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?

Aldo Leopold, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

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.12345

Sources

  1. I know of only one such place: northeastern Europe. 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 carried away.
    I THE STORY OF A CYCLE, pp. 289–290
  2. 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.
    A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There, pp. 233–236
  3. 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.
    Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation, pp. 369–370
  4. Possibly the Society can help retard this tendency toward demolition of existing wilderness areas, as well as push the establishment of new ones. There is particular need for a Society now because of the pressure of public spending for work relief. Wilderness remnants are tempting fodder for those administrators who possess an infinite labor supply but a very finite ability to picture the real needs of his country.
    Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation, pp. 486–489
  5. The distinctive attributes of American culture grew out of the interaction of Europeans and the wild North American landscape, he explains. To perpetuate these valued qualities in future Americans we must preserve the frontier environment in which they were forged.
    The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays, pp. 26–27

Where the argument is made

  • '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

How the argument was received

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.