Earth, Hearth, Home

     “No Tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electro mechanical gadgets.” Edward Abbey

      I always thought I had a pretty good idea of what constituted wilderness and things related to wilderness. I live in an isolated and rural area of the United States. I am surrounded by National Parks, National Forests, and State Parks. I live not very far from the first wilderness area ever designated as such in the United States, the Aldo Leopold. Most of my close friends are conservationists. I am married to a Park Ranger and we often speak of wilderness issues. I thought I understood wilderness until I received an email from a woman at the University of Montana who accidentally was added to my journal mailing list by the mysterious self adding genie living in my computer.    

          “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.”     As a person of one of the First Nations, I find this definition is wrong headed at best and racist at worst.

          I had her address because of a brief correspondence with her about the wilderness quote page she monitors. When I find myself with “writer’s block,” I turn to this quote page to see if I can find the germ of an idea to get me started. For a while this quote site was “messed up.” It took a couple of days of correspondence to resolve those issues and I thought no more about this woman until I received her note in which she stated, “I would be more than happy to correspond with you on wilderness-related matters, but am not interested in receiving other emails. Thanks!” Apparently she received a journal I wrote about Turkey Vultures and felt that it was not wilderness related because it included First Nation creation stories. I am more than happy to delete her from my mailing list but her note made me to think about the idea of “wilderness – related matters” and just what “wilderness – related matters” would be. For clarity, I turned to the document which defines the wilderness movement, the 1964 Wilderness Act. In this document I found something which may be a clue to why this woman and I seem to have different ideas of what “wilderness-related” might be.

          It is wrong headed because I do not think that “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain” has been the case for hundreds of thousands of years. By this definition, Olduvai Gorge could not have been wilderness for millennia since there are footprints preserved in ancient mud beds which show that man “trammeled” there and “his mark remained.” By this definition, the journals of Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery make a strong case that they never encountered such a wilderness in North America on their journey to the Pacific from Missouri. The journal recounts how they worked their way up the Missouri River and stopped at the villages of the Arikaree and Mandan, they passed over the Mountains of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho to the villages of the Shoshone nations and then down the Columbia to the pacific and the villages of the Chinook and other northwest First Nations. Lewis and Clark were never in an area that was out of sight of an “area of the earth and its community untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor himself and does not remain.” No such area exists in North America. In fact, by this definition, since there are remnants of the Mogollon Culture inside the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, this area should lose its designation as wilderness, unless of course the people of the Mogollon culture were not really people after all.

          And this points to the racism inherent int this definition.

          This definition of wilderness automatically classifies any First Nations people and their communities either as “not men” or in need of removal so the earth can be untrammeled. This definition would build wilderness on the view that the earth lodge of the Mandan, the adobe of the Pueblo, or the Mound City of the Eastern Woodland, makes any area where First nations people left a trace not wilderness, since these areas are not “without permanent improvements or human habitation. If we give these places and the human communities they represent any status as “human” then what this definition calls wilderness never existed or First Nations communities never existed and First Nations peoples were not human.

          A First Nations definition of wilderness would be very different – the white man came and saw the forbidding and the unfamiliar and called it wilderness – while the red man who lived here simply saw the familiar and called it home. As a First Nation’s person, I do not see wilderness existing opposed to man but in relationship to man. As a First Nations person I find it unfortunate that wilderness has taken a definition which so thoroughly excludes man. This land was never wilderness to us. What many in the environmental movement call “Wilderness” is in fact our landscape, and it is home. What many now call Wilderness has never been a place where man has not lived, it is a place where man has learned to live with the land and the landscape, become a part of it, working with it, but never excluded from it.

           This “government clerk’s” definition of wilderness is the problem with so much of the conservation ethic. It is a definition which seems to hate man and excluded man from the material picture the landscape. The followers of the conservation ethic never realize that they are no different than the land users they despise. No one can exist outside of the landscape – when they try they simply come off as elitist in their exclusionary attitudes.

          The real issue of wilderness is not just about preserving this or that tract of land in some pristine condition like a large natural zoo which only an elite has access too. The real issue of wilderness is about how we all live and how we either are or are not a part of our landscape. It is through our daily relationship with the land that we understand how well we are doing – the landscape is a mirror of us and we are a mirror of the landscape. We, landscape and mankind, reflect each other’s very soul.

