{"agent_id":"leopold","agent_name":"Aldo Leopold","slug":"wilderness-preservation","label":"Wilderness preservation: is the wilderness ideal a defensible recovery of land's intrinsic value or, as Cronon argued, a cultural construct of urban Americans that obscures the human history of any landscape?","topic":"Wilderness preservation","question":"Is the wilderness ideal a defensible recovery of land's intrinsic value or, as Cronon argued, a cultural construct of urban Americans that obscures the human history of any landscape?","position":"Wilderness — the land that the conqueror has not yet conquered, the *blank space on the map* that still admits the possibility of relations of land use that the industrial pattern has foreclosed — is a cultural and ecological resource the loss of which would be catastrophic. Wilderness is not the *opposite* of human use; it is a *form of land use* (the 1925 essay's title), the form in which the land's own ecological order organizes itself without industrial management, and in which the human can come as a citizen rather than as a conqueror. The Wilderness Society co-founding (1935) was the institutional response to the recognition that without active preservation the industrial-extractive conquest would eliminate every remaining example. Wilderness is also a *land laboratory* — a place where the biotic community can be studied in relations the managed landscape no longer allows.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Wilderness — the land that the conqueror has not yet conquered, the *blank space on the map* that still admits the possibility of relations of land use that the industrial pattern has foreclosed — is a cultural and ecological resource the loss of which would be catastrophic.","n":[]},{"t":"Wilderness is not the *opposite* of human use; it is a *form of land use* (the 1925 essay's title), the form in which the land's own ecological order organizes itself without industrial management, and in which the human can come as a citizen rather than as a conqueror.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The Wilderness Society co-founding (1935) was the institutional response to the recognition that without active preservation the industrial-extractive conquest would eliminate every remaining example.","n":[]},{"t":"Wilderness is also a *land laboratory* — a place where the biotic community can be studied in relations the managed landscape no longer allows.","n":[1,2,3,4,5]}]],"texts":"'Wilderness' (in A Sand County Almanac Part III 'The Upshot') and 'Wilderness as a Form of Land Use' (1925, in River of the Mother of God) — the founding texts of the American wilderness preservation movement; the Wilderness Society co-founding correspondence and the 1935 manifesto; 'Why the Wilderness Society?' (1935, in River of the Mother of God); 'Wilderness as a Land Laboratory' on the scientific case for wilderness; the early Gila Wilderness designation work in the Southwest. Reception: Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (Yale, 1967, fifth edition 2014) — the canonical history; Bob Marshall, Howard Zahniser and the wilderness-movement institutional history; William Cronon, 'The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature' (in Uncommon Ground, 1995) — the most influential historical-cultural critique; Michael Pollan, Second Nature (1991) on the garden-not-wilderness move; J. Baird Callicott's reply to Cronon in 'The Wilderness Idea Revisited' (1991) and 'Should Wilderness Areas Become Biodiversity Reserves?' (1996); Wendell Berry's agrarian counter-tradition.","works":["'Wilderness' (in A Sand County Almanac Part III 'The Upshot') and 'Wilderness as a Form of Land Use' (1925, in River of the Mother of God) — the founding texts of the American wilderness preservation movement","the Wilderness Society co-founding correspondence and the 1935 manifesto","'Why the Wilderness Society?' (1935, in River of the Mother of God)","'Wilderness as a Land Laboratory' on the scientific case for wilderness","the early Gila Wilderness designation work in the Southwest"],"reception":"Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (Yale, 1967, fifth edition 2014) — the canonical history; Bob Marshall, Howard Zahniser and the wilderness-movement institutional history; William Cronon, 'The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature' (in Uncommon Ground, 1995) — the most influential historical-cultural critique; Michael Pollan, Second Nature (1991) on the garden-not-wilderness move; J. Baird Callicott's reply to Cronon in 'The Wilderness Idea Revisited' (1991) and 'Should Wilderness Areas Become Biodiversity Reserves?' (1996); Wendell Berry's agrarian counter-tradition.","status":"The wilderness movement Leopold helped found shaped twentieth-century American conservation policy through the 1964 Wilderness Act and the National Wilderness Preservation System. Roderick Nash's *Wilderness and the American Mind* (1967, 5th ed. 2014) is the canonical history. William Cronon's 