In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

10 / Wild, Tame, and Free Comparing Canadian and U.S. Views of Nature donald worster “ I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society .” Those oft-quoted words from Henry David Thoreau, published in 1862, ring through the subsequent years of American history. Although they were made deliberately extreme and one-sided and although they came from a man who often felt marginal to his society, they express some central ideas in American national culture, ideas that are among our most distinctive contributions to the human story. Over the past century and a third, following Thoreau’s manifesto, the United States has arguably been the world leader in cherishing and preserving wildness—in terms of path-setting legislation, size of acreage, and the passion and intellectual rigor of debate. Beginning with the creation of Yellowstone in 1872, the country has extended protection to more than eighty million acres in its national park system and a comparable expanse in its wildlife refuges. Both programs, it should be said, have been widely copied by other nations, and the idea of nature preservation has become a global movement. Although it is now fashionable on both the right and left to attack the entire movement as elitist or racist and even to criticize it for alienating humans from nature—a strange, contorted piece of reasoning that holds that we are spiritually estranged from places we cannot farm, mine, or drive our cars through—the common sense of humankind has come around to the view that nature preservation is, at least theoretically, a moral obligation. The 1992 246 Earth Summit in Rio recommended that every nation set aside at least 12 percent of its land base from economic use—a goal that even the United States does not quite meet and most nations fall short of meeting. Canada, for example , protects less than 3 percent of its gigantic territory from logging, mining , or other exploitation. But the most stringent way to protect nature is not merely to designate “parks” or “bioreserves” but to designate land as “wilderness,” and so far only the United States has set up a comprehensive system for doing that. Passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress and signed into law on September 3, 1964, the Wilderness Act established a system of preserving wild landswithinthenationalparks,forests,wildliferefuges,orpublicdomain.With few exceptions, those lands will never have to provide any crops, minerals, reservoir sites, timber, gravel, meat, suburbs, or golf courses—they will never have to earn any dollars for the greater good of the United States. Remarkably, in a nation that often seems driven solely by economic calculation, these lands have been put beyond the demands of commodity production. To date the nation has set aside about one hundred million acres of wilderness , an area larger than California.1 Most of that land has come from the national forests and fish and wildlife refuges, although the national parks have contributed a large share too. More than half of the one hundred million acres isinAlaska,including8.7millionacresintheWrangell–St.EliasNationalPark; but also in the lower forty-eight states there are immense stretches of protected wild country, some of the largest in the Pacific Northwest. There are small remnant pieces of wilderness scattered from Florida’s Keys to Vermont’s Green Mountains and westward to Missouri’s hardwood forests, indeed scattered through all but a handful of states. Conservationists have identified another eighty to one hundred million acres they feel deserve protection, while they have begun to talk boldly of still more acres that can be restored to wilderness—lands that may have been heavily used but can be put back into a more natural condition through a program of “wilderness recovery.”2 Inspiration for the 1964 law, I have suggested, lies far back in the nation’s past. Particularly, as scholars have argued, it owes much to Europe’s Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and to the search for a new secular religion in the sublimity of nature. After Thoreau, passionate defenders of the wild included John Muir, Robert Marshall, and Aldo Leopold, who together made wilderness into a national political cause, although it was the indefatigable Howard Zahniser (1906–64), a less wellknown figure but a highly e¤ective advocate in congressional hearing rooms...

Share