WILDERNESS IS BY DEFINITION di;cult to reach and explore,
sometimes dangerous to life and limb. It is not there for conve-
nience. In wilderness you hike into the hills, climb the moun-
tains, wander the canyons—preferably alone, away from the
madding crowd—on foot or on horseback; you run the white-
water in rafts with paddles; you camp, gathering wood for fire or
food from the forest; you’re even free to go armed and kill your
own meat. Yet the human benefits provided by wilderness were
meant to be secondary to the needs of the ecosystems them-
selves. “Recreation is not necessarily the dominant use of an area
of wilderness,” declared Zahniser, testifying before Congress in
1962. “The purpose of the Wilderness Act is to preserve the wil-
derness character of the areas to be included in the wilderness
system, not to establish any particular use.”
Nevertheless, recreation is driving the newest frontier of wil-
derness compromise, particularly recreation that helps the lo-
cal economy. The Oregon Badlands Wilderness, 30,000 acres
carved out in 2009 near the town of Bend, serves as a case
study of how wilderness is marketed as a recreational commod-
ity. Among the groups that lobbied for the Badlands Wilderness
was the Conservation Alliance, which represents the interests
of the outdoor gear manufacturer and retail industries. Based
in Bend, the Conservation Alliance funds grassroots wilderness
campaigns with money it draws from its 185 member corpora-
tions, including Patagonia, REI, Columbia, Kelty, Keen, Eastern
Mountain Sports, Clif Bar, and The North Face, whose collective
goal, of course, is to sell more gadgets to lovers of the outdoors.
“It makes good economic sense to protect wild places,” alliance
president John Sterling told the Bend Bulletin last February. “Pro-
tected wild places are important to the outdoor industry. This is
the infrastructure of outdoor recreation. Their customers need
these places to use the products they make and sell.”
There you have it: wilderness as “infrastructure” for profit gen-
eration. The marketing of the Badlands Wilderness also touted the
benefits to Bend’s restaurateurs and hoteliers and guide services,
and the attraction of the new “playground” for newcomers who
might settle in Bend and drive up the price of real estate. Wilder-
ness has come to be seen as an economic engine, with smiling ap-
proval from the local chamber of commerce. Wilderness advocates
have stopped talking about wildness, because wildness is not com-
mercially viable. The wild, a realm of human experience outside
the confines of the commercial mindset, has no burgers and fries.
The thinking follows the deranged principles of growth-mania: two recreationists, properly accoutered with Keen sandals and a Columbia jacket and a Kelty pack full of Clif Bars, will
always be better than one, and three better than two, and three
hundred, three thousand, three hundred thousand better still.
Scott Silver, executive director of the nonprofit Wild Wilderness,
in Bend, notes the irony that the “wilderness” of the Badlands
now conforms less to the vision of the Act than when the land
was unprotected. It has degenerated into a tourist draw.
RECENTLY I HIKED into the Sawtooth Wilderness of central Idaho
looking for wolves in the rain. At around seven thousand feet
along a lonely trail, the sign at the wilderness boundary laid out
the rules, simple enough to comprehend: closed to motor vehi-
cles, motorized equipment, bicycles, and hang gliders. violations
punishable!
It was June, but the rain was cold, and fog poured from the
stony peaks beyond the treeline. The weather seemed to know
I’d crossed into wilderness, for it doubled its action as the trail
climbed higher, the rain turning to sleet then snow, the wind
kicking in the pines, the fog now a mad-dashing thing alive.
Plodding along, eyes cast downward, I noticed that the trail had
been cut with tire tracks, evidence that mountain bikers had
violated the wilderness regulations. When the fog cleared, I
looked out over a landscape laced with bike trails, the hundreds
of thousands of acres of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area,
all of it—except for the 217,000 acres of the Sawtooth Wilderness — open to the spandex’d horde. Apparently it’s not enough.
On I tramped, farther into the wilderness, wet and cold, howling
as I went, to see if a wolf might answer. None did.
The trouble for wilderness, I found myself thinking, is that
the Wilderness Act expresses values fundamentally antithetical
to the American Way and the American Dream. This means that
protecting wilderness will always be an uphill fight. Consider
the opening words of the legislation, which I submit is the most
radically anti-American language that lawmakers in the United
States have ever approved: “In order to assure that an increasing
population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing
mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the
United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated
for preservation and protection in their natural condition . . .”
By god it’s an insult to the dictates of Manifest Destiny, an assault on the rightness of our manic metric, the GDP, a slap in
the face to the American Dream. Our civilization has always held
fast to the delusion of limitless expansion: more settlement in
every corner, more mechanization, more technology to catalyze
more growth, more profit. Such a civilization, taken to its logical
extreme, cannot have wilderness, because wilderness represents a
limit: you shall go so far with the trammeling machine, and no
further. Zahniser was communicating to the growth-obsessed
business community that wilderness values repudiated its arrogance, its presumption, its totalizing self-regard. There’s no ambiguity in his language, no hint of compromise. Today’s wilderness
advocates would do well to embrace the clarity of the message. A
