WILDERNESS, ITS MEANING AND VALUE

SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY FALL, 1973

WILDERNESS, ITS MEANING AND VALUE*

Allan Shields

California State University, San Diego

I.

“....The conclusion will be that mankind will hang itself upon a tree. And who would interfere to cut it down?” Henly David Thoreau, by Krutch, p. 15 1

The mind boggles at the complexity of the problems and paradoxes that arise when we consider the practical urgency of acting to conserve and to preserve the minimal conditions for human life in this his given habitat. Man, at this moment, is in the same dilemma as the rat floating on a loaf of bread in the middle of the ocean, eating his raft .... Though it is true, that during the past 100 years, since the publication of the epochal, Man and Nature by George Perkins Marsh, human beings have amassed an impressive array of scientific information pertinent to achieving a proper conception of man’s habitation, it is false to infer that these problems were not known before then, or that these concerns are of recent origin. Since the cave man, as Konrad Lorenz imaginatively re- minds us, first befriended the jackal as a useful ally in the hunt, as well as a kind of companion in life, and since the earliest forms of agrarian existence, man has been forced to conceive a kind of cooperation with the natural condition. His conception of the natural condition has varied so considerably during his experience that it is literally an impossibility to catalogue and identify what man has believed of nature, how he has inferred from these beliefs for his actions and cultures, and how he would try to justify the grounds of those beliefs as knowledge. Poetry, ritual, religious festival, political action, myth, and elaborate literary expression. . . . .indeed one could go on to survey the entire corpus of world-wide cultural effort and fail to exhaust the variety of how nature, and man in nature, have been conceived and believed.

Paradoxes, the true philosopher’s bait, abound. The history of man’s concern with overnature and supernature has led historically to a lack of concern with the natural. What he has learned accurately of nature has been motivated despite his supernatural aspirations, not because of them. The need, as recognized by man, for personal and racial salvation in life, has led him to a preoccupation, paradoxically, with life beyond life, almost in an absentminded fashon. Another paradox man faces is this: if ultimate personal individualism as a way of life is to be preserved, then actions of a wholly selfish and shortsighted view, in the name of assertive individualism, must be thwarted.

Allan Shields, Professor of Philosophy, California State University, San Diego since 1949, has served as Dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University ofNorthern Iowa (1968-1970). He is a contributor to various philosophical journals and to others, including the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the Journal of Aesthetic Education He is corresponding editor for the international art journal, Leonardo.

*Read in part, during the annual meeting, The Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Durham, North Carolina, March 26-28, 1970.

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The expert knowledge of biotic relationships, of the ecology of life, as well as the ethology of living things, leads to the paradox that a sufficient refinement and recitation of empirical, scientific discoveries by their nature have become incommunicable and ununderstandable except to the elect. Since this kind of knowledge very often contradicts perfectly the assumptions of belief by the ignorant, the uninformed, and the stupid, and since these adjectives accurately describe the growing majority of the overpopulation, the conclusion is unmistakable, paradoxically, that the more we know and need to know, the less adequately informed the numerous people of the world become. Where decision rests on elective judgment, the implications are catastrophic.

A fmal suggestive paradox, though far from exhausting the list, has arisen for explicit defense in recent years only. Such writers as Aldo Leopold have asserted a view of a land ethic that in practical spheres has never before been conceived. The definition of land as all that occurs in it and on it contributing to its constitution, and the further assertion that such material has a moral right to be, has barely entered the consciousness of the race. Unconsciously, it has lain undeveloped, or has assumed occasional and rather inchoate forms since man’s life began. The jackal at the campfire was given certain privizeges before it was assumed explicitly that he might have, indeed, certain inalienable rights to life in his own condition. Conservancy organizations multiplied for specific purposes frequently express their purposes in value terms that are translatable into ethical expressions.

IN A BIRD SANCTUARY

Because they could not give it too much ground they closely planted it with fir and shrub. A plan of pathways, voted by the Club, contrived to lead the respiter around a mildly wandring wood, still at no cost to get him lost.

Now over dear Miss Drury’s favored trees they flutter (birds) and either stop or not, as if they were unconscious that the spot is planned for them, and meant to buy release for one restrained department of the soul, to “make men whole.”

It’s hard to tell the purpose of a bird; for relevance it does not seem to try. No line can trace no flute exemplify its traveling; it darts without the word. Who wills devoutly to absorb, contain, birds give him pain.

