Howard Zahniser grew up in Tionesta, the county seat of Forest County, PA—so named for the Allegheny National Forest it sits in, near the largest remnant of the former old-growth forest that once flourished there. Zahniser was a prominent conservationist and advocate for wilderness, and one of the principal authors of the Wilderness Act. On 3 September 1964, Presdient Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law. Today, it protects over 106 million acres. The Friends of Allegheny Wilderness have offered a middle ground between locals and the Allegheny Defense Project’s zero-cut policy, asking simply to protect more of the Allegheny Forest under wilderness designation. While 18% of the National Forest system is designated wilderness, and even in eastern forests the average is 11%, in the Allegheny where Zahniser grew up, less than 2% is protected by the law he wrote. The Friends of Allegheny Wilderness aim to change that, and protect more of the forest under the designation. It’s a noble goal, and one they pursue with far more tact than their former compatriots in the ADP, but they still suffer from a major problem: the idea of “wilderness” itself.

Roderick Nash’s classic Wilderness and the American Mind traces the history of our conception of wilderness from its Biblical roots. In the Bible, the “wilderness” was a place of great evil—a wasteland cursed by G-d, inhabited by demons and devils. When Christ goes into the wilderness, he is tempted by Satan. At its best, the wilderness is a purgatory where one might meet G-d, but only once the trials of the wilderness have burned away one’s sins. When the Israelites sin, they are sent to wander the wilderness for 40 years before they may enter the Promised Land. It was this view that dominated the medieval view of wilderness: the place where hermits and monks could burn away their sins, and find communion with G-d through suffering. Folklore and legend built on this. In Beowulf, Grendel comes out of the wilderness, and is very much a manifestation of it.¹ Pan, the trickster god whose name is the root of our word for “panic,” was similarly a monster of the wilderness.^{2, 3} The Age of Exuberance was a turning point in this history: while in the New World the “wilderness” remained an obstacle to be subdued, in Europe, limitlessness led to the begininnings of Romanticism.

The greatest impact on American thought and attitudes toward wilderness were from European influences. It is clear that European views were developed, at least in part, by religious perspectives, folkloric legends and fears created by the encounters with the unknown. But at the time that the colonists settled in the New World, Europeans, who no longer had any real wilderness left, romanticized wilderness. They were not in battle with it—Europe had long ago been tamed and cultivated. It was from this vantage point that wilderness held a mystique. Perhaps there was a Paradise yet to be discovered.

From the perspective of the colonists, however, the New World and the wilderness thereof was a desolate, difficult battleground. Diaries from colonists in the early days repeatedly spoke of their struggles against the wilderness in militaristic terms. The battle was real—survival was the primary objective in the face of many obstacles presented by the wilderness condition. The creation of civilization was a formidable task. As such, the wilderness was a place to be conquered, tamed and cultivated.

During the colonial days, the wilderness was a metaphor for the savagery within every man. Wilderness lacked societal pressures to check the innate wildness within man. And without rules imposed by society man had license to behave like a savage. The wilderness provided an opportunity for temptation.⁴

William Cronon’s important 1995 essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” makes many important points about the dualism in our notion of “wilderness” (though his identification of humanity with agriculture leads him to a strong, but historically bizarre, tangent against primitivism). Of course, Romanticism did eventually cross the Atlantic, and authors like James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and William Wordsworth created the American notion of “wilderness.” Originally appealing to a “sublime” experience in “Nature” that was closely akin to terror, “wilderness” became married as well to the frontier, and to the myth of the United States’ “national character.” The result, ultimately, was the domestication of wilderness.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, the terrible awe that Wordsworth and Thoreau regarded as the appropriately pious stance to adopt in the presence of their mountaintop God was giving way to a much more comfortable, almost sentimental demeanor. As more and more tourists sought out the wilderness as a spectacle to be looked at and enjoyed for its great beauty, the sublime in effect became domesticated. The wilderness was still sacred, but the religious sentiments it evoked were more those of a pleasant parish church than those of a grand cathedral or a harsh desert retreat. The writer who best captures this late romantic sense of a domesticated sublime is undoubtedly John Muir, whose descriptions of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada reflect none of the anxiety or terror one finds in earlier writers.⁵

The Romantics did not find G-d in just any natural landscape, though. Some areas were more “sacred,” and more “wild,” than others—betraying the Romantics’ concern not with ecological viability, but with far more shallow concerns of aesthetics.

