A speech delivered at the 13th Northeastern Alpine Stewardship Gathering - Oct. 25, 2024, Bretton Woods, NH
This is a sticker on a Jeep in Escalante, Utah. It says what it means – that wilderness is a wasteland with no human value, a place you can't do anything but look at.
That’s the sentiment, at least, in this rural town that has seen in recent decades a sawmill that employed hundreds shut its doors and a proposed coal mine killed by the 1996 designation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. A community that has watched its families struggle to make ends meet and its children move away. It’s no wonder here that wilderness has a negative connotation.
Still, it made me think. What could I say to get such a person to understand that the worth of a place resides in more than just the extractive value of its resources? What arguments do we have today on behalf of wilderness?
The fact is that there is no designated wilderness on Grand Staircase, but the sticker’s not entirely wrong. Forty-seven percent of the Monument is Wilderness Study Area, or WSA, a temporary label for lands that have wilderness characteristics but that have not been officially designated as “capital W” wilderness. Think of it as wilderness purgatory. The Bureau of Land Management is legally mandated to monitor WSAs to protect their wilderness characteristics.
Last year, my organization received a grant to design and run a pilot program to conduct that monitoring. We created a smartphone app and trained a group of volunteers to document impairments to wilderness character while hiking or driving a series of routes across some of the most rugged, remote, and unforgiving backcountry on the planet.
In coming up with the protocols, though, we realized something. Most indicators of wilderness quality are intangible—they can't be measured. To monitor naturalness, for example, we instead had to look for degradations to naturalness – things like trash, graffiti, or invasive species. By the same token you don't look for untrammeled, either, you look for the trammels themselves – fences, dams, ATV tracks. You can't quantify solitude – you document noise, lights, and other disturbances to it. In practice, we learned, wilderness is defined by what it's not.
This line of thinking reminded me of apophatic theology – the idea that it’s impossible to say anything about what God is. We can only describe what He (or She or It) is not. For example, it's impossible for us to conceive of the infinite, so we say that a higher power, if it exists, is not finite. The word "ineffable", often used in these conversations, refers to an experience that cannot be captured in words.
Historically, in Europe, wilderness was the land that wasn’t fertile enough to convert to crops or pasture, the place no one wanted. It was thought of as a shadowy dwelling place of beasts and evil spirits, of chaos and temptation, the devil. More recently, misconceptions of the American frontier have shaped our idea of wilderness as “virgin” land untouched by humanity. The blank space on the map. Today, among some, wilderness is still considered a Trojan horse for federal overreach and intrusion into the private lives of citizens, to dictate what they can and can’t do on lands they take to be rightfully theirs.
Contrast this with another interpretation.
In the 1800s, writers and painters repurposed religious language and imagery to depict grand, tranquil scenes of human beings and nature coexisting peacefully. Rather than desolate and dangerous, wilderness was to them a paradise or cathedral, a sublime sanctuary where the spirit can achieve its greatest heights. Of course, even this view has its flaws. But the movement’s great insight was that in wilderness can be found a restorative sense of wonder, the power to propel us upward or rescue us from despair. If we’re lucky, even find a sense of meaning and purpose.
Question: How many of you in this room got into this work because you had a transformative experience in nature? For how many of you did that experience happen in the mountains of the Northeast? Look around.
Me too. I remember, in my early twenties, what it felt like to be totally lost—then found—in the Adirondacks: Learning to accept the pain and discomfort of rain and mud and black flies, what seemed like endless trudging through soupy mist until I emerged, unexpectedly, into a clear sky, a rocky island rising above a sea of clouds. I think of the trajectory it launched me on, to be a Summit Steward, then to conduct research here on Mount Washington.
“We need a significant level of mystery in the world around us. That is an essential attribute of wildness." - Guy and Laura Waterman, Wilderness Ethics
Laura Waterman has described being “held a willing captive, mesmerized, intoxicated” by the mountains, especially her beloved Franconia Ridge. When she and her husband Guy were the Ridge’s first adopters in the 1980s, the trail was already one of the most popular in the Northeast. Laura estimates they they’ve “probably touched every rock with our feet and hands. It felt like an extension of our backyard; it felt like home.”
This feeling informed Laura and Guy’s visionary writings, which helped launch an entire field of study—recreation ecology—and an international system of outdoor ethics we now call Leave No Trace. But in articulating this vision, the Watermans insisted that we not lose sight of the mysterious and unknowable aspect of our relationship to the outdoors. Wilderness, they wrote, is “something more than trees and rocks”.
This legacy lives on. At the Waterman Fund, our mission is to not only protect and conserve the alpine areas we all love, but to foster that spirit of wildness, the motivation for protecting them in the first place.
In art, negative space is necessary to any composition. It’s the downbeat, the background, the unused portion of the canvas, a pause… that provides context and contrast, depth and motion, breath, life. It’s the yin to the yang. The generative void. A complementary force that brings wholeness and unity.
Each year, the Waterman Fund essay contest challenges emerging young writers to articulate their own vision of wildness, and each year the entries surprise us. Samantha Sapp, this year’s runner-up, found self-acceptance and belonging through the example of a pitcher plant in a muggy Alabama bog. Our winner, Catherine Wessel, wrote of her research on Mt. Mansfield, where from Bill Howland, who conducted his own work there thirty years ago, she inherited not only a trove of data but a lifelong relationship with place. There have been stories of pandemic disease, of raising children amid the threat of climate change-induced wildfires, of huddling in a tiny apartment during a Washington DC thunderstorm while lightning splits the sky overhead.
These stories reiterate what so many of you in this room already know—that a brush with wildness has the power to change the course of our lives. Often, how we make sense of ourselves – the frame we place over our lives – changes from that point forward. This spiritual argument, I believe, is still the best one we have. Now, in a room full of scientists, I’ll admit I’m a bit hesitant to make this argument. But the unique beauty of this Gathering is that it’s not merely a scientific conference.
The next two days are dedicated to your work—and lives—in the mountains. We’ll hear the most recent scientific research on the origin and evolution of alpine tundra ecosystems. We’ll learn about the conservation of alpine snowbeds and rare, endemic plants. We’ll hear about the thankless, tedious, sometimes back-breaking labor required just to keep things from falling apart.
But we’ll also learn how supposedly isolated alpine ecosystems are actually not that isolated at all, how their future depends on the health and interconnectedness of forests and waters across the entire Northeast; We’ll learn how communities that have been marginalized by the outdoor industry should become a focal point to bring up a new generation of conservationists; We’ll discuss what it means, in the 21st century, when nowhere on Earth is untouched by climate change or microplastics or the will of human hands, for any place to be called “wild” in the first place.
Over the next two days, I encourage you to embrace this Gathering, this negative space. Talk with one another. Tell stories. Build a community that will sustain itself—and you—when we all get back to work. Like the inhale after a long exertion; Here, together, that is our purpose. That is our use.
Thanks for another good read.