Commissioners of Public Parks have won a partial wisdom, know that birds exist.

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And seeing people equally insist on birds and statues, they go hire a man to swab sans rancor dung from granite stare and marble hair.

BIRDS HAVE BEEN SEEN IN TOWERS AND ON ISLES; ALSO ON PRIVY TOPS, IN FANEUIL HALL; BIRDS HAVE SOME OF THEM NOT BEEN SEEN AT ALL; BIRDS, IF THEY CARE TO, WALK ALONG IN FILE. BIRDS DO NOT FEEL ESPECIALLY GOOD IN FLIGHT: LET’S TREAT THEM RIGHT!

The liberty of any things becomes the liberty of all. It also brings their abolition into anythings. In order’s name let’s not turn down our thumbs on routine visions; we must figure out what all’s about.

The paradox Richard Wilbur celebrates, and Leopold develops, is that to argue for an ethic for birds or grizzly bears or the land is to fly in the face of the contempt of the overwhelming tower of human value belief which limits the notion of rightness to human- kind or its deities. Birds, bears and bees have no rights.

Strangely, nature intoxicated prophets - Thoreau, Muir, George Perkins Marsh, Burroughs - subscribe ultimately to a position of either meliorism or optimism of a cautious variety. Almost the exclusive uniformity among these various thinkers, it would carry us too far afield to try to search out the subtle explanations for their optimisms. Regardless of the height to which the bionomic edifice gets built, these naturalists reject pejorism. The doomsday prophecy of some students of pollution and other mistreatments of nature is becoming more common a view.

11.

John Muir remarks somewhere in a letter that no author has ever succeeded in catching the great, slow pulse beats of Nature, and he would not hesitate to include himself as well as natural scientists. Though this is not the occasion to pursue the basic distinction between figurative and literal language, it would be necessary to pursue this distinction as an imperative, for the history of man’s efforts to conceive nature, as well as his efforts to conceive himself, are replete with figurative and metaphorical invention. The key terms of discourse regarding the world, its inhabitants, its place in the universe of other things and beings - the world, this globe, our sphere - are rich in connotational overtones, are laminated with the imaginative energies of human authorship. The history of the idea of conservation in this country alone is instructive in this regard. A recent book by Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, examines in rewarding detail the major metaphors used by the Puritans to conceive the wilderness of the new world and finds their roots in biblical literature. This study is further instructive for the reason that varying modem

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SOUTHERN TOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY FALL, 1973

conceptions of the wilderness have grown from these same Puritan sources. It is accurate to say that, like other social ideas, all of these varied conceptions are yet currently manifested in the attitudes of various groups of persons today. It will be valuable to abbreviate some of the major findings of Carroll.

Disregarding inherent contradictions, the colonists identified the New England forest with the Biblical wilderness and employed traditional Christian language to articulate their life in America. The notion of the wilderness as a refuge from worldly corruption, for example, moved the settlers of New England to stress the advantages of sanctuary in justifying their departure from the degeneracy of England. In other contexts, the Puritans interpreted the wilderness as the place of religious insight, and therefore could challenge ecclesiastical deviation both in America and in Europe. Furthermore, as the children of Israel, they translated their hardships in the New World as God’s testing of his chosen people - a necessary prelude to everlasting salvation. The continued use of these metaphors illustrates the Puritans’ remarkable ability to apply preconceived ideas to the experientially different world of New England. (p. 2)

At first, according to Carroll, the Puritans viewed the wilderness symbolically as a test of their faith in the Lord, as a necessary step to purgation of their iniquities preparatory to their salvation in the Promised Land. The wilderness symbolically expressed for the Puritans the escape from persecutions for religious belief, and became a divine shield, a refuge and a secure haven, “...protected by the Hedge of Grace.” (p. 62) A further symbol of the wilderness was that of a state of sin, a harshness and a trial to be overcome. Perhaps a most important symbolic meaning of wilderness for the Puritans was that of a cite of religious insight. The wilderness was a kind of purifier and a strengthener of faith. The Puritan conception of wilderness was a compilation, a compounding of these various symbols and their metaphorical elaborations are still with us.

That the wilderness was loaded with trials and tribulations was a lesson Puritans did not require to learn from any abstract sermon, for like so many advances in the conception of nature, insight stemmed from the immediate intuition of practical affairs. To interpret the wilderness as a place of habitation of unclean and wild beasts, living and feeding in the most violent fashions, served to emphasize the importance of human culture and its cultivation by contrast, and to emphasize that wilderness was something to be got through, to be overcome, to be subjugated, that forests were made to be cleared to create arable, useful land.