In the theories of Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, William Gilpin, and others, sublime landscapes were those rare places on earth where one had more chance than elsewhere to glimpse the face of God. Romantics had a clear notion of where one could be most sure of having this experience. Although God might, of course, choose to show Himself anywhere, He would most often be found in those vast, powerful landscapes where one could not help feeling insignificant and being reminded of one’s own mortality. Where were these sublime places? The eighteenth century catalog of their locations feels very familiar, for we still see and value landscapes as it taught us to do. God was on the mountaintop, in the chasm, in the waterfall, in the thundercloud, in the rainbow, in the sunset. One has only to think of the sites that Americans chose for their first national parks—Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Rainier, Zion—to realize that virtually all of them fit one or more of these categories. Less sublime landscapes simply did not appear worthy of such protection; not until the 1940s, for instance, would the first swamp be honored, in Everglades National Park, and to this day there is no national park in the grasslands.⁶

More to the point, the dualism of “wilderness” played to the fantasies of privileged urban elites, a notion that promulgated patriarchal sexism, and led to the dispossession of Native peoples.

The mythic frontier individualist was almost always masculine in gender: here, in the wilderness, a man could be a real man, the rugged individual he was meant to be before civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity. Wister’s contemptuous remarks about Wall Street and Newport suggest what he and many others of his generation believed—that the comforts and seductions of civilized life were especially insidious for men, who all too easily became emasculated by the feminizing tendencies of civilization. More often than not, men who felt this way came, like Wister and Roosevelt, from elite class backgrounds. The curious result was that frontier nostalgia became an important vehicle for expressing a peculiarly bourgeois form of antimodernism. The very men who most benefited from urban-industrial capitalism were among those who believed they must escape its debilitating effects. If the frontier was passing, then men who had the means to do so should preserve for themselves some remnant of its wild landscape so that they might enjoy the regeneration and renewal that came from sleeping under the stars, participating in blood sports, and living off the land. The frontier might be gone, but the frontier experience could still be had if only wilderness were preserved.

Thus the decades following the Civil War saw more and more of the nation’s wealthiest citizens seeking out wilderness for themselves. The elite passion for wild land took many forms: enormous estates in the Adirondacks and elsewhere (disingenuously called “camps� despite their many servants and amenities), cattle ranches for would-be rough riders on the Great Plains, guided big-game hunting trips in the Rockies, and luxurious resort hotels wherever railroads pushed their way into sublime landscapes. Wilderness suddenly emerged as the landscape of choice for elite tourists, who brought with them strikingly urban ideas of the countryside through which they traveled. For them, wild land was not a site for productive labor and not a permanent home; rather, it was a place of recreation. One went to the wilderness not as a producer but as a consumer, hiring guides and other backcountry residents who could serve as romantic surrogates for the rough riders and hunters of the frontier if one was willing to overlook their new status as employees and servants of the rich. In just this way, wilderness came to embody the national frontier myth, standing for the wild freedom of America’s past and seeming to represent a highly attractive natural alternative to the ugly artificiality of modern civilization. The irony, of course, was that in the process wilderness came to reflect the very civilization its devotees sought to escape. Ever since the nineteenth century, celebrating wilderness has been an activity mainly for well-to-do city folks. Country people generally know far too much about working the land to regard unworked land as their ideal. In contrast, elite urban tourists and wealthy sportsmen projected their leisure-time frontier fantasies onto the American landscape and so created wilderness in their own image.

