Why Wilderness?

by Robert K. Olson

Sigurd Olson asked this question years ago during the thirties and published his thoughts in an article of that name in the September 1938 issue of American Forests. The question is as relevant today as it was then, perhaps even more so. For it now lies at the heart of our survival as a civilization. The French author/philosopher Chateaubriand, writing in the 18th Century, put it succinctly. "First comes civilization," he wrote, "then comes the desert." Since that time, from the days of William Wordsworth to the present, the wilderness question has been posed in a variety of fashions depending on the mood of the times: as adventure, beauty, protection of nature for its own sake, as spiritual renewal, and even as a threat and obstacle to "real" civilization," (which also consigned its human inhabitants to a meaningless purgatory). We retain elements of these attitudes and outlooks to this day.

But today, our central concern is the environment and the search for answers to questions too obvious to ask, questions of geometrically growing populations, widespread and possibly irreversible pollution, the degradation of our lives and nature, the decimation of species, a permanent nuclear hangover. In the words of Worldwatch President Lester Brown, "The new era now emerging defies description." It is in this context that we again ask the question, "Why Wilderness?" and it is in this urgent context that lie the elemental reasons for supporting the wilderness heritage worldwide.

In a world imploding on itself, with all that that means for noise, pollution, resource degradation, biological catastrophe, and sheer human suffering, wilderness is a vital ingredient of civilized life. It offers a variety of spiritual antidotes to noise, rush, and pollution in beauty, silence, solitude, and sacredness, all in short supply. It offers clean air and clean water, also in shortening supply. To paraphrase the Bible, "It consumes not, neither does it pollute." Wilderness provides unimpeachable natural habitat (also in dwindling supply) for the rest of God's creatures, which have survived the agricultural and industrial holocausts, and a brake on the continuing frightful decimation of species.

According to the International Botanical Congress meeting in St. Louis in August, at current rates we risk the extinction of two-thirds of all species -- birds, mammals, plants and insects -- by the end of the 21st Century.

Wilderness is a carbon sink and a brake on the inexorably increasing rate of global warming. The list is endless, as broad or as detailed as one wants.

In other words, for whatever else it means to us in beauty, pleasure, and spiritual renewal, wilderness is a crucial factor in the recovery of environmental health. Perhaps Thoreau said it best and for all time when he said that "In wildness is the preservation of the world." It may have sounded extreme and improbable when he uttered it those many years ago, but today the sense of it stands out in relief.

It is ultimately a question of focus. Hitherto, wilderness has been a special but relatively marginal concern of society, a crusade of a devoted minority, the residual of economic and social development. Wilderness has been a local, regional, or at best a national issue. But we are now beyond that. Wilderness has moved in a generation from the margins to the mainstream. We have discovered that it is an integral component of the global scheme of things. To the more crowded, more polluted, more vulnerable world of tomorrow, wilderness preservation may literally be our saving grace.

This means that the idea, the understanding, and the appreciation of wilderness will have helped redefine our idea of civilization since the days of Chateaubriand. Today, only a society, which recognizes this reality and acts on it to halt the decimation and degradation of our environment, may deserve to be called civilized. Those that do not are living in a new dark age, an insult to the spiritual as well as the physical world. Wilderness preservation, therefore, is at the cutting edge of nothing less than a historic and global revolution in thought and practice.

The Listening Point Foundation plans to sponsor a "Why Wilderness" conference as soon as possible.

Why wilderness?, indeed.