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glowing-fish posted:I am not trying to be pedantic about this, but it is kind of the point of the post. Lol glowing-fish I don't believe you are capable of ever resisting an opportunity to be pedantic.  In your opening post you started by defining wilderness as "“an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” You also expanded on this definition with various other arbitrary or relative criteria, like no "visible" human technology (ecologically, only relevant to a few Prairie species so-far-as I know), at least two miles from a road (why two and not three miles I wonder? Couldn't we use metric measures instead of imperial?), and a "more or less" complete ecosystem. Strictly speaking speaking following your opening definition wilderness hardly exists anywhere on earth, certainly not the Canadian north and probably only in Antarctica and maybe some tropical peat forests. Humans have altered almost all landscapes and animal communities on earth dramatically, it has all been trammeled. So of course we are instead speaking broadly, the more-or-less untrammeled wilderness, approximately intact, with relatively few signs of human presence. Into this space we can introduce many common and productive manifestations of wilderness. Trendy today is Urban Wilderness, perhaps exemplified in its modern form by the New York High Line Park. There has been a number of studies of the diverse plant communities in the abandoned lot, and the wild diversity of the bilgewater hitchhikers that proliferate in the coastal waters of the modern freight harbor. These communties are not natural in the traditional sense, but in some ways they are more wild than the tightly regulated macrofauna of a place like Yellowstone, where every wolf and bison is carefully tallied and the surplus culled, and every aspect of the system is carefully monitored and managed. When we talk about a concept like wilderness it is not analogous to something like chemistry where we can empirically test for the presence or absence of an element in a repeatable experiment. There's no acid test for wilderness. Rather wilderness is a mental model which we can apply to make sense of real circumstances. In the parlance of Sociology we can call wilderness an Imaginary. From wikipedia an imaginary is defined as those "institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society through which people imagine their social whole." The definition you have used has a very clear historical origin rooted in Romantic philosophical notions of the Sublime and particularly influenced by the work of American Preservationists like John Muir. Pointing out that Wilderness is a social construct is important when addressing the differences in the ways other people make sense of the concept of wilderness. I recently attended a lecture on the differences in Environmental Imaginaries between the American West, which you exemplify, and in the Southeast, which is comparatively disinterested in preservation and much more centered around the use-value of the landscape. Imaginaries shape our values and priorities, and successful conservation often involves navigating the idiosyncratic needs and values of local communities. Wilderness is a mental model with a form that varies depending on circumstance and necessity. it's just as foolish and pointless to claim exclusive supremacy for your own peculiarly Western-American Imaginary, as it is to claim rural areas have to be x-distance from a city, or mountains have to be higher than x meters. Drawing these kinds of distinctions depend on are own subjectivities. As far as answering the question in the OP, I think we should all try and keep a little wilderness in our backyard if we can manage. Plant some wildflowers and let them grow themselves, enjoy the butterflies and other pollinators. I also try and remember though that the Imaginary wilderness is a tool through which I can make sense of the world and ascribe value to my actions, and that there are other imaginaries no less useful for accomplishing many of the same ends. It is a useful tool, but ultimately not prerequisite, and many people today go without just fine.
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Jun 14, 2017 05:59
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We can draw our arbitrary lines wherever we want, the trick is making them useful. That's the important take away. By equating the emergent wild ecosystems of the modern urbanity with low-human disturbance systems we can illustrate the interconnectedness and complexity of natural systems in a way that's tangible, and inculcate conservationist or preservationist values. Unfortunately most people, including most pre-modern people, live very far away from any wilderness and will probably never interact with it. In fact if they did so it would probably stop being wilderness. And I don't think things are really as clear cut as you imply. Yes there's a big difference between ecological systems in highly disturbed urban areas and the most remote least populous regions, but what about the places with a few patches of climax forest, a few invasives, some of the pre-modern megafauna, and a few distant human structures (or maybe just a few tin cans left by cowboys)? If you are too exclusionary in your model definitions you'll only lead to the this circumstance described by Fitzy Fitz all the sooner: Fitzy Fitz posted:The classic definition of wilderness will need to be discarded soon. Management of all land is increasingly important because natural processes cannot adequately cope with climate change and international spread of introduced species. There's really no going back at this point. I think exhibits a more European approach to wilderness than we usually see in America, where much tighter control of the landscape and natural processes is the norm.
