We are living now in the most critical moment in the three-and-a-half-billion-year history of life on Earth. (1) For this unimaginably long time, life has been developing, expanding, blossoming, and diversified, filling every available niche with different manifestations of itself, intertwined in complex, globe-girdling relationships. (2) But today this diversity of perhaps 30 million species face radical and unprecedented change. (3) Never before - not even during the mass extinctions of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous era, 65 million years ago - there has been such a high rate of extinction as we are now witnessing, such a drastic reduction in the planet's biological diversity.
(4) Over the last three or four hundred years, human civilization declared war on large mammals, leading some respected ecologists to assert that the only large mammals living twenty years from now will be those we humans choose to allow to live. (5) Other prominent biologists, looked aghast on the wholesale devastation of tropical rain forests and temperate-zone old-growth forests, rapidly accelerating desertification, rapacious commercial fishing, and wasting of high-profile large mammals like whales, elephants, and tigers ("charismatic megafauna") owing to habitat destruction and poaching, say Earth could lose one-quarter to one-third of all species within forty years.
(6) Not only is this blitzkrieg against the natural world destroying ecosystems and their associated species, but our activities are now beginning to have fundamental, systematic effects upon the entire life-support apparatus of the planet: upsetting the world's climate; poisoning the oceans; destroying the atmospheric ozone layer what protects us from excessive ultraviolet radiation; changing the C02 ratio in the atmosphere and causing the "greenhouse effect"; and spreading acid rain, radioactive fallout, pesticides, and industrial contamination throughout the biosphere. (7) Indeed, Professor Michael Soule, founder of the Society for Conservation Biology, recently warned that vertebrate evolution should be at an end due to the activities of industrial humans.
Clearly, in such a time of crisis, the conservation battle is not one of merely protect outdoor recreation opportunities, or a matter of aesthetics, or "wise management and use" of natural resources. It is a battle for life itself, for the continued flow of evolution. (9) We - this generation of humans - are at our most important juncture as we came out of the trees six million years ago. (10) It is our decision, ours today, whether Earth continues to be a marvelously living, diverse oasis in the blackness of space, or whether the "charismatic megafauna" of the future consisted of Norway Rats and cockroaches.
How have we arrived at this state, at this threshold of biotic terror? Is it because we have forgotten our "place in nature," as the Native American activist Russell Means says?
(11) If there will be one thing upon which the nation states of the world today can agree, one thing at which the United States and the Soviet Union, Israel and Iran, South Africa and Angola, Britain and Argentina, China and India, Japan and Malaysia nod in unison, it is that human beings are the measure of all value. As Gifford Pinchot, founder of the United States Forest Service, said, there are only two things on Earth: human beings and natural resources. (12) Humanism is the philosophy that run the business engines of the modern world.
(13) The picture that most humans have of the natural world is that of a smorgasbord table, continually replenished by a magic kitchen hide somewhere in the background. (14) While most people perceive that there are gross and immoral inequities in the sizes of the plates handed out and in the number of times some are allowed to belly up to the bar. Few of us question whether the items arrayed are there for their sole use, nor do they imagine that the table will ever become empty.
There is another way to think about man' s relationship to the natural world, an insight pioneered by the nineteenth-century conservationist and mountaineer John Muir and later by the science of ecology. (15) This is the idea that all things are connected, interrelated, that human beings are merely one of the millions of species that have shaped by the process of evolution for three and a half billion years. (16) According to this view, all living beings have same right to be here. This is how I see the world.
With that understanding, we can answer the question, “Why wilderness?”
(17) Is it because wilderness make pretty picture postcards? Because it protects watersheds for downstream use by agriculture, industry and homes? Because it's a good place to clean the cobwebs out of our heads after a long week in the auto factory or over the video display terminal? Because it preserves resource-extraction opportunities for the future generations of humans? Because some unknown plant living in the wilds may hold a cure for cancer?
No--the answer is, because wilderness is. Because it is the real world, the flow of life, the process of evolution, the repository of that three and a half billion years of shared travel.
(18) A Grizzly Bear snuffling along Pelican Creek in Yellowstone National Park with her two cubs has just as much right to life as any human has, and is far important ecologically. All things have intrinsic value, inherent worth. Their value is not determined by what they will ring up on the cash register of the gross national product, or by whether or not they are good. They are good because they exist.
Even more important than the individual wild creature is the wild community - the wilderness, the stream of life unimpeded by human manipulation.
We, as human beings, as members of industrial civilization, have no divine mandate to pave, conquer, control, develop, or use every square inch of this planet. As Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, said, we have a right to be here, yes, but not everywhere, all at once.
(19) The preservation of wilderness is not simply a question of balancing competing special-interest groups, arriving at a proper mix of uses on our public lands, and resolving conflicts of different outdoor recreation preferences. It is an ethical and moral matter. A religious mandate. Human beings have stepped beyond the bounds; we are destroying the very process of life.