One inference the Puritans drew from these metaphors was the obligation on their part to transform the wilderness into a garden in which religious institutions could be successfully planted. These beliefs led to practices of progressive forest clearing and to the practice of not encouraging homes to be built distant from the congregation place, the meeting house of the church membership.

Beset by immense dangers, they conceived of the wilderness experience as Armageddon, the final moral battle against the forces of the antichrist. But as a result of projecting their hostility for the external forces of the forest onto the

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wilderness itself, the Puritans regarded their condition in New England with obvious antipathy. To be sure, New Englanders frequently exploited their wilderness troubles for propaganda purposes in England. But the idea of the wilderness as the antithesis of civilization became increasingly influential as the Puritans attempted to explain their self-exile in America. (p. 66)

This antithesis between civilization and nature, between man and not man, between human nature and other nature, is a radical metaphor, foundational to most enemies of conservation and preservation of the natural world. Man, set apart from the world of nature, becomes the most dangerous animal he faces. The antithesis between nature and human nature may be said to be the unexpressed basis of the more common argument from multiple use of natural resources, of the argument for economy of the world for man’s needs, the argument from necessity, and the related arguments against a land or animal ethic as having a competitive interest with the rights of mankind. The Puritan took as the basis for his rights, a divine one. This cannot be claimed for his modern, civilized counterpart. For the Puritan, the wilderness was often conceived as a “. . .sorrowful estate” which one might unfortunately be cast out into. Never do you find in these Puritanical utterances anything approaching Muir’s view that going into nature was going home!

Of course, as the Indians were either pacified or removed, and the forest clearings became productive, the Puritans themselves became friendlier toward their wilderness. The attitude often became one that approaches acquisitiveness, for their idea that what- ever was humanly unoccupied was therefore vacant and available to them occurred quite naturally. This view possesses modern visitors to the national parks with the same kind of unthinking arrogance. Desert areas are especially vulnerable to misuse and plundering.

The belief that America was vacant soil also served as a convenient justification for the Puritans’ claim to the Indian lands. John Cotton argued that “hee that taketh possession” of vacant lands, “and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it,” has an unimpeachable claim to that land. John Winthrop bolstered this position by citing Genesis 1 :28 wherein the Lord gave man a general commission to “encrease and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it.” This is especially true, he added, since England is overpopulated and abundant land “lyes waste” elsewhere. Supporting these colonizing endeavors, John White appealed to God’s command that men replenish and subdue the earth. This task, he maintained, binds Adam’s posterity “as long as the earth yeelds empty places to be replenished.” Moreover, he concluded, as a result of the Indian epidemic in New England, “there is no person left to lay claime to the soyle which they possessed.” Winthrop also argued that the Indians’ claim to the American wastes was extremely tenuous because “they inclose noe Land, neither have (they) any setled habytation, nor any tame Cattle to improve the Land by.” The natives, he maintained, “ramble over much land without title or property.” And if “the whole earthe is the Lordes garden,” he asked, why should we contend for living space while other places equally “fruitful and convenient for the use of man...lye waste without any improvement”? (p. 14)

I submit that in these statements of Winthrop and of John White, with the authority 244


of “Genesis”, we have a sufficient justification for much of the plundering of natural resources! We have at least the historical progenitor of such justification.

III.

Though it is a long leap from the metaphorical conceptions of the Puritans to the modern concerns with conservation, and their attendant political-social-cultural complexities, it is necessary to draw our compass more narrowly. The recitation of a development of the concerns with conservation, of the history of the development of the national park system, the distinctions between national forests and wilderness preserves, and many other important changes during the past three hundred years cannot be detailed here.

Certain basic conservation myths can readily be scotched by the historical facts for those curious to seek them out. The myth that the national park idea is unique and original with the United States can be scotched by a research into the conservancies of Europe, and the game preserves and similar institutions in the European and Oriental past. They myth that preservationism originated with Thoreau or John Muir, though romantic and colorful, rests on the necessity to ignore the detachment of Spinoza, poets of all races, many artists in various forms, and even reverential sources. The myth that only recent science sufficiently comprehends the complexities of protection of the biosphere from its own self-destruction can only survive by ignoring the work of George Perkins Marsh and concurrent and prior students of these same problems.

But Stewart Udall can state accurately in The Quiet Crisis how actions of government and other agencies have changed in the decades of the 20th Century.

