The Meaning of Wilderness

Sigurd Olson, shown at left in 1960, presented this talk before the Utah Academy of Sciences at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, in May 1958.

I want to speak today about the preservation of wilderness, about certain aspects of the preservation of wild, natural areas that are beyond economics, intangible things that are not to be measured in the ordinary scales on which things of value are weighed. Also, I want to express my feelings about the importance of wilderness regions.

I've spent most of my life in wilderness country all over this continent, and early in life was a guide to expeditions of various types, most of which were in the Canadian North. I have traveled many thousands of miles and am still traveling thousands of miles. Within a year I hope to explore the Copper Mine River to the Arctic Coast ending at Coronation Gulf, Northwest Territories.

My interest in wilderness has stayed with me. Early in life I became impressed by what wilderness does to man. I was too young then to realize what was behind the deep feeling of people for natural areas and wilderness experience. But as the years passed, I began to probe my own mind and the minds of others. I began to try to crystallize early ideas and develop some sort of basic philosophy. I have decided finally that the preservation of natural areas is more than rocks and trees and lakes and wildlife. It has a far more fundamental significance than any physical attribute any area might have. It is concerned with broad social values that have to do with human happiness, deep human needs, nostalgias, values that may be a counter-action to the type of world in which we live.

If it was only a matter of saving representative areas, I would have given up my interest long ago and a lot of other people would surely have given up theirs. Without the recognition that there is something deeper behind all of this, there would have been no sustained efforts to preserve natural areas anywhere.

Natural area preservation is only one facet of the broad conservation picture, a facet which is very important. As we think of the definitions of conservation, we can see, however, how closely it ties in to the field of humanitarian values. Aldo Leopold's famous dictum that "conservation is the development of an ecological conscience" is of this pattern. What did he mean by an "ecological conscience"—the development of a land ethic, a feeling of morality towards the earth, reverence, and love, a feeling deep within us that we are responsible for whatever we do to the earth. Leopold was right when he said, "Conservation is the development of an ecological conscience."

I like Sterling North's definition, too, and how it ties into the general premise of broad social values. He said, "Whenever I see a muddy stream, a dust bowl, or an eroded gully, I see the passing of American democracy." He saw much more than the passing of so many tons of soil, the loss of humus, and of life-giving qualities of the earth, nothing said about destroyed watersheds. In this vein, Henry Clay once said, "The greatest patriot is the man who stops the most gullies." Analyze that statement in the light of patriotism. It's all involved with the feeling of people for the country they love.

This is the fiftieth anniversary of the functioning of this Academy. It's also the fiftieth anniversary of conservation. At the Governor's Conference called by President Roosevelt in Washington, D.C., just fifty years ago, a man made a speech worth remembering. After long discussions about conservation and the need of establishing a Forest Service and a National Park Service, J. Horace McFarland said one of the most telling things that came out of the conference: "The true glory of America rests," he said, "not on its material resources, but on the love of country, a love excited by the beauty of the country. For a hundred years, we have done our best to make America ugly. Let us resolve now and for the future to make it a beautiful country because our economy and our future prosperity depend on the love and feeling our citizens have for that country."

It is clear, then, how the great thinkers of conservation tie their thoughts and efforts into the matter of broad social values. Some of you may have been in the Near East, through the Mesopotamian Valleys, where all has been lost because of poor conservation, but what is lost is more than water and fertility. What those people lost is dignity—a way of life and opportunity—things we take for granted here.

Paul Sears, head of the Conservation Department of Yale, gave a definition of conservation which belongs to this concept. "Conservation", he said, "is a point of view—a point of view involved with the entire concept of freedom, human dignity, and a good way of life." When they think about conservation of natural resources, all speak of dignity, freedom and broad social values.