(20) The forest ranger and wilderness proponent Aldo Leopold perhaps stated this ethic best: A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community, it is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Source: Weil, N. J. & Cepko, R. (2008). Thinking Beyond the Content: Critical Reading for Academic Success(p5-7). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
(4) Over the last three or four hundred years, human civilization declared war on large mammals, leading some respected ecologists to assert that the only large mammals living twenty years from now will be those we humans choose to allow to live. (5) Other prominent biologists, looked aghast on the wholesale devastation of tropical rain forests and temperate-zone old-growth forests, rapidly accelerating desertification, rapacious commercial fishing, and wasting of high-profile large mammals like whales, elephants, and tigers ("charismatic megafauna") owing to habitat destruction and poaching, say Earth could lose one-quarter to one-third of all species within forty years.
(6) Not only is this blitzkrieg against the natural world destroying ecosystems and their associated species, but our activities are now beginning to have fundamental, systematic effects upon the entire life-support apparatus of the planet: upsetting the world's climate; poisoning the oceans; destroying the atmospheric ozone layer what protects us from excessive ultraviolet radiation; changing the C02 ratio in the atmosphere and causing the "greenhouse effect"; and spreading acid rain, radioactive fallout, pesticides, and industrial contamination throughout the biosphere. (7) Indeed, Professor Michael Soule, founder of the Society for Conservation Biology, recently warned that vertebrate evolution should be at an end due to the activities of industrial humans.
Clearly, in such a time of crisis, the conservation battle is not one of merely protect outdoor recreation opportunities, or a matter of aesthetics, or "wise management and use" of natural resources. It is a battle for life itself, for the continued flow of evolution. (9) We - this generation of humans - are at our most important juncture as we came out of the trees six million years ago. (10) It is our decision, ours today, whether Earth continues to be a marvelously living, diverse oasis in the blackness of space, or whether the "charismatic megafauna" of the future consisted of Norway Rats and cockroaches.
How have we arrived at this state, at this threshold of biotic terror? Is it because we have forgotten our "place in nature," as the Native American activist Russell Means says?
(11) If there will be one thing upon which the nation states of the world today can agree, one thing at which the United States and the Soviet Union, Israel and Iran, South Africa and Angola, Britain and Argentina, China and India, Japan and Malaysia nod in unison, it is that human beings are the measure of all value. As Gifford Pinchot, founder of the United States Forest Service, said, there are only two things on Earth: human beings and natural resources. (12) Humanism is the philosophy that run the business engines of the modern world.
(13) The picture that most humans have of the natural world is that of a smorgasbord table, continually replenished by a magic kitchen hide somewhere in the background. (14) While most people perceive that there are gross and immoral inequities in the sizes of the plates handed out and in the number of times some are allowed to belly up to the bar. Few of us question whether the items arrayed are there for their sole use, nor do they imagine that the table will ever become empty.
There is another way to think about man' s relationship to the natural world, an insight pioneered by the nineteenth-century conservationist and mountaineer John Muir and later by the science of ecology. (15) This is the idea that all things are connected, interrelated, that human beings are merely one of the millions of species that have shaped by the process of evolution for three and a half billion years. (16) According to this view, all living beings have same right to be here. This is how I see the world.
With that understanding, we can answer the question, “Why wilderness?”
(17) Is it because wilderness make pretty picture postcards? Because it protects watersheds for downstream use by agriculture, industry and homes? Because it's a good place to clean the cobwebs out of our heads after a long week in the auto factory or over the video display terminal? Because it preserves resource-extraction opportunities for the future generations of humans? Because some unknown plant living in the wilds may hold a cure for cancer?
No--the answer is, because wilderness is. Because it is the real world, the flow of life, the process of evolution, the repository of that three and a half billion years of shared travel.
(18) A Grizzly Bear snuffling along Pelican Creek in Yellowstone National Park with her two cubs has just as much right to life as any human has, and is far important ecologically. All things have intrinsic value, inherent worth. Their value is not determined by what they will ring up on the cash register of the gross national product, or by whether or not they are good. They are good because they exist.
Even more important than the individual wild creature is the wild community - the wilderness, the stream of life unimpeded by human manipulation.
We, as human beings, as members of industrial civilization, have no divine mandate to pave, conquer, control, develop, or use every square inch of this planet. As Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, said, we have a right to be here, yes, but not everywhere, all at once.
(19) The preservation of wilderness is not simply a question of balancing competing special-interest groups, arriving at a proper mix of uses on our public lands, and resolving conflicts of different outdoor recreation preferences. It is an ethical and moral matter. A religious mandate. Human beings have stepped beyond the bounds; we are destroying the very process of life.
(20) The forest ranger and wilderness proponent Aldo Leopold perhaps stated this ethic best: A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community, it is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Source: Weil, N. J. & Cepko, R. (2008). Thinking Beyond the Content: Critical Reading for Academic Success(p5-7). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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