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Jun 14, 2017 06:53
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Fog Tripper posted:In the case of the wolves it may be an attempt to fix what circle of life ecosystem we've disrupted. The "wilderness" was already changed by human interaction. It's complicated. For example one of the big threats to biodiversity in Ireland is actually reforestation. There's several species of rare bog adapted plants that only occur in sheep pastures. With the decline of the wool industry many of those pastures have been abandoned, and the land is reverting back to a natural or semi-natural forested state for the first time in 2000 years. In this case a return to wilderness will actually mean a loss of biodiversity. In cases like this there's no "right "response. But you have to consider the changes we've already made and preserving artificial habitats may sometimes be the best response.
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Aug 4, 2017 01:23
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glowing-fish posted:Just from a biological point of view, it doesn't seem to be a good idea. From my wide research on the matter (reading a wikipedia article), it seems that wolves are not native to the island and it is too small to contain a stable population of an apex predator. Someone who knows more about this might be able to comment better, but it seems that apex predators have a non-linear relationship to population size. You might be able to sustain a pack of 40 wolves on an island twice the size of Isle Royale, but the genetic bottleneck gets too small on Isle Royale. One of the main reasons for preserving wilderness is that solid chunks of undisturbed habitat seem to be necessary as a core for some animals to breed and maintain their populations. Even when they can go and live in semi-wilderness areas, they need wilderness to replenish their populations. The small population isn't a big deal if you can maintain connectivity, if ice bridges are no longer reliable it can just be done manually. One of the big issues in conservation is that we are basically doing triage. We can't save all species everywhere, so where do we allocate our resources? In the United States endemic and threatened species are concentrated in the southeast, but most conservation funding is spent in the West in large wilderness areas that mostly protect widely distributed and common species, excepting a few charismatic macrovertebrates. It's a conflict of priorities, one large wilderness area in Montana might get you a sustainable grey wolf population, or for the same expenditure you could get four small wildlife preserves in the Ozarks that could save a dozen or more species of crayfish, freshwater mussel, and mountain orchid. Solid chunks of habitat are nice, but if you could break them into long sinuous corridors crossing multiple ecoregions they might be even more useful for wildlife. Even if they no longer meet your strict definition of wilderness.
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Aug 4, 2017 05:03
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khwarezm posted:This might be a bit tangential, but I've read before that most of the national parks and other protected areas in the United States are in the North West-ish (i.e. Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Glacier Ntl. parks, as well as huge parts of Alaska), which kind of makes sense from a pragmatic point of view since states like Wyoming and Montana have a much shorter history of intensive settlement and farming, still have very small populations that reduces pressure on the land, and of course the landscapes are breathtaking compared to most of the rest of the country (and these parks were as much set up to preserve such vistas as well as the wildlife). However I've heard from a lot of environmentalists and biologists that if the aim of national parks should be to protect unique biodiversity then the current distribution of parks in America is extremely lopsided, the areas that have the massive parks aren't terribly bio-diverse and if that's a primary concern then the its actually mostly in the southeast of the country, what I guess might be called the 'Deep South', that large areas should be set aside, but as luck would have it the South is one of the least protected parts of the country. Your impression is correct, however as other posters have pointed out there are more priorities to consider here than just biodiversity. There is a real strain of thought that elevates wilderness to a kind of mystical place where the romantic explorer can travel in the footsteps of John Muir to experience the sublime. This kind of imaginary has value, but it is difficult to implement in areas that are already heavily developed. In the southeast there's not much wilderness, however there is still a lot of nature. It's just that that that nature is valued primarily as a productive resource rather than for mystical reasons. Therefore in order to preserve biodiversity the focus is on finding ways to keep ecosystems intact while still keeping them productive. It is a tricky balancing act but there have been successes. For example in the last 20 years the army corp has worked hard to increase in the area of seasonal wetlands in the Mississippi floodplain, which is good for all species. The reason? improved flood control and game bird habitat.
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Aug 5, 2017 16:58
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