosystems just because they do not conform to the ideal we think about when we think about wilderness.
Acknowledging prior indigenous use of the land doesn't necessarily have to lead to an undesirable free for all of as you say "unlimited private exploitation of public lands." There is another way.
Recognizing Aboriginal Title of traditional lands and joint lands management can be a way to control and limit exploitative uses of lands in a way which also recognizes traditional (generally a lot lighter!) land uses.
I cannot strongly enough suggest the book "Tending the Wild:
Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources" by M. Kat Anderson.
It was suggested to me in a comment here on HN, though I cannot now seem to find it by searching.
I'm currently reading this book and it's incredible.
It paints a picture of how rich plant and animal life was before contact with Europeans. It shows how Native Californians depended on and deeply understood every root, leaf, flower, and fruit of every plant in their area. It explains how Native Californians were responsible for preserving and enriching the wildlife around them -- doing controlled burns, pruning, managing animal populations, sowing seeds, etc. These areas weren't "wild" or "pristine" at all, they were carefully managed and densely populated by Native Americans for over 10,000 years.
I think oftentimes we feel hopeless about our relationship to nature. We think if we touch it, we'll destroy it. Learning about how Native Californians lived shows how that's not inevitable at all.
> In order to safeguard a sufficient number of species to protect global biodiversity, including humanity, the late American biologist, E.O. Wilson and a new generation of scientists, ecologists, and conservationists concluded that we must set aside roughly half of Earth’s land and seas for nature, known as the principle of “Half-Earth.”
It doesn't matter if we modified the ecosystems, it's still imperative to establish large regions of untouched ecosystems (as large as possible, as untouched as possible). Humans are very recent in the life of the planet and there's no a priori reason to assume that the things we do are sustainable for several hundred million years.
The dinosaurs lasted, what?, three hundred million years? That's the figure to beat. Can the talking apes last longer than the big dumb lizards?
So far most civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying the health of the soil. Merv was the most beautiful city in the world for a thousand years. Now look at it: https://maps.app.goo.gl/CzfGxVZiTpapqCC8A It looks like Mars.
An equivalent book, which covers the same topic, and which I consider to be one of the most influential books I've ever read: The Once and Future World, by J.B. MacKinnon (https://www.jbmackinnon.ca/the-once-and-future-world)
Unfortunately, the ebook version is rather difficult to buy outside of the US, but if you contact the author, he may be able to provide a copy.
The part I found most haunting was what he termed 'the forgetting' - how, as we lose swaths of Nature, each new generation accepts it as normal, until we've forgotten what was lost.
I also learned about the megafauna: giant animals that vanished in prehistory, coinciding with the arrival of humans to their habitats. Africans, Europeans, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines - it made no difference. Every tribe of humans wiped out the competition, in every continent.
"Encounters with the Archdruid" by John McPhee, about David Brower, former director of the Sierra Club, and his advocacy for preserving wilderness areas "untouched" by humans.
"Forests: A Very Short Introduction" by Jaboury Ghazoul, which explores how human presence, even in ancient times, has led to profound changes in landscapes for their benefit.
"1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C. Mann, which I’ve just started reading, hypothesizes that Indigenous peoples in the Americas actively transformed their environment to a much greater extent than previously believed.
"A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold since he is referenced in the article.
I would like to see more land east of the Rockies and east of the Mississippi turned into protected federal land. So much of the western states (often more than 50% of total land area) is federal land.
It feels like the easterners ruined their beautiful land and now want to tell us in the west how to live.
Go spend on your own backyard and leave ours to us.
Readit News
But, the author is fundamentally correct about the relationship between humans and natural areas. The untrammeled nature of officially designated wilderness areas is a myth. The degree of trammeling of course varies by area and over time, but it's there no matter where you look. To the extent that we continue to put stock in this concept of "untrammeled by man", we do a disservice to the history and continued existence of indigenous Americans. Also, we needlessly hamstring our own management actions which compound into real threats on the very thing the act set out to protect. Increasingly I think to myself "no more wilderness" and advocate for proposed wilderness study areas to have a management designation more closely aligned with their intended use: National Recreation Areas.
