What exactly is wilderness? What is wild? What is a native environment? What is a national park? The more I sit around and ponder these things (and I do indeed sit and ponder at length) the more I cant come up with any answers. I dont mean I dont know the answer I just literally am starting to believe there is no answer. Wilderness is just one of these bizarre holdover colonial notions. Wild lands is land fundamentally freed of the influence of mankind, or some such. Yet all of these lands, any lands, on any continent aside from antarctica, have had human influence for thousands of years before so called "white" men found them. Was yosemite in a "natural" state before the europeans got there? Was it indeed so "wild" as we might imagine. There is no negligible influence on an environment. It is deterministic chaos, never in a constant state. Even the observation disturbs relationships. If then, if humans, "natives", existed in all of these "wild" "pristine" places then how is it that these environments where really untouched by man? You follow me on this? Like, humans are everywhere and have been long before european expansion and so every ecology is influenced by mankind to some extent. And the "wild" places untouched by man dont even exist. Only the environments that had been less impacted by sparse populations of natives rather than the more profound effects of europeans.
Now, where does this put the national parks? We all know well and good you cant carve up an environment with roads or logging or mining and expect it to be unimpacted but even something so simple as aircraft flying overhead can impact environments. And as much as we might like to mitigate the effects of civilization (meaning "european" civilization, native civilization does not count as civilization in this queerly racist tract) we cannot but impact every environment as they are so interconnected. We might attempt to eliminate some type of grass or bug calling it "non native" but isnt this even more moralistic meddling on the part of mankind? At one point, say at the founding of this nation, the idea was that all "waste" land should be converted to productive land by the ax or the plough and made to serve the aims of mankind. Now however things are different we are more civilized and enlightened as to our own impacts on the environment. Now we have a notion that all land must remain "wild" or "native" or "pristine". As if it was untouched by man. By how do we accomplish this goal? Selective logging, controlled burns, controlled introduction of pests to pester our pests. Isnt this the same difference? Arnt we swinging the pendulum so far to the other side its back around where we started? Arnt we still introducing a bizarre and unnatural (lol) notion of morality and ethics to a more or less accidental (on purpose?) system, by which I mean nature.
This is all so murky. "Wild", "wilderness", is it just a figment of our imagination? Invented to gratify our own notions of independence from and control of it? All of these notions of ours are inconsequential to the reality of the thing itself. What the hell is a national park? A zoos writ large? A weekend retreat? Historical reenactment for landscape architects and environmentalists? To what end do we preserve the presence of wolves in yosemite? Is this just another notion of "productive" land? Isnt that equally tenuous? How far do we "rehabilitate" a native environment and at what cost? Centuries ago ireland was covered with oaks but after centuries of logging (THANKS ENGLISH!) it was deforested. Now however its the emerald isle, celebrated for its beauty. Would it really be somehow moral or ethical to turn it back into a oak woodland? And why? No environment is static. No environment is right or wrong. Why arbitrarily try to freeze everything at 1492 and maintain it in that state? Nature has no concern for our petty moral concerns. She has sat idly by and let 99% of all of the species to ever exist go extinct (or something). Is mankinds similar effect of mass extinction even unnatural? Or abnormal? Or immoral? Stop laughing im not making a joke im being serious. Think of the horrible "imbalance" necessary to trap all those dead creatures at the bottom of the ocean and turn them into oil. Now we swing it back. How can a species be entitled to anything? How can nature "break down" rather than simply continue to change inexorably? How can mankind "disobey" natural laws (i.e. physics)? Why do these notions get so much traction when, it would seem to me, they are fraught with nonsense through and through.
Isnt this really all about aesthetics? About mythology? About our own sense of moral obligation as care takers of all around us? Its ok that ireland was deforested centuries ago because today it looks nice. Wolves in yosemite are part of the american mythology, like cowboys and farmers and rebels(naturalists?) without causes. Its like in europe where they pay farmers to farm unprofitable land so they can charge tourists to come and look at it and experience the "authentic" italy or whatever. Isnt the "untamed" west the same in effect? Isnt this a manicured landscape, ornamental horticulture? Massive gardens on century long time scales. We have the boxwood hedges and the hybridized cloned orange orchards that symbolize mans domination and separation from nature (ostensibly). And then we have the managed wild lands, carefully burned and grazed and inoculated from foreign onslaught. At least in so much as it is possible. Trying to eliminate non native species of course is directly combating nature in the name of preserving nature. I think it is instructive to think of the national park not as a wilderness but as a garden. It is not untouched by the blight of man, it is pristine, but pristine in a whole different way than you first imagine. It is pristine in the same way a cut diamond is pristine. Its not a "natural" place, it is very specifically unnatural in the sense that man has pruned unwanted flora and fauna, that man has changed the flow of the rivers and the weather to suit his notion of "wilderness". If we approach wilderness in this way it is not in the slightest bit wild, it is at best a manicured landscape and at worst a theme park. Just another 3-D "thrill ride" with surround sound but no comfortable seats. Mere aesthetic. This then leads me to a conclusion I do not even like or endorse. That we do not need to be more in touch with nature. We do not need to leave the cities or walk in the forests. We need to become LESS connected with nature. Less connected with "wild" spaces. We dont need to reconnect, we need to disconnect. It has been our connection all a long that has blighted nature with clear cutting and roads and whatever else (if we for a moment will believe in a notion such as "blight"). We cant control what goes on in "there". Just wall the place up and never set foot in it again. Ignore it. Let whatever lives, native or otherwise, live, and whatever dies, die. Let it actually become wild again.