'The Trouble with Wilderness' (in *Uncommon Ground*, 1995) mounted the most influential historical-cultural critique: that the wilderness ideal is a cultural construct of urban Americans that obscures the indigenous and pre-industrial human history of any landscape and reproduces a nature/culture dichotomy the land ethic itself rejects. J. Baird Callicott's reply ('The Wilderness Idea Revisited,' 1991) and 'Should Wilderness Areas Become Biodiversity Reserves?' (1996) defends the preservation project on biodiversity grounds while conceding parts of Cronon's historical- cultural critique. The debate has shaped contemporary conservation policy and Anthropocene-era environmental philosophy.","era":"1887-1948","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"RILEY GAME COOPERATIVE RILEY, WISCONSIN","page":"pp. 306–307","canonical":"","quote":"It is not likely that we shall fail to study it. The other and most perfect norm is wilderness. Paleontology offers abundant evidence that wilderness maintained itself for immensely long periods; that its component species were rarely lost, neither did they get out of hand; that weather and water built soil as fast or faster than it was Wilderness as a Land Laboratory 289 carried away.","label":"RILEY GAME COOPERATIVE RILEY, WISCONSIN, pp. 306–307"},{"n":2,"work":"The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays","page":"pp. 151–152","canonical":"","quote":"My purpose is to challenge the validity of such an assumption and to show how it is inconsistent with certain cultural ideas which we regard as most distinctly American. Our system of land use is full of phenomena which are sound as tendencies but become unsound as ultimates. It is sound for a city to grow but unsound for it to cover its entire site with buildings.","label":"The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays, pp. 151–152"},{"n":3,"work":"A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There","page":"pp. 233–236","canonical":"","quote":"It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking. DEFENDERS OF WILDERNESS Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. Invasions can be arrested or modified in a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, or for science, or for wildlife, but the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.","label":"A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There, pp. 233–236"},{"n":4,"work":"RILEY GAME COOPERATIVE RILEY, WISCONSIN","page":"pp. 304–305","canonical":"","quote":"The disruptive movements which now threaten the continuity of human culture are born not on the land where the take originates, but in the factories and offices where it is processed and distributed, and in the capitols where the rules of division are written. If courses like this one can decrease our mental distance from fields and woods, they are worth taking, and worth giving.","label":"RILEY GAME COOPERATIVE RILEY, WISCONSIN, pp. 304–305"},{"n":5,"work":"Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation","page":"pp. 369–370","canonical":"","quote":"My purpose is to challenge the validity of such an assumption and to show how it is inconsistent with certain cultural ideas which we regard as most distinctly American. Our system of land use is full of phenomena which are sound as tendencies but become unsound as ultimates. It is sound for a city to grow but unsound for it to cover its entire site with buildings.","label":"Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation, pp. 369–370"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-land-ethic-and-the-extension-of-moral-consideration-to-t","label":"The land ethic and the extension of moral consideration to the biotic community: is the inclusion of soils, waters, plants, and animals in the moral community a defensible extension of the ethical tradition or a category mistake?"},{"slug":"thinking-like-a-mountain","label":"Thinking like a mountain: is the predator-preservation argument an empirical-ecological insight that no longer needs philosophical defense, or does it still carry the larger ethical claim about the collapse of the conqueror perspective?"},{"slug":"holism-vs-individualism-in-environmental-ethics","label":"Holism vs. individualism in environmental ethics: is the land ethic's primacy of the biotic community over individual organisms a Humean-Darwinian extension of moral sentiment, or the 'environmental fascism' Tom Regan charged?"},{"slug":"game-management-as-scientific-discipline","label":"Game management as scientific discipline: is the integration of hunting and population control into the land ethic a defensible synthesis of science and ethics, or does it license practices the ethic itself should refuse?"},{"slug":"the-aesthetic-and-ecological-conscience-dimension","label":"The aesthetic and ecological-conscience dimension: is the integration of aesthetic perception, ecological understanding, and ethical conscience a defensible synthesis or three projects awkwardly stapled together?"}]}