A Storied Wilderness: Rewilding the Apostle Islands

6 | Rewilding and the Manager’s Dilemma

191 With the creation of Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in 1970, the National Park Service inherited a rich and evocative landscape. The islands boasted lonely beaches, mysterious sea caves, and bays that could protect boats small and large from the powerful moods of Lake Superior. Island forests contained some of the best remnant stands of old-growth forest in the western Great Lakes. Lighthouses guarded five of the islands. Although automated beacons had replaced the keepers and their families, the romantic buildings and manicured lawns still served as among the biggest tourist attractions in the region. Establishing the lakeshore, however, proved far easier than managing it. For fifteen years after designation, the NPS engaged in acrimonious disputes with property owners for control of the land within the park. As NPS officials resolved these conflicts and assumed conservation authority for the islands, they made a series of decisions about the development of the lakeshore that consistently elevated the protection of natural resources over other concerns. They established primitive campsites but steered away from commercially oriented developments such as scenic drives, lodges, and restaurants. They drafted a resource management plan that aimed to return the islands—or at least portions of them—to their prelogging condition. Since 1977, the Park Service 6 Rewilding and the Manager’s Dilemma 192 chapter 6 has managed the Apostles as wilderness, even though formal wilderness designation did not occur until 2004. Wilderness, in both popular conception and NPS policy, is a place without people, a place where wild nature rather than human influence shapes the land. Evident human use—especially modern Anglo-American use—necessarily degrades wilderness. This is a relatively recent perspective. Wilderness advocates of the early twentieth century had a far more inclusive view of lands influenced by humans. It was only with the growing popularity of wild places for primitive recreation and scientific study in the 1960s and 1970s that the wilderness ideal excluded traces of human activity. This has created a standard that defines and values wilderness as a place without history, an ideal that is often at odds with the wild landscapes the NPS seeks to protect. NPS management guidelines translate this wilderness ideal into on-theground policies that strictly segregate nature and culture. This divide is further reinforced by the demands of the modern bureaucratic state for simplified, easily managed landscapes. Applying wilderness management to the Apostles represented the culmination of a trend that began nearly a century before: the growing authority of the state to specify with ever greater precision the kinds of activities acceptable on the land under its control. By instituting wilderness management in some places but not others, NPS officials determined which landscapes should be valued for their history and which for their wildness. These imperatives have reordered both the natural and the cultural landscapes of the islands. NPS personnel removed fish camps, summer cottages, and other evidence of human activity to create the appearance of pristine nature. They concentrated campgrounds, trails, and other facilities into previously “disturbed ” locations, further reinforcing the boundary between the human and the natural. But removing the evidence does not change the past. NPS policy creates a deception—a wilderness without history. State power and ecological succession make a potent team. They have remade the Apostle Islands into a place that looks ever more like the dehumanized wilderness ideal. Island forests have regenerated, and evidence of the wasteland that so disturbed Harlan Kelsey in 1930 is very difficult to find. But mythologizing the Apostles as a wilderness without history obscures some of the most important lessons places like this can teach. For generations, people lived, worked, and played in the Apostles, and recognizing the human imprint on the returned wilderness allows us to see the consequences of these actions. Rewilding and the Manager’s Dilemma 193 Doing so opens new conversations about the relationship between humans and nature, conversations that break down the boundary between these seemingly dichotomous categories. The Battle for Sand Island Before NPS officials could take formal steps toward managing Apostle Islands National Lakeshore (AINL), they had to acquire property from landowners who had often fought against the establishment of the park. In 1970, private citizens owned over 25,000 acres of land within the lakeshore, approximately 60 percent of the 42,375 acres in the park, and the State of Wisconsin owned nearly 17,000 acres. The complicated process of land acquisition in the Apostles...