The Myth of a Wilderness Without Humans
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
Fish were so dense in the ocean that boats would come to a halt in the middle of the Atlantic. Coral reefs several stories high and miles long. Lions roaming North America larger than in Africa. Armadillo-like animals the size of cars. Plenty more.
I did a couple video essays on it:
- http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the-once-...
- http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-010-the-once-...
(Also, it's ironic that despite the amount of criticism on aesthetic grounds they catch, compared to most things that generate power windmills are virtually ecologically invisible.)
See how the Eiffle Tower and trains were called ugly and now tearing it down would be unthinkable and old steam engines are considered picturesque.
disclosure: I work on the MIT Press Reader, where the article — an excerpt from Dowie's book "Conservation Refugees" — is published. We're a non-profit press and the Reader is a space where we post excerpts, essays, and interviews with our authors.
I think that is article is a good one if one takes away from it the idea that humans have had an influence over almost all of the Earth's landmasses for thousands of year. The idea of wilderness, meaning a place where humans don't influence nature, is recent and probably partly stems from the depopulation of western North America from European diseases before Europeans began exploring the region. See the Louis and Clark expedition.
It's also fairly disingenuous to claim that human activity is not allowed in wilderness areas: I'll be camping in a gorgeous wilderness area in Colorado this weekend.
[1] https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/oil-and-gas...
In areas where the government doesn't enforce so many rules, there will be recreational vehicles, hunting, logging, all sorts of other disruptive activities.
So ironically, the only places that can still feel like wilderness are the places where the government takes some action to keep it that way.
https://wilderness.net/learn-about-wilderness/key-laws/wilde...
There seem to be far fewer rules on the national forests. As a result it feels less wild because there are more people there doing non-wild things like riding ATVs.
There is a tremendous amount of conservation effort from many privately funded, non-profit organizations. One could make a convincing argument that The Nature Conservancy, WWF, Sierra Club, et. al. do more work protecting our wildlife and wilderness areas than the government's neglected BLM land.
Perhaps small government advocates prefer philanthropy over authority?
Government needs to be at least as big as the corporations it seeks to regulate, or things get squirrely. This is obviated by problems like campaign finance, Trump, fossil fuel subsidies, etc.
Why?
Does the board need to be as large as the company?
Seems like this would eventually lead to (or read as), "The government needs to be at least as big as the sum of the corporations it seeks to regulate".
I agree that things get squirrelly when corporations (or NGOs, even) wield more power than governments. That's most obviously an issue when large global corporations mess with small countries. Or small states in the US, for that matter.
While it's also an issue even in the US overall, one hopes that antitrust enforcement would kick in before total domination.
The government isn't great at managing forests, but if had my way it would already be done.
A government brings with it the ability to actually enforce laws, and I think there are sufficient examples in world history as to why the ability to enforce is just as important, if not more, as the ability to legislate. That's partly why we now have the Constitution instead of still using the Articles of Confederation.
This is really only true of places that are easily accessible. The are plenty of places that would feel like "wilderness" that have far fewer restriction and little to no enforcement.
The history of the conservation movement is rich white people screwing over poor brown people due to romantic notions of wilderness.
Lest we think it is in the past, look at the current conservation movement and endangered species. If you look at the land animals most people want to save, these are mostly in areas where a lot of poor brown people live. The brown people are the ones who have their development curtailed and have to live with lions killing their cattle, elephants trampling their crops, etc.
Having read Tending the Wild, I'm inclined to think that at least some of their complaints have merit. California 'wilderness' was considerably curated by communities that moved back and forth from foothills to shoreline with the seasons (are you 'semi-nomadic' if you keep moving between the same handful of locations?)
Aboriginals were not in a position to 'curate' or 'manage' much at all. Aside from some rare controlled burns here and there - they didn't have the capacity to 'curate' vast areas of land.
More reasonably, their 'industrial footprint' was small by virtue of their near lack of modern industrialisation and their small population.
They were light on the land, but let's not construe that with some kind of 'caretaker' moniker - this is a romanticism of another kind entirely.
Finally, because aboriginals were present in some areas does not abnegate the notion that they were essentially pristine, i.e. this is not some kind of false romanticisation of the land by Westerners, rather, a mischaracterisation. Lacking a large agricultural base, large scale domestication of animals, an industrial base, large cities or even large populations, it's fair to suggest that such areas were in fact, by and large, pristine - certainly relative to the West.
Treatment of aboriginals by whatever policy is an altogether different question.
Look at medieval poaching laws from hunting being an aristocratic privledge. Poaching has been considered villainous in the past and present for completely different reasons. A "rich playground" aspect has long been there and that isn't limited to even the West. It is a warrior elite among agrarians thing really.
The article doesn't contain many facts to support or refute this idea. For a lot of them, check out the books 1491 and 1493 by Charles Mann.
Spoiler: the lands we think of as having been pristine prior to arrival by Europeans were in fact heavily manipulated and in some cases densely populated.
Ok: ride in with a string of horses, shoot an elk with a rifle, and pack it out.
Not ok: push a baby stroller around because ...wheels!
That said, they're a good way of preserving areas.