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2. WILDERNESS

2. WILDERNESS. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Robert Boyle (1627-1691). Origins of concept of “pure” nature. Robert Boyle Chemist, developed Bacon’s experimental method Struggled to defend science from charges of heresy

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2. WILDERNESS

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  1. 2. WILDERNESS Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) Robert Boyle (1627-1691)

  2. Origins of concept of “pure” nature Robert Boyle • Chemist, developed Bacon’s experimental method • Struggled to defend science from charges of heresy • Scientist: nature consists of external objects to be experimented upon, as distinct from humans and society Thomas Hobbes • Political philosopher, survivor of English Civil War • Proposed that the “State of Nature” was the antithesis of civilization, the absence of property and peace: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. • Humanist: Science and democratic knowledge-making should apply to all subjects.

  3. Democracy in pursuit of Truth Boyle and Hobbes differed on the aims of Science, but they agreed on this novel idea: Nature is something entirely separate from Society, and that boundary must be constantly policed and reinforced. This is a fundamental element of the European Enlightenment

  4. Romanticism The Romantic movement saw wilderness as sublime, spiritual, a place to be close to God. Mountains and valleys are “warts and pock-holes in the face of the Earth.” John Donne, ca. 1600 There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but nature more. Lord Byron Childe Harold, 1818

  5. Albert Bierstadt, “Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains” 1868

  6. Romanticism “Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,—all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!” Henry David Thoreau

  7. The Pristine Myth • There are no areas “untouched by humans” • Evidence from Amazon

  8. Wilderness and Nation 1890: Secretary of the Census declares the lack of a “frontier line”. 1893: UW Historian Frederick Jackson Turner declares “the closing of the frontier”: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”

  9. US population density in 1890

  10. “It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such a wilderness as Christ and the prophets went into. … Save a piece of country like that intact, and it does not matter in the slightest that only a few people a year will go into it. That is precisely its value. Roads would be a desecration… We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.” Wallace Stegner “Wilderness Letter”, 1960

  11. Ecology, Spirituality, and Policy “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools, – only Uncle Sam can do that.” John Muir “The American Forests”, 1901

  12. Wilderness for the Nation “In all the category of outdoor vocations and outdoor sports there is not one, save only the tilling of the soil, that bends and molds the human character like wilderness travel. Shall this fundamental instrument for building citizens be allowed to disappear from America, simply because we lack the vision to see its value?” Aldo Leopold, 1925 “The Last Stand of the Wilderness”

  13. The Wilderness Society, b.1935 Wilderness is “…a natural mental resource having the same basic relationship to man’s ultimate thought and culture as coal, timber, and other physical resources have to his material needs.” The Wilderness Society Platform September 1935

  14. Regulation and Wilderness 1924: First wilderness area set aside in Gila NF 1929: USFS adopts Regulation L-20, which defines 14 million areas of Primitive Areas in USFS land. 1939: USFS revokes L-20 and replaces it with U-1 and U-2. 1964: Wilderness Act adopted

  15. Bob Marshall: founder of The Wilderness Society Harold Ickes: Secretary of the Interior 1933-1946 Howard Zahniser: author of the Wilderness Act

  16. Defining Wilderness in Law §2(c): “A wilderness… 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.” • “affected primarily by forces of nature” • “outstanding opportunities for solitude” • At least 5,000 acres • Scientific, educational, scenic, historical value

  17. US National Wilderness Preservation System map Graphic from High Country News, 2003

  18. de facto wilderness? USFS Inventoried Roadless Areas 58.5 million acres ~30% of USFS lands

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