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Foreword | Irrevocable Lessons of Vanishing Fields by William Cronon
- University of Washington Press
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ix Foreword Irrevocable Lessons of Vanishing Fields William Cronon On December 8, 2004, Pr esident George W. Bush signe d congressional legislation creating the Gaylord Nelson Wilderness Area in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore of Lake Superior. Named for the Wisconsin senator who is best known as the founder of Earth Day, the new wilderness area represented the fulfillment of a decades-old dream. Although Nelson had been responsible for setting aside the Apostles as a national lakeshore in 1970, their statutory designation as “wilderness” more than three decades later brought the islands the highest form of land protection available in the United States. In the words of the 1964 Wilderness Act, the Apostles were now to be recognized as places “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Like most of its midwestern counterparts, Wisconsin had precious little federal wilderness before 2004, making all the more remarkable this formal declaration that within the state’s boundaries was (again quoting the 1964 Act) “an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation . . . with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable.” But there was something more remarkable still about the new Apostle Islands wilderness area. In 1930, the landscape architect Harlan Kelsey had vis- x foreword ited the area at the invitation of local boosters to determine whether the islands might be suitable for designation as a national park. As he toured the islands looking for the pristine conditions that his National Park Service employers expected of units in their system, Kelsey saw the marks of human habitation and activity everywhere: dwellings, agricultural fields and pastures, fishing camps, abandoned quarries, and cutover forests scarred by decades of logging. He pulled no punches in his final report. “The hand of man,” he wrote, “has mercilessly and in a measure irrevocably destroyed [the islands’] virgin beauty.” Far from being a wilderness, the Apostle Islands simply did “not meet National Park Service standards.” Reading his report, one gets the sense that he couldn’t believe he had been asked to make such a pointless trip. How could Kelsey’s “irrevocably destroyed” islands of 1930, so self-evidently unworthy of national park status, become Gaylord Nelson’s national lakeshore by 1970 and a congressionally designated wilderness area by 2004? That is the intriguing question that the environmental historian James Feldman explores in his important new book, A Storied Wilderness: Rewilding the Apostle Islands. Feldman brings to this subject a lifelong engagement with wilderness in general and with Lake Superior in particular. Having spent boyhood summers attending and serving as a youth counselor for a camp on the lake’s southern shore, he returned as a seasonal ranger for the National Park Service in the 1990s, guiding visitors through one of the many nineteenth-century lighthouses that are now among the most popular tourist attractions in the Apostles. As he did so, he became ever more intrigued by the ways in which the modern tourist experience of wild nature in the islands related to the long history of human habitation still visible—if only one knew where to look. Feldman embarked on his research for this book just as discussions of wilderness designation for the park were reaching their climax, and the arguments he offers in A Storied Wilderness played a significant role in shaping the outcome of those discussions . Because his insights have implications far beyond the Apostle Islands, this book has much to offer anyone who cares about parks and wilderness areas in the United States. In the stories Feldman tells, we learn of the Ojibwe peoples who made their homes in the Apostles, hunting, trapping, fishing, and participating in far-flung trade networks centering on that place. The Ojibwe were eventually joined by French, British, and American missionaries and fur traders who congregated on the largest of the islands and created the town of La Pointe that for a time [34.228.168.200] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:25 GMT) foreword xi was among the most populous settlements on the Upper Great Lakes. As the fur trade declined, commercial fisheries took its place in the local economy, along with the small immigrant farms that began to appear on the islands and the nearby Wisconsin mainland. The popularity of Lake Superior brownstone in the late nineteenth century led to large shoreline quarries, where the heavy stone blocks could...