If THE FORESTER and reclamation engineer symbolized the conservation effort during Theodore Roosevelt’s time, and the TVA planner and the CCC tree planter typified the land program of the New Deal, the swift ascendancy of technology has made the scientist the surest conservation symbol of the 60’s. His instruments are the atom-smasher, the computer, and the rocket - tools that have opened the door to an ultimate storehouse of energy and may yet reveal the secrets of the stars. (p. 173)

The technological possibilities of weather prediction and controls, improved methods of conserving water supplies, of converting sea water, of the use of husbandry methods with wild creatures, and similar advancements are doubtless encouraging to the meliorist looking for evidence to support his aspirations. Improvements of a kind have been made in the control of environment. Even some kinds of “reclamation” are feasible.

At the same time that we have learned improved controls, we have learned to despair of other conditions. The use of horses and mules in the high Sierra have so eroded the delicate meadows that they are forever beyond return to their original, pristine condition. Removal of the animals will not solve the problem for the national forest or the national parks. The human erosion of those same areas increases with each passing day. It is a common saying among park naturalists that the establishment of accessibility to the park by the general population is immediate assurance of its ultimate destruction. Sierra Club members often regale each other, in dolorous tones, about the scandalous overuse of the

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park and wilderness areas but continue to schedule greatly amplified numbers of trips for themselves into those areas. Is it more than simply an impression that preservationism, as manifested in the establishment of wilderness areas, and conservationism, manifested in a variety of forms in the national forests and parks, are all simply backfires against the impending ultimate holocaust of man’s cultural overwhelming of natural conditions?

recitation of over-population, under-abundance of food and natural resources, of the alarming air and ear pollution in human culture, of uncontrollable social actions by lemming-minded human beings, of the cognitive failures which preclude the education of the ignorant in anything like a sufficient time to forestall ultimate disaster - are these alternatives the inevitable ones?

William E. Smythe, early in the 20th Century, argued vociferously for a vigilant and aggressive federal control of public lands and resources. Though neither the first nor the last to do so, he was one of the most vigorous proponents of the need for positive government enforcement of controls in resource development. In 1905, in his book, Constructive Democracy, the Economics of the Square Deal, he is alarmed over the extension of commercial monopolies, the misuse of natural resources by commercial interests and industry, and of the domination over political power by organized wealth. He believed that this kind of domination by megalopolitan monopoly led inevitably to misuses of resources and public lands, and that such practices would eventually lead to national disaster. The solution he proposed lay in the recognition of the logical basis of cooperation in democratic processes, and at one point he entered an ingenious argument against commercial exploitation based on its own premises, and concludes that what amounts to the modern concept of stewardship over public lands is the only practical solution.

Must we despair in the face of problems that seem irresolvable? Need the dreary

The battle for the people’s lands is a subject of high social interest, but there is a business side to it which should appeal even to the commercialism of the hour. The public domain is property. The American people are its proprietors. The Govern- ment is their agent. What individual among the whole American people, if this magnificient heritage happened to be his private estate, would allow his forests to be sold for a fiftieth part of their true value? Or his streams to be dried up, with resulting impairment or loss of his farm? Or his argicultural land to be taken by speculators and monopolies, when he wanted partners to operate a million little farms? Or his pastures to be held by a few aggressive individuals, when he wanted his friends and neighbors to enjoy them? Or his mines of incalculable wealth to be given away, without paying the slightest tribute to his own bank account?

A citizen who managed his private estate as the American people manage theirs, would be adjudged insane, and the courts would provide him with a guardian. The American people have been supremely indifferent about their rights and interests in their vast estate. Their guardians at Washington are equally indifferent, and there is no hope that they will be fully conscious of their trust until the people themselves shall awaken and call them sharply to account.

The first step in making institutions for the surplus man, is to save his rightful heritage in the public domain of his country.*

*See also in Constructive Democracy, pp. 23,26, 334-335, 343, and 397.

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Though we are variously familiar with government concerns with resource preservation, conservation and development on national and international bases, we may not be so conversant with other methods. There is a long history of action by individual, interested persons and groups. Most societies that have been formed, such as the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, and similar organizations represent concerned citizens acting privately to assert their opinions publicly to influence actions of government and business, to say nothing of actions of their fellow citizens, as those actions impinge on the world of nature especially. Not so well known, are the private landowners who have quietly purchased lands and then donated these to local, state, or national government agencies to be preserved in perpetuity for the use of their fellow citizens. Still more recently, and less well known, are actions by wealthy individuals who have systematically bought very large land holdings with the avowed purpose of not donating these to the public for the specific reason that they recognize the dangers of ultimate destruction of wilderness values in those holdings when the general public is provided access to them.