          I do not mean this to sound as a “Red man” versus “White man” issue. There have always been men and women of every race who have understood the idea of landscape in its truest sense. Those who truly understand landscape have generally been seen as the most spiritual people, not the most pragmatic people. For truly spiritual people wilderness is the place that exists in our hearts – it is the place of the undiscovered county that we all must come to terms with. It is the place where we stop being consumptive extractors and users. It does not mean we cease to be – it means we come to understand that who we are is in large part where we are and that “where” reflects our “who-ness.” The spiritual person comes to see that for our own continued existence, the more pragmatic view is the spiritual view. I know, all too well from personal experience dealing with my “more scientific friends,” that far too many college educated “scientists” take the almost religious position of scientism and view the spiritual as religious and the religious as the opiate of the masses and somehow the destroyer of nature and landscape and therefore wilderness. The reality is that a wilderness created without an understanding of man’s place in the landscape is merely a large inaccessible zoo.

          I do understand what the wilderness act was referring to – it was referring to the trammeling of the capitalist mind set which is consumptive and extractive. I realize too that a bridle did have to be placed upon those activities or there would be nothing left, the consumptive, like the tuberculosis bacteria, eats and destroys its own host and arguably man, at least capitalist man, does just that. I enjoy knowing there are places like the Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall Wilderness because I know these places are protected for now from the consumptive.

          But, I know, too, that Anwar and the North Shore of Alaska are grand landscapes and great “wilderness” areas even though they are the trammeled home of men and women and have been for millennia. I would not for one moment expect or accept that the native Aleuts or Eskimos be removed or denied access to hunting in these Landscapes. Nor would I begrudge them modern tools of survival even though these tools may not seem to be of historic value. I know how hard it is to make do without a chain saw and though I have never had a dog team of my own, my wife has and tells me it is hard work. Understanding that, I think I would opt, in my more realistic moments, for a snowmobile too, if I had to survive in that tough landscape.

          Wilderness is about one’s heart and one’s attitude, it is not simply about setting aside a place and calling it wilderness. Preserving wilderness should not be an oddity for the elitist who can afford expensive consumer equipment at REI or who gets his or her “bona fides” by being an academic, a government agent or a member of a “wilderness society.” Such people in their narrowness of view all too often betray the need for deeper understanding of wilderness in our lives. What they call wilderness is no wilderness at all. Wilderness as defined above is really nothing more than preserved landscape, a specimen in a lab jar. Real, vital, living landscape is about the nature of our heart and how we interact as a whole.

          I have a friend who has come home from Europe to her small garden. This garden is in an Eastern State, it is her wilderness, a wilderness full of humming birds and cats and garden plants. Her landscape is not about exclusivity, it is about solitude and community and home. I venture to bet that she has a much better understanding of the “wilderness” and our relationship to it than someone who falls for the bureaucratic definition of wilderness as a location none of us is allowed to go (unless of course we can afford the equipment from REI that is made in factories in China that belch this stuff out on the back China’s destruction of their own landscape though the building of dams and coal fired power plants in order to create consumer goods.)

          Landscape is a place of which we are an inextricable part. Landscape suffers for no other reason than our attitude of consumptiveness, exclusiveness and otherness. Wilderness as we have defined it is an attitude of exclusiveness. It excludes, by its very definition, man and places man as something “other” than a part of the great whole. Wilderness in the truest sense of the word is the landscape where we co-exist with the four legged and six legged and eight legged nations, where having fins or wings makes one no less important in the greater scheme of things. Wilderness is the home landscape of our soul and exists in direct proportion to our ability to rise above our own limited definition of our place in relationship to the other Nations of this world and our relationship with the Earth. Wilderness is not simply a five thousand-acre parcel of land having “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.”

           I will respect the wishes of this woman at the University of Montana and will remove her from receiving my journals as she asks. I hope however she and all of you think about what the real meaning of wilderness is and in the thinking broaden your horizons into the wilderness of your heart – where The Nation of Man and all the other Nations of the Earth coexist. Maybe in doing so instead of isolated human-less spots called “wilderness” we will come to under stand that the earth itself and our place in it is home and wilderness simultaneously.

          “Traditional people of Indian nations have interpreted the two roads that face the light-skinned race as the road to technology and the road to spirituality. We feel that the road to technology…. has led modern society to a damaged and seared earth. Could it be that the road to technology represents a rush to destruction, and that the road to spirituality represents the slower path that the traditional native people have traveled and are now seeking again? The earth is not scorched on this trail. The grass is still growing there.” William Commanda, Mamiwinini, Canada, 1991