I think we need to think about management in a graded way, with different areas having different mandates and different policies, with different restrictions on usage, and all working together in a way that repairs what we have damaged, and working together with policies for land that isn't government-managed.
However, we have to be prepared to stand up for restrictions that a lot of people aren't happy with. A lot of people aren't happy that we don't log and mine natural parks. If we give in to the "common sense" of people like that, on the reasoning that "nothing is truly wild," we'll lose the rest of what we have, and very quickly. The moment you use a word like "recreation" in connection with a federally-managed piece of land, people are going to assume it's for partying and drunk-operating noisy vehicles. And they're going to call you elitist and out-of-touch for pushing back. We absolutely need to fight those battles, even without a blind and absolute belief in "wilderness."
- No motorized vehicles
- No permanent buildings - this even means bathrooms and bear boxes many places. Stephen Mather Wilderness (North Cascades National Park) is currently doing surveys asking about if they should install more of them or add more bathrooms.
- Limited trail signage
- No "trammeling" which essentially means: don't mess with natural processes.
These Wilderness Areas are very different from Federal Recreation Areas, yet you can still "recreate" in a Wilderness area seeking solitude and nature.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb52701...
Carrying long guns is legal on all BLM land. Discharging them may be restricted in some areas, though.
Even "leave no trace" outdoor practices leave some trace. Multiply that by the number of visitors and the impact is obvious.
(There might be a counterargument to this; I have not found it in the article)
When an area is designated as a Wilderness, that requires a certain style of management that might or might not be appropriate for the area and is very hard to change. More flexible management options are often a good thing, and there are lots of options for managing federal lands (NRAs, NCAs, etc) that don’t come with the strict rules of a Wilderness but are still pretty limited in what they allow.
Non-Wilderness designations do mean having to place more trust in the people on the ground and the agencies involved. You might or might not think that’s appropriate. But what OC and the article both say is that we have to make those decisions with the mindset that “no management” isn’t the default or best option, and often people hear the word “wilderness” and assume that it is.
I'd love it if things were mostly left up to local decision makers. Some trails aren't appropriate for bikes and that's fine, Wilderness area or no. Some trails within Wilderness areas would be no problem at all for bikes.
And tactically, maybe environmentalists would gain some allies if they weren't trying to push cyclists out.
Nothing like listening to few hours of planes on approach to SeaTac to spoil the whole “untrammeled by man” thing.
(Not that I have a good solution to this problem. Air traffic noise abatement involves a ton of tradeoffs)
Pardon my french, but fuck no. I think "Wilderness" is a perfectly appropriate designation for the intended use of these lands-to keep man-made impact on them as little as possible. The fact that it's not "historically accurate" doesn't diminish the value of the label in its intended use.
Also, I did not realize the Wilderness designation had anything to do with indigenous Americans. Is that a thing?
Grazing animals can prevent grassland from reforesting by eating the tree shoots, but they can't knock down mature trees. There is some evidence paleoindians would burn down forests to expand grasslands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_bison_belt
Thus, in some parts of the US, you can stand on a hill, look out at miles of apparently untouched land without a single permanent structure, but is as artificial and manmande as a golf course, crafted from thousands of years of invisible labor.
Some American Indians loathe the patronizing idea that they were/are nobles in-tune with nature. They may not have exploited nature with mechanized efficiency, but at least some tribes took what they needed when they needed without the hippie vision of harmonious balance and they engaged in violence and war when it made sense to do so —kind of like other groups of humans elsewhere.
There’s a theory the current state of the Amazon is the product of heavy cultivation. Hence its high quantity of edible plants. I’m not sure the degree of acceptance that theory has though.
Dead Comment
I'm sure it's geo-dependent, but I wonder if there's a wider media narrative driving the association.
Dead Comment
The distinction between wild or natural is completely arbitrary human made, and has no actual reflection on reality that I can tell
Humans are not the only set of organisms to radically change landscapes - Ants, wasps, locusts and beavers perfectly demonstrate that.