From various sources a different principle has arisen in recent decades which has been called “stewardship.” In an effort to conciliate the requirements of utilitarian conception of the value of nature with the defensible features of conservationism and preservationism, there has developed a growing awareness of the inevitable concessions to use of the national forests under controlled conditions, with improved understanding of those controls, as well as a growing recognition of the important distinction of wilderness areas. This idea of wilderness, so foreign to the Puritans, is so important that it requires a separate statement and development.

There is a sense in which the germ of the current belief in the preservation of wilderness and a recognition of the meanings and values of wilderness, was contained in the Puritan Land ethic where the Puritans subscribed to the doctrine of the need to achieve a resurgence of religious insight through a continuous exposure to the natural condition, and where wilderness was interpreted as a natural sanctuary of the good. However, as indicated previously, the main historical developments of the Puritan conception took the form of the natural right of men to make use of natural resources, and more specifically the form in the United States of the “manifest destiny” of the commercial interests to exploit natural resources which were believed vaguely to consist in an infinity of superabundance. It was believed seriously that oil, water, forest products, air, the buffalo, passenger pigeon, and other resources were literally inexhaustible by human use.

The usufruct conception in Roman and civil law applies to the modem concern to conceive of appropriate, defensible uses of wilderness and its natural resources. Usufruct stood in Roman Law as the right to use and enjoy the products and profits of an estate or other thing belonging to someone else, so long as it did not require, or lead to, any impairment or reduction of the substance. Called a “perfect usufruct,” this right is usually interpreted as meaning a personal servitude or obligation, and takes the two forms of use (ius utendi) and the enjoyment of the fruits (iusfruendi). In addition, the principle of unsfruct, by an extension of its meaning in its perfect form, was thought to justify the similar right which could be allowed for things which would be consumed in the using. This was traditionally known as an imperfect or quasi, usufruct.

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Conservationists have argued the justification of the imperfect or quasi usufruct principle; that the national forest is to be held in perpetuity by the national government but managed according to the principle of multiple use - recreation, forestry products, grazing lands, and so on. Preservationists, like Thoreau and Muir, and unlike Gifford Pinchot and commercial interests, support the basic principle of a perfect usufruct of the natural resources and the wilderness areas as the only defensible principle ultimately for the welfare of man and other living things. The modern preservationist, however, in the form of the defender of wilderness areas and their values, no longer argues as energetically for the complete exclusion of all human intercourse with wilderness and primitive areas, and less strenuously argues against some kind of use, if only recreational, for these same areas. Similarly, conservationists number among their supporters, very large industrial lumber interests and tree farmers who have come to admit the basic necessity of utilizing ecologists, biologists, as well as foresters, in developing their reforestation principles and practices.

The United States government has for some time recognized distinctions of importance among its natural preserves that we have remarked earlier, between wilderness and the national park area, and between wilderness and the National Forest. Wilderness areas are uninhabited regions of pristine and primitive wilderness in their natural condition, devoid of roads, trails, and habitation of man. These are areas which are set aside and protected from invasion by national protective agencies, are kept “useless,” except for their primary biological, evolutional values, are kept as areas wherein the natural forces determine the direction of developments within them for flora, fauna, and geological events alike. These are areas where their ultimate natural values are believed to be inherent, requiring no attribution by man, other than their recognition, as justification for their preservation. There is a further sense in which the wilderness areas are viewed as a kind of repository for ultimate regeneration of vital elements. Loren Eiseley finds a basis for optimism in one of his earliest, and best, essays called, “The Snout,” where he imaginatively interprets the continuing fecundity of primordial ooze that could re- generate the living record here on earth. Whether, indeed, such optimism is warranted regarding the wilderness areas is very much an open question. Pollution of the upper atmosphere, predation by man of animal life bordering wilderness areas, and even inside wilderness areas and in national parks, strongly suggest that the practices of protection of the pristine, nascent life preserve are ultimately insufficient to prevent the Wilderness from succumbing to the cultural and civilized inroads of humanity. Perfect usufruct is a biological, as well as a legal, fiction, and the imperfect usufruct seems to make an ultimate destruction a virtual certainity. The rat eats his raft ...

