This Month, the Wilderness Idea Gets Bigger
President Biden’s proclamation declaring Sept. 2024 National Wilderness Month takes a wider, more inclusive view of the wild.
John Muir knew what wilderness meant: no people. Folks of right breeding and sentiment might visit these preserved and pristine places, which he described as temples, cathedrals, and Edens. But they couldn’t move in; habitation unwilded the wild. That held particularly true for the Indigenous peoples whose homeland wild America had once been. They had to go.
Muir turned this notion into the dramatic point of a story he told five times over in his writings. It happened in the summer of 1869, when Muir, then working as a shepherd in the Sierra Nevada and heading east and down from Mono Pass, encountered a group of Kutzadika’as coming west and up. In his eyes these Native people were “mostly ugly, and some altogether hideous.” Moreover, they disturbed the contemplative ambience Muir sought in the high country. In one telling, he reduced the Kutzadika’as to “mere dirt specks in the landscape,” and in another he declared:
Somehow they seemed to have no right place in the landscape, and I was glad to see them fading out of sight down the pass.
The idea of unpeopled wilderness didn’t originate with Muir. It was a Romantic concept that gained traction in the United States of the late 1800s as deforestation, mining, and industrialization spread until all but the last wild spaces had been cleared, stripped, and ravaged. Since people were the problem, they had to be driven out to save the at-risk wild lands that embodied what America came from.
Imagine the biblical scene where, after that business with the serpent and the apple, Adam and Eve are cast out of Eden. Their presence offended the place, and they had to go. Wilderness worked the same way.
The Romantic notion of wilderness as naturally unpeopled thrived long past Muir, animating the conservation and preservation movement well into the 20th century. The novelist Wallace Stegner put it at the center of this thinking:
I want to speak for the wilderness idea as something that has helped form our character and that has certainly shaped our history as a people. For an American, insofar as he is new and different at all, is a civilized man who has renewed himself in the wild. The American experience has been the confrontation by old peoples and cultures of a world as new as if it had just risen out of the sea…. If the national park is … the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.
This exclusionary thinking fueled the years of hard lobbying that led to the Wilderness Act 1964 and established the federal wilderness system. The law made clear what a wilderness is:
A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.
In this philosophical and legal tradition, distinctly European and American in origin, nature thrives only when left to its own devices without human interference. It misses an important reality: tribal peoples shaped their homelands, often to enhance the very wilderness qualities Euro-Americans admired.
Consider Yosemite Valley. The first Euro-American visitors raved about the valley’s park-like scenery, so open that you could see from one granite side through the trees and meadows across to the other. The valley looked that way not because it was untouched, however. Tribal people burned sections every year to eliminate brush and favor tree species that grew better in light than shade. When genocidal warfare, dispossession, and bans on burning stopped the practice, brush and shade-preferring conifers moved in, took over, and clogged the valley floor. So there went the view; what wilderness was supposed to preserve, it in fact lost.
In addition, wilderness as Euro-Americans use the term lacks an equivalent in Native American thinking. The writer Luther Standing Bear (Sicangu and Oglala Lakota) put it this way:
We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth as “wild.” Only to the white man was nature a “wilderness” and only to him was the land “infested” with “wild” animals and “savage” people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery.
Where Muir, Stegner, and other heirs to Romantic wilderness erected an impenetrable wall between the cultural and the wild, tribal thinkers like Standing Bear see the two as interwoven, overlapping, and inseparable. This core idea drove the campaign for Bears Ears, the first national monument proposed by Native Americans, and it underpins the national monuments promoted by tribal alliances and recently proclaimed by Pres. Biden (see “Tribes Flip the Script”).
The president incorporated this enlarged notion of the wild in his Aug. 30 proclamation declaring September National Wilderness Month:
By conserving our wilderness, we not only protect key pieces of our Nation’s history — we also protect the livelihoods of people who depend on our lands and waters. We protect and preserve Tribal communities’ sacred landscapes. We sustain wildlife and conserve landscapes to help fight climate change and improve our Nation’s resilience. And we ensure that generations of Americans will be able to enjoy the beauty and power of our country’s wilderness today and into the future.
No longer do Euro-Americans have the last word on how to preserve wilderness, Biden explains:
We can continue our partnership with Tribal Nations, working together as co-stewards and ensuring that Indigenous Knowledge is respectfully included in the care of our natural heritage.
As of this month, the public idea of wilderness includes the subtle interweaving of the human and the natural central to tribal thinking, and it’s on the way to becoming home-grown American, wider and more inclusive.
Which has me wondering what John Muir would have to say about that.
The latest
Just this week, California Senators Alex Padilla, Laphonza Butler, and Representative Adam Schiff introduced the Sáttitlá National Monument Act, which will protect the northern California region known as the Medicine Lake Highlands east of Mount Shasta. Besides protecting water resources and biodiversity, the act will prevent geothermal development in an area long sacred to numerous tribes, including the Pit River Tribe, which has lobbied long for national monument protection. Here’s what’s at stake and where you can add your name to the effort.
Cast out of Eden events in the offing
Sunday, Sept. 29, 12:45 p.m., Berkeley Society of Friends: I'll be talking about the book, John Muir, and the foundations of the national park system in person at the meetinghouse, 2151 Vine St. (near Shattuck), Berkeley, CA 94709. Free and open to all.
Saturday, Oct. 5, 2 p.m., Orinda Books: I'll be reading from Cast out of Eden, answering questions and taking comments, and signing copies at this in-person event at Orinda Books, 276 Village Square, Orinda, CA 94563. Free and open to all.