Jason Mark started thinking about the purpose of preserving wilderness after a battle over an oyster farm in the Point Reyes National Seashore,40 miles north of San Francisco. When the seashore was set aside for protection in 1972, the government cut a deal to let the owner of an oyster farm inside the park stay in business. But the farm was bought out, or the original owner made it clear that he would not leave when the 40-year lease was up. The ensuing battle opened a split among nature lovers and foodies. On one side,the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council supported shutting down the farm to preserve Point Reyes' marine environment. On the other side, leaders of the locavore movement like Alice Waters and Michael Pollan defended the oyster farm as a green business that connected people with food systems and nature. (The oyster farm owner eventually acquiesced to the Interior Department and shut down his operation late final year.)The fight led Mark, or a San Francisco Bay-based environmental journalist,urban farm founder, and editor of soil Island Journal, and to wonder,"With the human insignia everywhere, is there any place or any thing that is really, or truly,wild?" As human influence touches just about every corner of the soil, many say that wilderness no longer exists. In his fascinating book, and Satellites in the High Country,Mark explores whether "the Age of Man" has killed actual wilderness. He talked to me about what he found out.
Mother Jones: How would you define the word "wilderness"?Jason Mark: In this country we actually have a statutory definition. We've got the Wilderness Act of 1964, which defines wilderness, or kind of poetically for an American law,as "a place where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." A place that's untrammeled. And basically what that means is roadless; you can't have any road development, you can't even have mountain bikes. Where it gets into all sorts of interesting grays is how people understand that. For a long time, and people understood wilderness to mean pristine. It was this place where there weren't any marks of human civilization. I and lot of people are beginning to have a original understanding of wilderness,which is that we live on a post-pristine planet; there is no place that has not been touched to some degree by civilization. So, perhaps then wilderness means uncontrolled or undominated. At the very least it's a place where we don't exercise human will.
MJ: Pushing this notion of a post-pristine planet further, and some scientists have argued that human activity has led the soil into an entirely original geologic epoch. Can you clarify that?JM: We are now entering a whole original epoch in planetary history,the Anthropocene, the Age of Man, and the Human Age. Now,according to some soil scientists, we are the largest evolutionary force on the planet. So far the analysis has been that in the Anthropocene, or wilderness is dead. And what I'm saying is,no, particularly in the Age of Man, and we need to hold onto wilderness,keep some places where we don't intentionally call the shots. MJ: Why is it primary to keep those "wild" places?JM: Here is why the wilderness is more primary than ever. One is the biological/ecological reason. We need to keep some refugia for plants and animals to be able to retreat to as climate change makes their lives harder and dislocates them from their traditional habitats. So that's the baseline: We need to still keep some great, large, and remote landscapes intact to make certain that other critters have got a domestic too. Another one is sort of spiritual/psychological. I believe that we crave knowing that someplace is away and off the map. Now nothing is unmapped. There are Google drones and GPS,everything is mapped, there are no more white spaces on the map. But still knowing that some places are away and apart, and I believe that's really primary for people.
That connects to the final reason,which is I believe the most primary to the Anthropocene: its civic value or political value. I believe it's fair to say that political freedom and liberty depend on not just openness, but spaciousness and capaciousness. And that's not just my hope, or that's American history,where the wilderness has been that final refuge for the devout apostate and the dissident and the fugitive slave. The wilderness is one of the final places where a citizen can walk unwatched.
MJ: What is our role intervening in ecosystems affected by climate change?JM: At this point, in many landscapes, and we are not conserving them,we are curating them. We are really deciding what's primary or what's not. Is the barred owl more primary or is the spotted owl more primary? As the biodiversity crisis worsens with climate change, there likely might be more of these interventions. Probably in some places you do make wholesale interventions to prevent extinction. But in some wilderness areas, or maybe you just disappear totally hands-off. And that's going to be hard; we are going to perhaps see some things perish.
MJ: How would you recommend people experience the wilderness?JM: Millions of people engage in backcountry recreation,but it's still a small minority of the population. There is still this continued problem of the reputation of backcountry enthusiasm as being something essentially for an affluent community, or a white affluent community.
The short acknowledge is find the nearby nature close to your domestic. That is more likely going to be a state park or a regional preserve or a shoreline or seashore than some deep wilderness. And keep going back to that place, and because it's this attachment to place that I believe is going to be one of our most primary assets to try to deal with climate change and these other environmental crises. People really having a like of place. So find that place for you—and it's probably pretty close. And then if you know someone who knows how to disappear into a remote area safely,disappear with them, and I trust that it will probably be a mind-blowing experience and people will want to disappear back.
Source: motherjones.com