Humans are not the only set of organisms to be altruistic or communal
Humans are the only animal who have the ability to destroy all other animals, and that seems to be the only distinction that we make - eg boils down to might makes right,
So I would love to hear somebody give me a proof of why this distinction in scale rather than kind, is actually a worthwhile ETHICAL differentiator, such so we can actually reason about what that difference implies in a way that doesn’t make artificial or arbitrary distinctions or appeal to self interests alone
We've already poisoned every living thing and every source of water on the planet with toxic "forever" chemicals we created. They're in the rain that falls. The body of every newborn creature is polluted by them before they draw their first breath. That's just so fundamentally different from "But look at this ant hill" that it's hard to imagine why anyone can't see what sets humanity apart or would consider that difference to be an arbitrary distinction.
We're capable of causing more harm. We're capable of understanding the harms that we cause in ways other animals simply aren't. We're also capable of deciding not to cause harm. We're capable of intentionally making different choices that can help protect and preserve the environments we live in. Our deliberate choices and their impacts on the world compared to the actions and outcomes of every other animal on the plant is about as far from an arbitrary distinction as it gets.
At no point does it actually contain any kind of coherency as a philosophy
This is some kind of vague paternalistic naturalism with no real foundational epistemology
I live in the UK and the situation is pretty extreme. People love nature passionately. But most of what people view as natural is degraded farmland. The National Parks are all landscapes that only exist directly from human intervention (usually sheep, grouse, mining, forestry). And many of the protected areas have people living in them that get outsized property prices and endless tourism.
While ants, wasps, and beavers can change a landscape to benefit them in an unsustainable, unhealthy way that will lead to their destruction, I think you have to indulge a bit of wishful thinking to not realize they are less likely and less capable of doing so than humans.
We'll need to set order in our own home before we look to the ants, the wasps, and the beavers.
I believe we are meant to be the gardeners of the planet. Improving available food in an ecosystem invites more living things. It is a positive feedback loop. If we focused on building closed loop ecosystems that also provide food and materials we could be a benefit to all life. Focusing on not changing the "wild" is a negative view. We are the expert species at forming our environment. We should shape it so it provides for us and the rest of the critters.
In fact, it muddies the question itself by distracting away from measurable criteria towards vague and general, broad sweeping conceptual ideas of “Unhealthy” “Unsustainable”
Even that is only theoretical. Let's say that we were to wipe out a great amount of life on earth with a thermonuclear war or something, a lot of life would remain, even if we are talking about bacteria and other microorganisms. But even deep sea life that exists below a certain depth would likely remain largely unaffected.
Well—the distinction seems perfectly natural, then.
I say I'm on the fence because on a longer time scale, that kind of mental adaptation might not be that much different from genetic adaptation and we'll still have to find equilibrium or die out.
As far as the ethics question goes, if we use the most basic model and say that the ethical thing is that which promotes the most "good-life-years per capita" versus "bad-life-years per capita", where capita means one of the sentient residents of the planet, there are a few ways to look at it:
1. Ethics is just a fiction that humans have made up to support the prisoners' dilemma style of cooperation game we play, and there's no real answer.
2. The billon or two twilight years of our planet are better spent in rough equilibrium, where tigers exist, but most animals get some time to stretch in the sun, nuzzle their young, etc.
3. Life in equilibrium is actually cold, brutal, and short for most of the sentient animals involved, so providing a higher level of comfort for a population of ten billion people is better, even if it eventually crashes.
4. The experience of a human counts more than that of an animal, so a high human population with a decent standard of living for a long enough time pushes the needle past what a much longer natural equilibrium would achieve.
These narratives still impact our policies today. When we frame conservation as keeping nature "untrammeled by man," we erase indigenous histories and practices that have long sustained ecosystems. IMO, conservation efforts that aim to separate humans from nature often harm both, as seen in the forced removal of indigenous peoples from national parks. A more nuanced approach would recognize that human interaction with nature isn’t inherently destructive and that indigenous stewardship offers valuable lessons in sustainable land management. Embracing this perspective could lead to more effective conservation policies and a healthier relationship with nature, where human presence is viewed as potentially harmonious rather than inherently damaging.
