The Road to Sustainability Goes through Wilderness

Lamont C. Hempel

"If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it."
   -President Lyndon B. Johnson, upon signing the Wilderness Act of 1964

Wilderness is our most precious legacy. What we leave future generations in the way of wild places and healthy species will say more about our success as a civilization than all the cars, computers and corporations ever created. But the spectacular landscapes and seascapes that inspired and sometimes frightened our ancestors cannot be handed down to our descendants like money or property. They, and the wildlife they support, are not ours to give; they are not our children's to own. But their fate is in our hands.

Forty-six percent of the Earth's surface is classified as wilderness, though much of it shows signs of human disturbance. Only about 7% has any meaningful form of protection. Huge areas are threatened by road building, expansion of agriculture and the global reach of fishing fleets, oil exploration, mining, and tourism. None of Earth's 37 major wilderness areas remain untouched by pollution and toxic chemicals. Increasingly, their silence is broken by the sound of passing jet engines in the sky above. More and more of their flora and fauna are being hunted, extracted, displaced by invasive species, or otherwise threatened by the consequences of rapid growth in human population and consumption.

The U.S. has over 100 million acres of federally designated wilderness, much of it protected as national parks and preserves. That's about 4% of our country's land area, with over half of it located in Alaska.

Our longing to experience wilderness becomes stronger as wild places and creatures become rare. But rarity is not what makes wilderness so precious. Wilderness symbolizes freedom and frontier adventure. People need the enduring presence of wild creatures and untamed landscapes, even if they spend all their time in crowded cities. Without these connections to nonhuman nature, we risk becoming pathologically self-centered and dull, trapped in a world where life takes place entirely within the artificial boundaries of technology and commerce. Absent wilderness, we are stuck with our selfish genes, bigscreen TVs, and stunted imaginations.

Wilderness encounters force us to live unconditionally-to confront situations and beings that we can neither create nor control. Unlike today's contrived reality shows, broadcast to television audiences around the world, wilderness experiences are truly unscripted encounters with reality. They may be dangerous, physically demanding, and uncomfortable, but they are always authentic and radical, in the best sense of that term. They take us to the roots of our being, inspiring and humbling us; forcing us to confront our immortality as individuals and to discover our ecological insignificance as a species. What but unbridled hubris would let us think that we could bring about the end of Nature without endangering the best part of human nature, in the process?

The world we inherited and the one we are leaving for our children is rapidly shrinking, at least in terms of ecological wealth and cultural diversity. It is often said that we do not inherit the Earth from our parents; we borrow it from our children. The truth is that each generation inherits a diminished share of wild Nature and a diminished capacity to sustain it.

Sustainability is about preserving meaningful choices for the future. It is ultimately about our bequest-what we leave for future generations. Sustaining wildness is not an easy thing to include in our collective will. It would be much easier to talk about preserving the beauty of a particular flower or island paradise, but that is not the primary goal of sustainability.

From rainbows to sunsets, what gives poignancy to beauty is the knowledge that it will not last. What must be sustained is the complex adaptive system that generates such beauty. Hence, the object of sustainability is not preservation so much as it is wholeness. Bequeathing ecological wholeness to future generations is the greatest gift that we can hope to provide. It promises a life in balance between the wild and the human; between risk and control.

Preserving wild life and wild places is essential for developing healthy human minds and identities. People, especially children, need to encounter places and beings that are, as author Philip Slater once remarked, "distinctly not us" or our creations! Such encounters can help us distinguish what is human from what is not. They can free us from the domination of human design and control in almost everything we experience. And they can remind us of primeval designs that pre-date those of our species by billions of years. Perhaps most importantly, they can teach us about humility at a time when human arrogance toward Nature seems dangerously out of control.

Many people see technology and economic progress as our society's ultimate gift to posterity. They believe that their own descendants will enjoy a form of material progress that more than compensates for any loss of natural beauty and wild places. It is certainly possible that future generations will not miss the majesty of a coral reef or massive forms of Blue Whales, cutting the surface of krill-filled seas. Perhaps our descendants will be content with mere images of the wild life we sacrificed for money, power and comfort. They will not know what they're missing, but part of the human spirit will have been extinguished, in the process.

On paper, there's plenty of physical space for wildlife habitat, even in a world that will add nearly one billion more humans in the next 15 years. In practice, however, each new human means a loss of wildnerness, due to the embedded energy and resources required to support their lifestyle. Since most individuals will eagerly pursue higher consumption lifestyles, the environmental impacts of population growth will be greatly magnified by growth in per capita consumption, and this in turn will be manifest in growing land conversion, resource extraction, waste and pollution. In the time it takes for human population to stabilize (hopefully) at 9-12 billion people, over 5 million species could become extinct due to the impacts of growth in human population and consumption.

Thoreau was right, "in wildness is the preservation of the world." The most precious opportunity we can preserve for future generations is the chance to experience wilderness-to encounter Nature in a state of untrammeled beauty and majesty. Such a bequest provides the ultimate test of our vision and morality as a people. A bequest without wilderness and wildlife offers a world too damaged to be enjoyed.