The history of conservation in this country is a record of the basic differences between the conservationist and the preservationist. The conservationist has argued consistently for the necessity and inevitable practicality of rational use of our natural resources under the control of the federal government. The preservationist has consistently argued that the conservationists’ principles are self-refuting in practice, and that the perfect usufruct, though unachieveable, must be constantly approached if human life is to be maintained. The bird watcher approaches perfect usufruct, the hunter imperfect usufruct. The hunter, as symbol of the conservationist view, contemptuously scorns the nature lover, the bird watcher, the intuitionist of natural things, the poet, the interpreter, the nature faker, while the bird watcher, symbolically for the preservationist, views with constant alarm the grossness and insensitivity of the hunter, positivistic scientist, and the utilitarian.

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It is not the objective of this paper to debate the profoundly complex differences in viewpoint, nor even to try to develop further the basic idea of “stewardship,” preserving for posterity, which is an effort to bring together the defensible views from a variety of sources and to hold that to some extent we are successful in preserving wilderness areas, while making use of natural resources, and all of these primarily with an eye to preserving them for future generations, rather than for the use of the present proprietors. Students of conservation, now using the term in its generic sense, usually recognize clearly that on the grand scale of eons of evolution, the entire biosphere itself is utterly dependent upon nonliving resources for its continuation, as well as for its development, and recognize the variety of values of nature conceived as wildness. Wilderness areas do in fact provide a kind of natural laboratory for the continuation of evolutionary processes and of natural ecological events, and agricultural practices have been changed through greater understanding of experimental work accomplished under the control of government in the national forests and other areas.

The values of recreation are most popularly understood. Visitors to a national park appreciate the direct experience, even though they may not verbalize or explain the physical, emotional and psychical renewal that accrues from even a brief period in nature. Visitors experience the resurgence of strength, the perspective on civilization and the release from pressures of their normal civilized lives; they experience a renewal of physical vigor, and are intimately reminded of the preciousness of innocence. They experience multiple aesthetic responses to natural events, places and forces. In exploring outlying areas, they discover the possibilities of raw excitement, exhilaration, and exuberance. They pursue sports. The visitor relaxes and may even rejuvenate. He learns again the meaning of necessities of life, perhaps of humility of how the individual who considers himself invincible becomes humble during a thunder storm. Or he may be humiliated by the agility of a mountain squirrel, or deer in flight. He may indeed learn that man is natural. By contrast, he may also find that natural man has built splendidly in his culture and civilization.

All of these values, I say, and more like them, are available to the human being who returns to wildness, regardless of how tenuously and timidly that return is made. It is given to few men to have the richness of 40 days and nights in the wilderness. But it needs remarking that whoever were to spend 40 days and nights in the wilderness, (even with a Kelty Pack and Dri-lite Food!) must be a good naturalist, and the better naturalist under these circumstances he is, the closer he will approach feral man. Moses, and many wanderers in nature since him, have experienced something like a revelation either of nature, of ultimate universal values, or of self-discovery by a return to nature. The unknown, and therefore feared, soon becomes the familiar and the known. Like Thoreau, the wanderer finds that he can learn fiom nature, even when he is aware of his incapacity to learn abour nature, as a scientist would learn. The wanderer values his own excitement, his hyperaesthesia, and the sensational events he confronts. Like millions before him, even though he may deny sect membership, he will find himself striking an attitude of awe, something like worship of nature, and something very like experience with the sublime.

On the other hand, lest we be accused of sentimentalizing, we must recognize that even the most sensitive, informed, creative naturalists among us have made mistakes and been forced to learn by them. It was John Muir who made a practice of burning whole

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trees and logs in the Sierra Nevada for warmth at night, never able actually to use the entire amount. Muir learned firsthand the destructiveness of sheep by being a shepherd in the Tuolumne Meadows. And it was Muir who seriously proposed the construction of a road from the Hetch Hetchy region up the wild Tuolumne River Canyon to bring more visitors to Tuolumne Meadows and beyond. This historical fact was conveniently over- looked in the debate over the establishment of the trans-park road from Yosemite Valley over Tioga Pass in recent years.

Henry David Thoreau it was who accidently started the fire in the woods at Concord which threatened the entire town with destruction. Though this has been carefully noted by his biographers, including Joseph Wood Krutch, it has been noted by few what Thoreau did. According to one recorder, when the fire began, Thoreau, instead of helping to fight the fire, retreated to a nearby hill to observe, and when afterwards was charged by the townspeople with responsibility in the holocaustal threat, wrote an elaborate, rationalized defense to prove that he could not be held responsible for the reason that some other natural event, such as a lightning strike, might conceivably have begun the fire!

