Writing National Parks History: What is Wilderness?
Changing conceptions of wilderness and nature in Canada and the United States
This is Part II of my Writing National Parks History series. You can read Part I here, where I reviewed the 2016 IMAX documentary National Parks Adventure and introduced the five themes this series will explore. Please subscribe to see the rest of the series and follow me on Twitter for updates on the newsletter.
I had a theory once during an undergraduate history seminar. If you took 100 square kms of forest and put a fence around it, keeping all the trees, animals, and insects inside and humans out, that land would forever be wilderness.
I assumed that wilderness was the absence of people. Forests, wild animals, wide plains, towering mountains. I forgot that, as long as humans have existed, we have always been a part of nature and wilderness. We have hunted animals, cultivated crops, built camps, villages, and towns, and dammed rivers and streams.
During an archeology fieldschool on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, a professor told my colleagues and I that any flat spot of land we saw was probably made by a human. Areas that seemed like pristine wilderness hid evidence of ancient agriculture and settlements. The simple acts of pulling unwanted weeds out of a patch of wild plants or clearing a flat piece of land for a dwelling.
Evidence of human intervention in wilderness is everywhere. But clearly a downtown city street is not wilderness.
The National Parks Adventure documentary that I began this series with describes national parks as natural wonders, wilderness set aside for everyone to enjoy. But are national parks - where we drive in cars on paved roads, camp in campgrounds with showers and flush toilets, and hike on groomed trails - wilderness? Are efforts to protect endangered species or keep bears and wolves away from humans natural?
Not surprisingly, the answer to these questions - of what nature and wilderness are and how they should be managed and used by humans - have changed over time.
In the United States, Americans held unfavourable views of wilderness and nature as late as the 1830s. Wilderness was a physical obstacle, a threat to survival that had to be overcome if Americans were to succeed. The idea of conquering wilderness - cutting down forests into lumber, ploughing grasslands into fields, forging a livelihood in unforgiving landscapes - became a central part of American identity.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Americans began searching for something to justify their freedom, to identify what made the United States different from its European rivals. Wilderness became what made America unique, a source of cultural and moral pride.
At the same time, the industrial revolution was radically changing American society. More people were moving to cities and towns, which became more crowded and unsanitary. They worked in factories and shops rather than on the land. Industrialization increased the tempo of daily life and the availability of material goods. People began to look at wilderness and nature as an escape from the bustle of city life. They made heroes out of “mountain men” and others who lived and worked in wilderness. The idea of going back to wilderness to reinvigorate and inspire the spirit became an important part of American culture.
And from America’s new appreciation of wilderness came a drive to preserve nature. To protect wilderness from the expansion of industrial civilization and preserve those places for Americans to go back to. This new “wilderness cult,” as historian Roderick Nash called it, coincided with the first American national parks, Yellowstone National Park in 1872 and Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks in 1890.
Canadians did not fear wilderness the way Americans did. Early Canadians - fur traders, fishermen, farmers - sought economic opportunities in wilderness. They wanted to categorize nature, identify valuable resources and exploit them. The first ideas of conservation and protecting wilderness in Canada were focused on preserving natural resources so they could be developed into profitable enterprises.
Canadian conceptions of wilderness underwent a similar transformation to Americans in the late nineteenth century. Romantic ideas of preserving nature for its own sake similarly emerged in response to industrialization and urbanization.
Like the United States, the first Canadian national parks were established during this period, Banff National Park (originally called Rocky Mountains Park) in 1885 and Glacier and Yoho National Parks in 1886.
Ideas of wilderness and conservation, however, still differed from those of the modern conservation movement. National parks were about preserving nature so the tourism industry could exploit it. Eliminating predators like wolves and bears to conserve deer and elk populations so sports hunters could hunt in parks and preventing forest fires to maintain beautiful scenery.
It was only in the 1960s and 1970s that the idea of national parks as nature reserves emerged. Sports hunting was discouraged, even banned. National parks became places to observe nature. Efforts to save endangered species became paramount.
Yet the idea of protecting wilderness at all costs, of banning hunting and controlling predators to maintain other animal populations and preventing any and all fires, has problems of its own.
Without wolves or sports hunters in national parks, there are no predators to hunt elk, so elk populations soar, and habitat for other animals destroyed. Efforts to stop forest fires in national parks destroy the “patchiness” of the forest and lead to bigger and more destructive fires.
Today, modern national park management involves human intervention to maintain the natural cycles of wilderness. Reintroducing animals like wolves into national parks, allowing hunters a reasonable number of hunting permits, starting controlled burns or allowing fires away from settlements to burn.
So perhaps it would be better to think of wilderness not as the absence of human activity, but as the presence of nature. Areas, like national parks, where humans and nature interact and coexist.
We often think that when we go to a national park we’re getting back to nature, spending time in the wilderness, and we are. But wilderness and nature have always been managed spaces, where human activity is everywhere, and it always has an impact - positive, negative, or otherwise.
Thanks for reading, if you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to see more and follow me on Twitter for updates on the newsletter.