Y2K Wilderness...The Challenge

by Robert K. Olson

Wilderness in America and wordlwide faces perhaps its greatest historical challenge in the next half century. Just when wilderness values are being adopted as part of our received national values, the 21st Century promises to bring another era of relentless social and economic growth, which is already eroding our remaining wilderness heritage in both large and small ways.

Large ways include economic and population growth, air and water pollution, logging, mining, and tourism and global warming. Some of these may be under control in the United States but elsewhere in the world they are devastating.

Small ways include proliferation of cabins and second homes in hitherto remote areas, urban sprawl, roads, tourism, noise, ATVs, power boats, and jet skis. In the Third World, the movement of millions to town and cities, poverty, and the search for firewood have decimated whole ranges of forest, hills, and mountain sides.

Indeed, the pressure is already becoming so profound and widespread that the prime value of wilderness is shifting from human enjoyment to ecological preservation. Like wetlands, wilderness may be seen as an essential component to the health and survival of nature itself. While this may sound extreme, the danger today is not just degradation and waste, but irreversible degradation, e.g. the extinction of species and destruction of tropical rainforests, which are historical artifacts and can never be replaced.

Global warming may absolutely devastate some wilderness areas we now take for granted, including the BWCAW.

In any debate about wilderness, whether for recreation of ecological health, it is impossible to ignore these overriding factors.

The primary objective of the Listening Point wilderness education program, therefore, shall be devoted to the understanding of and education in the full dimensions of the challenge. The threat may be overstated in some places and understated in others. It may be severe in one place and not in another. The basic aim shall also be to lift the horizons of the wilderness debate from the local to the global, responding to the now familiar admonition to "think globally and act locally."

What would Sig have thought about this? After all, the message of Listening Point is one of spiritual renewal through wilderness experience and is devoted almost entirely to the north in general and to northern Minnesota in particular.

My opinion is that we would be doing no more than he would have done himself. Had Sig Olson been born at midcentury, he would have been all over the world, celebrating nature, writing about the great ecological disaster overtaking the globe, condemning the polluters and exploiters, calling for a sustainable, ecologically sane society.

During the last years of his life he became more and more concerned with the global view of our times, what Club of Rome founder Mario Peccei called "The Predicament of Mankind." He read, indeed studied, the famous book On The Shred of a Cloud (University of Alabama Press translation, 1966) by Swedish Ambassador Rolf Edberg, which called for a global, holistic vision to cope with the mega-challenges of the age, and which inspired the holding of the formative UN Conference on the Environment at Stockholm in 1972. In the video The Wilderness World of Sigurd F. Olson, he says, "This little corner of wilderness epitomizes wilderness all over the world." In a 1977 letter to one admirer, he wrote, "Many thanks for your kind words regarding my books and my efforts to preserve wilderness not only here but almost everywhere." Not the least, we should remember that for Sigurd Olson, Listening Point was not an end in itself but the portal to a larger world.

We recognize fully that there are already many dedicated and effective people and organizations devoted to these same goals, plan to work with them in the common cause, and urge you, dear reader, to do the same.

[From the First Listening Point Foundation Lecture "Sigurd Olson, the Man Behind the Legend," delivered by Robert K. Olson at the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute/Northland College Centennial Banquet, Ashland, Wisconsin, April 4, 1999.]