It was Audubon who spoke in pride of being able to amass large piles of feathered birds for specimens to be used as he made his famous sketches of bird life. Nor were these specimens carefully preserved in such a form that it was unnecessary to duplicate the killing to accomplish his artistic and scientific ends.

Moreover, both Muir and Thoreau consistently depressed their dependencies upon university training, on their highly selected but important scientific libraries in their homes, and the extent to which they consulted scientists and other knowledgeable persons in their work. Muir was an apt and thorough student of botany while at the University of Wisconsin, while Thoreau was a constant visitor to the Harvard University library, at one point successfully changing the library policies regarding borrowing books by persons who lived far away from the campus. Muir and Thoreau are alike in their stout refusal to make reference to sources of a scientific or scholarly kind.

Finally, there is the romantic impression that Muir and Thoreau spent a great deal of time as feral men, of doing what Bertrand Russell calls, “...stripping bare, dying themselves in woad, running wild in the wood, living on hips and haws.” Thoreau, at Walden, was within easy walking distance of his home and friends, often taking dinner with friends in town during his two-year experiment, and frequently visiting with friends at his cabin. During the same period, he often stayed in his family’s own home. Though it is difficult to establish a time period, it is no exaggeration to suggest that the total duration of John Muir’s stay in the High Sierra would not exceed a total of five calendar years, spread over a much longer period of time, of course.

All of this is given not to deride or to belittle in any sense the extraordinary accom- plishments of these naturalists and preservationists but rather to indicate that time and circumstance can lead even the most discerning into a misbelief in the sufficiency of their own knowledge.

V.

Certain conclusions suggest themselves. Superstitious belief in animism may actually contain a great deal more merit than has

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been assumed. Though it is inaccurate to attribute characteristics of living things to inanimate objects, it also leads to misconception to attribute inanimate qualities to animate beings. If the land be a collective organism, if land, as Aldo Leopold maintains involves at least three basic ideas, 1) that land is not merely soil, 2) that the native plants and animals keep an energy circuit open; others may or may not, and 3) that man-made changes are of a different order than evolutionary changes and have effects more com- prehensive than is intended or foreseen, (p. 218) we are better advised, therefore, to conceive the world metaphorically as an organism, rather than a mechanism. The very world is animate, and must be so valued.

Another conclusion suggested is that though we may talk of reclamation, of reforestation, of returning things to their natural condition, and in similar ways, the record of the ecologists and ethologists clearly shows the literal impossibility of returning altered regions to their natural condition. We may reduce pollution, but we cannot recall the effects of that pollution. We may cease using certain poisons, but the residual effects of those poisons continue without limit. We may wish to reinstall Sierra Nevada mountain- sheep in the Sierra, but their altered habitat precludes this possibility. Extinct animals, birds, and plants, produced out of evolutionary forces, cannot be recalled by man, and may not be recalled by biotic processes.

The lesson of conservation history is clear. The idea of a superabundance of natural resources is a myth. The alternative of continuous stewardship of natural resources is the only practical one, and those practices which depend upon the assumption of superabundance must be made to cease. Since very often it is true that individual or corporate practices are altogether selfish and short-sighted, it will become increasingly necessary for governmental agencies at all levels to seize the initiative to ensure the propriety of stewardship of the conditions of life.

A further conclusion, more difficult to establish, is .that positivistic science, though admittedly vastly superior in what it has learned of nature over romantic intuitionism, is not ominiscient. It is not the scientist, but rather the scientistic thinker, the pseudo- scientist, or the dilettante in conservation, who makes this assumption of the omniscience of scientists. Scientists are inclined themselves to be overwhelmed by humility, realizing that every hypothesis proved breeds new hypotheses for investigation. And more impor- tantly, natural scientists are among the first to concede that knowing in an explanatory way how living events come to be, or come not to be, does not in itself dictate what living events ought to be allowed to be, or ought not to be. Leopold appears to be correct: the ethics of living things cannot be determined out of a recitation of factual truths, and that therefore it is perennially the condition of man that he must make judgment of how his habitat ought to be regulated.

