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Wilderness as a Form of Land Use [1925]
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Wilderness as a Form of Land Use [1925] In the scholarly Journal ofLand and Public Utility Economics, Leopold published his most sustained, comprehensive statement of the wilderness idea and the rationale for developing a policy of wilderness preservation as a component ofland use in America. The influence of the leading historian ofthe American frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner, who moved to a house just two doors down the street from Leopold the same year that Leopold moved to Madison, is unmistakable in Leopold's argument for the cultural value of wilderness. From the earliest times one of the principal criteria of civilization has been the ability to conquer the wilderness and convert it to economic use. To deny the validity of this criterion would be to deny history. But because the conquest ofwilderness has produced beneficial reactions on social, political, and economic development, we have set up, more or less unconsciously, the converse assumption that the ultimate social, political, and economic development will be produced by conquering the wilderness entirely-that is, by eliminating it from our environment. My purpose is to challenge the validity of such an assumption and to show how it is inconsistent with certain cultural ideas which we regard as most distinctly American. Our system ofland use is full of phenomena which are sound as tendencies but become unsound as ultimates. It is sound for a city to grow but unsound for it to cover its entire site with buildings. It was sound to cut down our forests but unsound to run out of wood. It was sound to expand our agriculture, but unsound to allow the momentum of that expansion to result in the present overproduction. To multiply examples of an obvious truth would be tedious. The question, in brief, is whether the benefits of wilderness-conquest will extend to ultimate wilderness-elimination. The question is new because in America the point of elimination has only recently appeared upon the horizon of foreseeable events. During our four centuries of wilderness-conquest the possibility of disappearance has 134 Wilderness as a Form of Land Use 135 been too remote to register in the national consciousness. Hence we have no mental language in which to discuss the matter. We must first set up some ideas and definitions. What Is a Wilderness Area? The term wilderness, as here used, means a wild, roadless area where those who are so inclined may enjoy primitive modes of travel and subsistence, such as exploration trips by pack-train or canoe. The first idea is that wilderness is a resource, not only in the physical sense of the raw materials it contains, but also in the sense of a distinctive environment which may, if rightly used, yield certain social values. Such a conception ought not to be difficult, because we have lately learned to think ofother forms of land use in the same way. We no longer think of a municipal golf links, for instance, as merely soil and grass. The second idea is that the value of wilderness varies enormously with location. As with other resources, it is impossible to dissociate value from location. There are wilderness areas in Siberia which are probably very similar in character to parts of our Lake states, but their value to us is negligible, compared with what the value of a similar area in the Lake states would be, just as the value of a golf links would be negligible if located so as to be out of reach ofgolfers. The third idea is that wilderness, in the sense of an environment as distinguished from a quantity of physical materials, lies somewhere between the class of non-reproducible resources like minerals, and the reproducible resources like forests. It does not disappear proportionately to use, as minerals do, because we can conceive of a wild area which, if properly administered , could be traveled indefinitely and still be as good as ever. On the other hand, wilderness certainly cannot be built at will, like a city park or a tennis court. Ifwe should tear down improvements already made in order to build a wilderness, not only would the cost be prohibitive, but the result would probably be highly dissatisfying. Neither can a wilderness be grown like timber, because it is something more than trees. The practical point is that ifwe want wilderness, we must foresee our want and preserve the proper areas against the encroachment of inimical uses. Fourth, wilderness exists in all degrees, from the little accidental...