It's no longer whether, but where and how
Centuries and millennia correspond raggedly to human epochs.
Europe's 19th century actually began at Waterloo in 1815, and ended
in Sarajevo in 1914. America's 19th began when Lewis and Clark left
St. Louis in 1804 and ended in 1890, when the Census Bureau reported
that the frontier had closed. The new century could be said to begin
with the founding of the Audubon Society (1886) and the Sierra Club
(1892).
We're too close to the 20th century's end to be able to limn it
precisely. John McPhee has suggested July 1, 1999, when Maine's
Edwards Dam was breached, the first major dam to be torn down to
liberate a free-flowing river. I nominate October 13, when the
Clinton-Gore administration announced that it planned to end logging
in all 52 million acres of the national forest system still
unscarred by roads.
Over the past century we debated whether we want America tame or
wild: whether we want to create a domesticated, second Europe, or to
find a new way of living with the land, cherishing and renewing its
wildness. Neither side prevailed. Yosemite was saved from grazing,
but its Hetch Hetchy Valley was drowned. The national forest system
was created, but left open to logging. In the 1930s Interior
Secretary Harold Ickes rescued Olympic National Park, but the
surrounding ancient forests were cut in the 1970s and '80s.
In the 1940s John D. Rockefeller quietly bought up the core lands
of Grand Teton National Park, but the Yellowstone ecosystem remains
a fragile patchwork. President Eisenhower created the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge in the late 1950s, but left it open to oil
drilling. In the next decade the Sierra Club blocked dams on the
Colorado inside Grand Canyon National Park, but failed to stop Glen
Canyon Dam just upstream. In the 1970s we added Big Cypress to the
protected portions of the Everglades ecosystem, but as we did,
sprawl, agribusiness, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were busy
destroying the hydrological system on which the Everglades depend.
In the 1980s we stopped James Watt from shutting down the
national parks, but Reagan's forest boss, John Crowell, doubled the
cut on the national forests. In the 1990s we protected the
California Desert and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument,
but failed to block the salvage clearcut rider, which felled
thousands of acres of our ancient forest.
Even though we lost some painful battles in the 20th century, we
are winning the wilderness debate, as evidenced by President
Clinton's historic proposal to protect the nation's roadless areas.
If it succeeds, it will be the first time that land has been
protected solely by virtue of being ecologically intact. The model
for last century's national park system was "Save one of everything,
the best example you can find." The model for this century's
roadless-area policy is "Save everything that is left." The first
led to unsustainable islands of wildness in a sea of human
appropriation. The second model is the first step--and only the
first step--in creating a landscape of wildness.
The administration adopted its roadless policy after a temporary
moratorium a year and a half ago. At the time, D.C. policy makers
considered this a radical move, even though the moratorium left out
many of the most important roadless areas in the Tongass National
Forest of Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and the Northern Rockies.
But public support for wilderness was so overwhelming that the
administration chose to proceed with one of the boldest
land-conservation initiatives in U.S. history.
Had 19th-century pioneers shared this spirit, it all might have
been different. We might have moved across the North American
continent, setting some of it aside as we passed: a continuous
wildway, the major riparian zones connected by ridgetops and
mountain ranges, and then perhaps one watershed in five, from ridge
to river, set aside for wilderness, spiritual refuge, watershed
protection, a genetic reservoir--a means of honoring our obligations
to the rest of the living world.
It's too late for that now, but not too late for still intact
systems in places such as Alaska, Utah, the Northern Rockies, and
the Adirondacks. Elsewhere, we need to find a way to give back some
of what we have already occupied. Here we are aided by robust
natural processes like flood and fire to regenerate wildness around
us. At present, we spend billions of dollars each year in futile
attempts to prevent floodplains from flooding, barrier islands from
migrating, chaparral from burning, and predators from predation. We
need to let these inexorable natural processes teach us where we do
and don't belong and how to live in greater harmony with nature in
the places where we remain.
Giving back space is one of the hardest challenges our culture
faces. We have adopted the nomadic ways of the first
Americans--living across the landscape--without living as lightly as
they did. While the administration's roadless policy would be an
enormous step, it would affect a tiny fraction of the continent, and
a tiny fraction of federal policy. In the debate over saving the
Everglades, politicians have been far more willing to offer money
for piecemeal restoration than to return natural water flows to
agricultural land owned by big campaign contributors. And even after
enormous flood losses in the Mississippi valley because of the
draining of wetlands and the constriction of the river by narrow
dikes, only modest progress has been made in restoring the Big
Muddy's floodplain.
The debate over whether there should be wildness is coming to an
end. How to find the wisdom and the means to relinquish space for
wildness, and how to re-create it, is the challenge of the next
century.
Carl Pope is the executive director of the Sierra Club. He can
be reached by e-mail at carl.pope@sierraclub.org
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