There is a strong suggestion that a kind of nativism is an important principle to adopt in preservation and conservation practices. Lorenz remarks,

Since my earliest youth I have always had dogs and cats about me, and it is about them that I shall talk in this book. Business-like friends have advised me to write a dog-book and a cat-book separately, because dog-lovers often dislike cats and cat-lovers frequently abhor dogs. But I consider it the finest test of genuine love and understanding of animals if a person has sympathies for both these creatures, and can appreciate in each its own special virtues.

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To all those who love and understand dogs and cats alike I dedicate this little book. (p. X) Man Meets Dog

He argues for an objective basis of taking the values and importance of living events as inherent in those events. A dog is not to be taken as a cat, nor a cat as a dog. The natural forest cannot be treated the same way in which a cultured forest can be treated. This attitude is strongly suggestive, from the much broader perspective of evolutional and geologic history, that man himself, as a product of those evolutional processes, has been brought to be; that man’s existence does not carry with it the assurance of its continuation. Man may need the universe, but the dependency is not reciprocal.

Finally, it appears that one of the most important developments in the philosophy of nature is the concept of the moral imperative of animate and inanimate events in man’s experience. The Kantian dictum, so act that you would be willing that the principle on which your action is based, should be universalized, is postulated on the assumptions that the dictum is rational, and that it applies solely to rational creatures therefore. This categorical imperative, so-called, as against the expediency of the prudential, hypothetical imperative, the instrumental imperative, I am now suggesting, is the proper model for stating the grounds of moral claim for a grizzly bear, a rattlesnake, a body of water, or a bird. And similarly, the objective basis of our obligation to these objects and events, must be grounded on the same metaphor. But just as the categorical imperative is an ideal towards which all conduct strives, and just as the discrepancies between individual desire and social good, between group interests, between the conditions possible for conduct as against the ideal conditions for conduct, constantly lead us into moral incompatabilities, we must expect inconsistencies in our judgments of moral worth of life events. Killing of humans is wrong, on the categorical imperative. A basic assumption is, according to Kant, that we must treat other human beings as ends in themselves, never as means. We never- theless continue to destroy each other.

A moral imperative for rattlesnakes appears outlandish only to the narrow mind that does not value living things truly. While descending a high mountain in San Diego, Mount San Miguel, with a companion some years back, the dust before me on the trail suddenly whirled into a giant coil of a dark-red, mature rattlesnake. The buzz of his rattle was immediate, intense and instructive. My companion, a physical scientist in the space program and I were eager to get photographs of giant sprouting yucca, just ahead off the trail. We stopped, watched the snake, retreated a few steps, became wary of the possibility of the snake’s mate nearby, and my friend then said, “Well, now let’s kill it.” I pointed out to him that this trail was rarely used, that it was a skinny strip of unused and bare land up a very large and wild mountainside, that the trail wound nonchalantly through the natural habitat of this magnificent reptile, that the snake was about its proper business when we startled it, he did not seek to attack or challenge us, that in the life of predation of the rattlesnake lay the biotic salvation of the chaparral forest and the fauna of that forest, that for centuries the reptile and its kind had prior possession of this territory, and though there may have been other arguments besides, my friend was easily persuaded to go around the rattlesnake and we proceeded on our human way, leaving the snake to wend his natural way.

However, inasmuch as rattlesnakes constitute a danger to human beings in habitation, their presence there must necessarily be eliminated, for a rattlesnake cannot be taught to respect the rights of human beings. It remains to be seen whether enough human beings can learn the vital necessity for a categorical imperative of natural things.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carroll, Peter N., Puritanism and the Wilderness, The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629-1 700, New York: Columbia University Press, 1969, xi, 243 p.

Krutch, Joseph Wood, Henry David Thoreau, New York: William Sloan Associates, 1948, xiii, 298 p.

Lorenz, Konrad, Man Meets Dog, Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1967, i-x, 198 p.

Lowenthal, David, George Perkins Marsh, Versatile Vermonter, New York: Columbia University Press, 1958,442 p.

Marsh, George Perkins, Man and Nature, edited by David Lowenthal, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965,472 p.

Marsh, George Perkins, The Earth As Modified by Human Action, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1898,629 p.

Smythe, William E., Constructive Democracy, The Economics of the Square Deal, New York: MacMillan Company, 1905,463 p.

Udall, Stewart, The Quiet Crisis, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963, xiii, 209 P.

Wilbur, Richard, The Beautifir1 Changes, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1947, 55 P.

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WILDERNESS, ITS MEANING AND VALUE

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