One of the reasons I feel we must preserve natural areas is because as a people and a race we have not yet gone far enough in our development to ignore our primitive past. We are still, as the historian Trevelyan says, children of the earth," still very close to primeval beginnings. In Harrison Brown's gook, Man and His Future, there is the interesting thought that man is so close to the earth he cannot forget physiologically or psychologically his long inheritance. Brown says the earth may possibly be three billion years or more of age. Reducing this time span to 365 days, man with his million years of existence has been on the earth only three hours. But a million years, Brown says, is not the kind of man we are talking about; possibly only a hundred thousand years have passed since Homo-sapiens arrived—only twenty minutes out of this time clock, and it's been only twenty thousand years since man evolved from Paleolithic cultures—a mere two minutes of the time span. And it's been only one second out of this clock since he changed from a purely hunting, fishing, and agrarian sort of life about a hundred years ago—only one second from a life regulated by the seasons, by primitive conditions, adjusting himself to the vagaries of climate and challenge that life then involved, a second out of man's long history.

What does this mean? Simply that man does not evolve or change swiftly, any more than any other animal evolves or changes. I am a biologist, and know that animal adaptations take a long time—eons of time—thousands and thousands of years—perhaps fifty, a hundred thousand, or several hundred thousand. Man, looked at from a purely ecological standpoint, is close to his past—so close he cannot and has not made the adjustment, in spite of the fact we are probably the most adaptable creatures on earth. We shall make the adjustment, but in the process of making it strange things go on within us, frustrations, nostalgias, trying to live according to the pace we have set, and finding it difficult.

The great psychiatrist Karl Menninger said, "In spite of the fact we are supposedly the happiest people on earth, in spite of the fact we have the greatest comforts, the greatest security, the most delightful living conditions, the most freedoms, the most of everything in this world of ours, we still consume forty million tranquilizers a day," which indicates to a man like Menninger that something is radically wrong if we have to take sedatives in order to keep our balance. We have to do all sorts of things to forget the supposedly happy life we are thrown and acquire the calm and serenity our forefathers used to know. Where does this tie in to the preservation of natural areas? Simply in this way: we need to preserve a few places, a few samples of primeval country so that when the pace gets too fast we can took at it, think about it, contemplate it, and somehow restore equanimity to our souls.

Last year, 1957, fifty-five million people visited the National Parks and forty million visited the National Forests. Those are elastic figures, you can argue about them, but the fact remains that a lot of people went to these areas. Some went to get stickers on their windshields, or so they thought, or bring home a collection of good kodachromes, or to pick up one of those velvet pillows you can buy in Yellowstone with the adage on it, "I've been in Yellowstone." But as I watch these people, I know they are getting far more than kodachromes and velvet pillows or stickers on their windshields. They stop at the lookouts and gaze over the mountain peaks and canyons. They stand on the porticos of their chalets or motels or leave their cars, may even hike the enormous distance of nearly one hundred feet to get a view. They stand there, take a swift look as one man did last spring when I was at Grand Canyon and, after glimpsing the South Rim and its changing shadows and colors, after five minutes said, "Well, Mom, this is it. Let's get out of here."

Don't make fun of those people. They're in a hurry—we're all in a hurry. That man was probably driving from Grand Canyon to Salt Lake that day and wanted to get there, wanted to go through the Mormon Temple grounds before knocking off. Nevertheless, something happened to that man when he took that swift look at the Grand Canyon, something he would remember as long as he lived.

One of the criticisms of the National Park Service program is that most of the National Parks arc preserved as wilderness, 90 percent of thembeing in this category, 10 percent sacrificial areas where all the hotels are located as well as all facilities. Some people say, "Why save that back country? Why not open it all up?" The point is that the 90 percent of the parts that are in wilderness gives significance to the small developmental areas and of the people who come there (and most go nowhere else) very few go on pack trips, or hiking trips, where they must exert themselves in any way. These people as a whole get their sense of the primeval by an occasional look or a glimpse. But in such glimpses they capture something satisfying that stays with them a long, long time, something that brings them back to the National Parks time and time again. They may think they go for the stickers and the kodachromes, but they go to satisfy something deep within them.

