Ah wilderness

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) one of the major political philosophers of the Enlightenment is often cited as the creator of the noble savage myth. However, the actual phrase came from John Dryden's The Conquest of Granada, a play first performed in 1670. Briefly, the idea of the noble savage is that man, in his natural state, is good and noble and that he has been corrupted by "civilization." The idea of the noble savage is so pervasive in literature that it has become a significant theme. Just as Rousseau saw civilization as corrupt, this same viewpoint has become a dominant theme among those who would preserve the wilderness.

The title of this post, "Ah, Wilderness" comes from Quatrain XI of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. There was also a Broadway Show of the same name by Eugene O'Neill. Neither of which have anything to do with wilderness. Actually, the translation of the Rubaiyat says "Oh, Wilderness."

It turns out that there are 704 Wilderness Areas in the United States with over 100 million acres of designated land. According to Wilderness.net, over 12 million people visit wilderness each year. In this context, only Federally designated land that is part of the Wilderness Preservation System under the Wilderness Act of 1964 is considered Wilderness (with a capital W). 4.57% of the United States, an area slightly larger than California, is designated as Wilderness. Assuming the government or any one else can actually count the number of people that visit a Wilderness (how do they know how many times I visited the Superstition Wilderness last year, for example) you can compare that to the attendance at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom, 17.1 million visitors in 2007. See http://travel.latimes.com/daily-deal-blog/index.php/socal-amusement-park-1492/

See also http://www.wilderness.net/index.cfm Wilderness.net Just as a note, I searched this site for a photo of "Arizona" and got a picture of the Superstition Mountain from the west. It must be a really old picture because where the photographer is standing is now all subdivisions.

Now, back to the noble savage and his connection to the wilderness (with a small w). It reminds me of the time we were sitting around Thunder Falls, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It was well over 100 degrees in the shade and we were waiting until evening to hike out of the canyon. We had a number of young people with us, including one of my sons, who was under 12. Suddenly, we saw this man run up to the waterfall and start frantically pumping water through a water purifier into a canteen. He was dressed in the best REI attire imaginable down to the expensive hiking shoes. I wandered over to ask him what was going on and he told me that there were a group of people up in the canyon and they had run out of water and he was carrying all the canteens and was going hike back up and rescue them. I pointed out that Thunder River came out of the cliff side about 200 feet away and there was likely no reason to filter the water. He filled the canteens and ran off up the trail. A couple of hours later, the group came stumbling down the trail and literally fell into the creek. They were in terrible shape. Later, when it was cooling off, we left them and began our hike out of the canyon. We had stashed water along the trail on the way in, so we would have enough to make the hike out. On the way out, we reported the unfortunate hikers to the National Park Ranger we met on the trail and he headed their direction.

What is the attraction of the wilderness that will put a group of totally unprepared hikers at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in the middle of the summer without adequate water? Why do 12 million people a year think it necessary to hike, camp, ski, and climb in the wilderness every year? Why do I see hikers in flip-flops or with shoes taped with duct tape hiking out of the Grand Canyon?

Just as Rousseau, who had probably never talked to a native aboriginal person in his life, romanticized the native existence, so too today in a society that has lost contact with nature and either believes that it should be transformed into a more manageable commodity or preserved out of a nostalgic desire to return to a simpler and less commercialized society. In both cases humankind is viewed as something apart from nature, either separated by our responsibility as custodians or our need to preserve "wild places" from the evils of society as a whole. Often, the native indigenous population is seen as an integral part of nature, not exactly human, and therefore also to be preserved in their primeval pristine state.

There is an insightful essay on the issue of wilderness sponsored by the Faculty Resource Laboratory at the University of Connecticut. You can read the article by David R. Klein at:
http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/HistoryCulture/wilderness.html

Although I do not agree with most of the article's historic analysis, I do agree that only a small minority of the American population ever visits a wilderness or a Wilderness. Klein's statement that "[t]he act of offering legal protection for wilderness that is far removed from our everyday lives provides salve for our conscience, perhaps in recognition that we have lacked the will to initiate the major governmental and economic restructuring necessary if we are to move toward sustainability of Western society" is a capsule summary of the entire wilderness issue.

More later