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The following article was first published in the 1984 volume 5, no. 1 issue of Earth First!, page 13. At the time it was published the appreciation of the ecological ramifications of wilderness, and in particular of big wilderness, were still little appreciated except among a few ecologists and "new style" conservationists such as the founders of the Earth First! Movement. Wilderness appreciation has since become somewhat more grounded in ecology and ethics, and even conservative groups, such as the Nature Conservancy, now appreciate the importance of global scale wilderness in the long term preservation of species.
Attitudes
toward wilderness in the popular mind are still confused but are
generally dominated by mercantile principles of direct use and
greatest monetary value of extractables. As Earth First!ers we know
that wilderness is right for its own sake - perhaps in the end the
only "right" for this planet. Yet it is difficult to
communicate this facet of enlightenment to others. It is discouraging
that among many prominent wilderness advocates the highest attainment
of comprehension seems to be that wilderness is desirable merely as
a source of recreation, nature solace, inspiration etc., and that a
little of it should be saved so our grandchildren can see what nature
in the raw was like. Even
our scientific experts can come up with little more than that
isolated segments should be preserved to protect genetic material of
practical value to humans and for baseline studies to compare with an
increasingly sullied world. Contributors to this journal deserve
credit for exposing the inadequacy and shallowness of these truisms.
Yet, in the practical world, in the urgency to protect the large
wilderness necessary for the salvation of this planet we need to
gather all the arguments we can, building particularly on the
discoveries of science as well as on history and logic. We need also
to swallow a little pride in our own enlightenment, to convince
others as we are convinced. It
turns out that nowhere do we have a stronger case than in global
aspects of wilderness appreciation. Consider for a moment the role of
wilderness in the big movements of human history, and in particular
those of the last several hundred years, when the industrial
revolution accelerated putative domination of nature and fostered the
idea of progress. Early in this period mostof Europe was
subjugated to intensive agriculture and later to mining and other
industries. Forests were cut, marshes were drained and wilderness -
dependent wildlife eliminated or driven north and east. Yet the
followers of the late Rene Dubos might say that all this destruction
didn't visit calamity on Europe and that human culture was even
capable of making "improvements" on nature that resulted in
a tamed but still verdant and fruitful landscape. But is this really
true? Can we really live in a world utterly dominated by the works of
humankind? Although
Europeans extirpated or beat back wilderness to the fringes of their
continent, they were really as dependent on it as ever - a fact many
of their greatest savants were and still are unaware of. In one sense
this dependency exists because the colonial period was launched and
the discovery of new lands around the globe made available virgin
wilderness - nourished resources. Asia and America were opened to the
fur trade and the timber and other products of the fertile soils of
the colonies entered international trade. The same was true of
mineral deposits and other resources. Nearly everywhere these
resources were easily exploitable because they were defended only by
low populations or non -industrial indigenous peoples. This gigantic
increase in available resources as well as food plants introduced
from the new world promoted population growth, and as a final
indignity the use of wilderness itself as a sink for surplus people.
Ye this was far from all. For
countless years preceding the industrial revolution Europe had
unknowingly been in thrall to extra - European wilderness. Its insect
- controlling migratory birds had sought refuge in distant African
forests, without which there could have been no European agriculture,
no picturesque bucolic landscapes and no nature poets. And this is
probably as true as ever today despite current reliance on
pesticides. Then too, the European fishing industry has always been
dependent on myriad remote wilderness rivers, bays and estuaries,
whose clean waters are necessary for spawning. At the same time clean
air and precipitation originating in the global wilderness swept away
locally produced pollution of the industrial society. It's clear then
that the European example of getting on without wilderness is
invalid, and to the contrary, the larger the area affected by human
technological development the more wilderness is required to support
and mitigate this development. The
importance of wilderness - big wilderness - either near or far, to
the very existence of agriculture, to food production in general, and
hence to industrial society itself, highlights a humbling fact of our
current situation; namely that despite human destructive efforts, de
facto wilderness still dominates the globe! For, disregarding the
oceanic wilderness, all of Antarctica, much of Asia, South America
and Australia, as well as large parts of Africa and North America,
are still wilderness - at least by the criteria of our Wilderness
Act. This is fortunate for us and perhaps is the major reason the
human species still exists. Furthermore, science has revealed that
these different parts of our planet, wilderness and non - wilderness,
are in constant communication, although all the modes of this
communication are not yet known. That there are global chemical and
biological "messengers" is shown by animal migrations as
well as the transport of pesticides and other chemicals by
atmospheric circulation. While such chemicals are certainly bad
messages introduced by humans, the messages that emanate from the
global wilderness are generally beneficial or benign in the sense
that the biosphere is enured to them or even owes its present state
to them through biologic evolution and adaptation. That
science has yet to explore many of the manifestations of the global
wilderness network - even as that network is being destroyed - is
again illustrated by the great bird migrations. It has been found
that a great number of these birds are of tropical origin and that
their patterns of behavior may be quite different in breeding and
wintering areas. For example, some birds that are insect eaters in
the north become fruit eaters in the south. Yet it is logical that
their behavior patterns as well as physiologies may be influenced by
every part of the migration route. Consequently these patterns of
behavior as well as chemical and genetic material are constantly
being modified and "telegraphed" by these avian messengers;
so that tropical rainforests are in complex communication with the
temperate forests, plains, mountains, boreal forests and tundra; the
Arctic and Antarctic. What happens in one part of the globe is
transmitted to other parts in the forms of altered populations and
behavior patterns. It
should be obvious then that the issue of protection of large
wilderness and the global network transcends all arguments for
"island" wilderness enclaves justified by naively perceived
human needs. When we come to consider the global wilderness as its
own justification our welfare automatically follows, because we
always have been and will be part of that wilderness as long as we
survive as a species. [727 Stingy Hollow Road ] Staunton, Virginia 24401
Wilderness - the Global
Connection
R. F. Mueller
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