A duck hunter when asked how many ducks he killed last year couldn't remember. Then he told me how he felt one morning out in the marsh as the sun was coming up and how the sound of the wings was in the early morning. Put a price tag on his duck hunting and he would have to evaluate those intangible values. The actual kill and the hunting were immaterial for he had caught something beyond price.

There was an editorial in the New York Times not long ago regarding the preservation of a wild area. The editor who wrote it must have known the wilderness because his title was "Tranquillity is Beyond Price." He said something important there, for many things are beyond price—most of the ones that make life worthwhile. These natural areas are beyond price because they do things to you which you cannot explain, that you cannot weigh, that you cannot put a price tag on.

Galsworthy in one of his novels said, "It is the contemplation of beautiful visions which has generation after generation lifted man from the primeval." In an article in the Saturday Evening Post last week, "An Evolutionist Looks at Modern Man," Loren Eiseley said, "The greatest explosion was not the first atomic bomb, the first fission, but a silent explosion in the brain of primitive man in which brain cells began proliferating that made man the first equating animal—a creature who could weigh things, evaluate, who could begin to look forward and backward." All of man's history has been an attempt to develop that potential in weighing of values, weighing the material against the intangibles.

What makes man a different animal than most is the very fact that he has this ability to look at his earth with new eyes, with appreciation and understanding, with love and reverence. In Dostoevsky's novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the old monk expressing his philosophy of life said, "Love all the earth, love the whole of it, every grain of sand in it, every leaf, every ray of God's light. If you love the earth enough, you will become aware of the divine mystery and if you become aware of the divine mystery you will develop a love for all mankind and all the earth."

Joseph Wood Krutch of Arizona said that conservation is not enough—that we can conserve rocks and trees and soil and water and all of the natural resources we have, but without love, without a deep feeling for the earth, without an ecological conscience all of this actually means little.

Albert Schweitzer embraces all of these things in his philosophy of reverence for life: love for all things; understanding of the earth; a deep failing within people of the intangible values encompassed by the broad term "conservation." Those are what really count.

There are many other reasons for the preservation of natural areas. One of these reasons is scientific. Scientific reasons are coordinated with broad social values because they too have to do with social welfare—the preservation of natural areas as norms is vital to modern scientific research. It's as important to have natural unchanged areas for comparisons and checks in the study of range ecology, in the study of behaviorism of animals, in the studies of all things that have to do with living and growing as it is for a doctor (in the strictly medical sense) having only sick people to work with and not knowing how normal people react. This is a great subject and worthy of lengthy discussion, but I simply want to say that the preservation of natural bits of terrain is very important to our welfare and economy, so important that without them we cannot arrive at correct answers when confronted with situations where man has caused change.

Another reason for the preservation of natural areas is to give people a sense of history. This morning in Salt Lake City, I saw a picture of the Hotel Utah in 1890—an old wooden frame building with lots of gingerbread around. Young people don't know what gingerbread is, but the oldsters do. In its time it was thought attractive, but they don't make it anymore. The thing that impressed me was that here on that site was Hotel Utah, a modern building where just seventy years ago was a little frontier town with very few facilities. In less than three quarters of a century, Salt Lake City has grown up into a modern community. Utah is really very, very young.

I live in a wilderness country, too, much like this. The town I live in was started in 1884. It's hard to realize what has happened in less than seventy years. And I feel that the preservation of natural areas is worthwhile for that reason alone—to give young people today a chance to see the road over which we have come. There is no substitute for such experience. You take a pack trip back in one of these canyons or do the unheard of thing in Utah—go in on foot and you will learn something you did not know before, the feeling of what the wagon trains ran into when they came through the passes, what the mountain men saw and the Indians, and you'll have more respect and understanding of Utah as a state and of the whole West than if you just read about all of this in history books. I know because I have done that sort of thing many times myself, and I recommend it to all of you.

I think that we in this generation have no right to deprive the young people of the future of the opportunity of primitive experience: getting the companionship, the sense of history, the feeling of the country, something you can only get by living in it and traveling through it, by primitive means.