It's an ideal appreciated by Europeans, but especially by Americans. We don't like people spreading to every single uninhabited nook & cranny and consuming every possible resource. America has a lot of uninhabited places. That's not an invitation for people the world over to consume and devour and combust and mine and destroy these places, as many of them have done to their own homes.
You've seen the headlines plenty of times: declining populations of species, particularly insects, bees. The natural world deserves some refuge and respite from human colonization. We've cultivated crops and powerful technology, let's cultivate some wilderness too. Wild growth is beauty and temperance. It's saying, "I've eaten enough, that I don't need to eat this, let wild beauty flourish here." Do not strive to eat the world, eat just enough.
Wilding and rewilding is an ideal.
I think the wild needs the respect of Gimli toward the Glittering Caves - we can help it, we can improve it, but only slowly and carefully (partially because we don't know what we don't know).
In truth, the idea of wilderness is a useful heuristic that simplifies incredibly complex questions about the functioning of ecosystems and their worth to us.
Labeling it a myth is a way of destroying its value as a heuristic without offering any replacement, leaving people unable to explain and defend policies that prevent unchecked commercial exploitation of public lands.
It is about respecting those who live on the planet with us, and the wilderness myth allows the people you speak about exploit everything other than a very narrow idea of what is wild, and valuable.
While the heuristic is useful for, say, a rainforest eco-system, it actively de-values the plains/ grasslands/ marshes ecosystems just because they do not conform to the ideal we think about when we think about wilderness.
Recognizing Aboriginal Title of traditional lands and joint lands management can be a way to control and limit exploitative uses of lands in a way which also recognizes traditional (generally a lot lighter!) land uses.
It was suggested to me in a comment here on HN, though I cannot now seem to find it by searching.
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/tending-the-wild/paper
It paints a picture of how rich plant and animal life was before contact with Europeans. It shows how Native Californians depended on and deeply understood every root, leaf, flower, and fruit of every plant in their area. It explains how Native Californians were responsible for preserving and enriching the wildlife around them -- doing controlled burns, pruning, managing animal populations, sowing seeds, etc. These areas weren't "wild" or "pristine" at all, they were carefully managed and densely populated by Native Americans for over 10,000 years.
I think oftentimes we feel hopeless about our relationship to nature. We think if we touch it, we'll destroy it. Learning about how Native Californians lived shows how that's not inevitable at all.
I can to this thread to talk up the book too!
https://eowilsonfoundation.org/what-is-the-half-earth-projec...
It doesn't matter if we modified the ecosystems, it's still imperative to establish large regions of untouched ecosystems (as large as possible, as untouched as possible). Humans are very recent in the life of the planet and there's no a priori reason to assume that the things we do are sustainable for several hundred million years.
The dinosaurs lasted, what?, three hundred million years? That's the figure to beat. Can the talking apes last longer than the big dumb lizards?
So far most civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying the health of the soil. Merv was the most beautiful city in the world for a thousand years. Now look at it: https://maps.app.goo.gl/CzfGxVZiTpapqCC8A It looks like Mars.
Unfortunately, the ebook version is rather difficult to buy outside of the US, but if you contact the author, he may be able to provide a copy.
The part I found most haunting was what he termed 'the forgetting' - how, as we lose swaths of Nature, each new generation accepts it as normal, until we've forgotten what was lost.
I also learned about the megafauna: giant animals that vanished in prehistory, coinciding with the arrival of humans to their habitats. Africans, Europeans, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines - it made no difference. Every tribe of humans wiped out the competition, in every continent.
Highly recommended!
"Encounters with the Archdruid" by John McPhee, about David Brower, former director of the Sierra Club, and his advocacy for preserving wilderness areas "untouched" by humans.
"Forests: A Very Short Introduction" by Jaboury Ghazoul, which explores how human presence, even in ancient times, has led to profound changes in landscapes for their benefit.
"1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C. Mann, which I’ve just started reading, hypothesizes that Indigenous peoples in the Americas actively transformed their environment to a much greater extent than previously believed.
"A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold since he is referenced in the article.
It feels like the easterners ruined their beautiful land and now want to tell us in the west how to live.
Go spend on your own backyard and leave ours to us.