We have a responsibility and I doubt very much whether we have the right to say to generations still unborn, "You are not going to be able to do the things that we did. You must get your sense of the primitive through history books. You are not going to have a chance to live that sort of life, or even to get a hint of what your forebears knew."

There are a great many problems in the preservation of natural areas—serious problems. One of the great problems is the pioneer concept which most of us still have. In spite of your beautiful campus and remarkable facilities, your comforts, and the progress you have made, you still have a certain heritage, the pioneer feeling. I speak with knowledge because I, too, live in a frontier community with the feeling of a world apart that national parks and forests belong to us, that outsiders have no right to tell us what to do. My country is a couple of thousand miles from here to the Northeast, but it is still close to the past.

I was very pleased yesterday to see a chapter of the Nature Conservancy formed here with its affiliations in Washington which will give the people here the chance to compare notes with what is going on in the rest of the United States and get the benefit of their experience. I think this chapter can do a great deal of good.

The preservation of wilderness is jeopardized by something over which we have no control at all—and that's the population explosion. I don't have to give you figures. You know them as well as I. Anyone who has traveled and seen the urban sprawl as we call it—the spreading out of the cities into the countryside, has no doubt. We know that the population which is now 172,000,000 will reach, according to past predictions, 227,000,000 by 1975, 250 million or even 300 million by the year 2000.

There is nothing we can do about it, for the explosion is the result of good living conditions and security, an aftermath of two wars. But it's going to affect our lives. It's going to affect Utah in a way you people cannot see or comprehend. Where are these millions going? They're not going to stay in the East because the East is crowded now. They're going to head for the West, will fill up these valleys, probe the back canyons, and get into places that until now have been sanctuaries ever since discovery.

We accept these figures, they are coming, and with them is coming an industrial expansion to keep pace with the rising population. The city planners in the country are worried. They've been behind the eight-ball now for ten years. They realize that they have not done the job they should be doing. They say, "If we had only known what was going to happen to our cities, we would have set aside breathing spaces for those developmental projects before they began. We should have set aside parks, natural areas within reach because we realize now that human happiness in cities is more than being crowded between walls of brick and steel, that people must have places where they can get their feet on the ground and get a whiff of fresh air once in a while, see natural growing things and scenes that have not changed." They recognize the broad social implications involved and the need of providing such spaces and are trying desperately now, to undo what has happened, and finding it very, very difficult.

I have been engaged in several surveys in the East in the last six weeks, one off the southeast coast of Georgia and the other off the coast of Massachusetts. There people know that the opportunity o acquiring natural areas for the benefit and pleasure of the people is disappearing so rapidly that possibly within a decade the opportunity will be gone. On Cape Cod, one of the areas I surveyed, real estate prices are going up at an average, on that particular stretch of-beach, of half a million dollars annually and soon will be beyond reach. In Utah you still have lots of open country, federal land most of it. in that ownership lies a great opportunity. Knowing that the federal holdings are large you should invoke all of the influence that you have on the federal agencies to set aside and protect these breathing places as we call them—these natural wilderness regions wherever they may be before the population invasion makes it impossible. You have an opportunity now.

You may think that I am a visionary looking into a nebulous future, but I believe sincerely that if you neglect your opportunities now, within a couple of decades they will be gone. And when those opportunities are gone there will be little space, little chance for solitude, or the kind of inspiration that comes from open vistas. Human beings need that kind of inspiration.

Surely we can live without it—we can live under almost any conditions for we are very inventive and ingenious. We can produce food to feed a billion people on this continent. We can produce building materials, fuels, in order to keep a much larger population going, but the question is always there, "Is that enough?" Is it enough to live just on an existence level? Does not man require more than food and fuel and housing? Does not life, if it is to be a happy one, necessitate space, living room, human dignity, the intangible values that give people happiness? Isn't this after all what really counts? The prophet Isaiah said a long time ago, "Woe unto them who build house to house and lay field to field lest there be no place where a man may be placed alone in the midst of all the earth."