There were other ironies as well, The movement to set aside national parks and wilderness areas followed hard on the heels of the final Indian wars, in which the prior human inhabitants of these areas were rounded up and moved onto reservations. The myth of the wilderness as “virgin â€? uninhabited land had always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once called that land home. Now they were forced to move elsewhere, with the result that tourists could safely enjoy the illusion that they were seeing their nation in its pristine, original state, in the new morning of God’s own creation. Among the things that most marked the new national parks as reflecting a post-frontier consciousness was the relative absence of human violence within their boundaries. The actual frontier had often been a place of conflict, in which invaders and invaded fought for control of land and resources. Once set aside within the fixed and carefully policed boundaries of the modern bureaucratic state, the wilderness lost its savage image and became safe: a place more of reverie than of revulsion or fear. Meanwhile, its original inhabitants were kept out by dint of force, their earlier uses of the land redefined as inappropriate or even illegal. To this day, for instance, the Blackfeet continue to be accused of “poachingâ€? on the lands of Glacier National Park that originally belonged to them and that were ceded by treaty only with the proviso that they be permitted to hunt there.⁷

Luther Standing Bear put a finer point on the issue:

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as “wild.” Only to the white man was nature a “wilderness” and only to him was the land “infested” with “wild” animals and “savage” people.

This is the essential problem that the Friends of Allegheny Wilderness have run into. The Wilderness Act defines “wilderness” as such:

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized 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. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this chapter an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.

Thus, the Wilderness Act codifies into law a Romantic fantasy, making it easy prey for critics like Forest County “Big Man” Doug Carlson,⁸ who points out that before Europeans came to North America, the Allegheny was being molded by humans. He is right.⁹ In fact, this is true of nearly all the designated wilderness areas in the United States. By the definition provided in the law, there is no wilderness. Prior to Columbus’ arrival, Native Americans cultivated the entire continent as a vast permacultural garden. The dualistic separation of humans from “nature” was non-existent. As permaculturalist Toby Hemenway wrote in “Beyond Wilderness“:

As researchers examine the Amazon more carefully, it appears that huge areas contain not only wild plants, but have been stocked with people-friendly cultivars of useful species. More and more, it looks as if the Amazon, like much of the Americas, was a carefully cultivated garden before the Europeans showed up and abused it into a thicketed wilderness. It appears that our idea of wilderness—black forest so dense you can barely walk, where people “take only photographs and leave only footprints”—is a notion burned into our psyches during an anomalous blip: the first two centuries following the Mayflower, in which the gardeners who had tended the Americas for millennia were exterminated, leaving the hemisphere to descend into an neglected tangle of “primeval forest.” It’s likely that this so-called intact forest had never existed before, since humans arrived here as soon as the glaciers receded and began tending the entire landmass with fire and digging stick. The first white explorers describe North America’s forests as open enough to drive wagons through. Two centuries later these agroforests had deteriorated to the black tangles immortalized by Whitman and Thoreau.

Wilderness may be merely a European concept imposed on a depopulated and abandoned landscape. The indigenous people of the Americas were master terraformers, using a hard-learned understanding of ecological processes to preserve the fundamental integrity of natural systems while utterly transforming the land into a place where humans belonged and could thrive. They were truly a part of nature, and likely did not make a distinction, as environmentalists do, between land where people belong and land where we do not. I’ll certainly agree that people carrying chainsaws and riding bulldozers don’t belong everywhere. But I’m beginning to think that gardeners, with gentle tools and sensitive spirits, have been and might again be the best planetary land managers the Earth can have.¹⁰

Cronon points out that this paradox leaves us divorced from the possibility of a healthy reunion with the non-human world.

This, then, is the central paradox: wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature is not. If this is so—if by definition wilderness leaves no place for human beings, save perhaps as contemplative sojourners enjoying their leisurely reverie in God’s natural cathedral—then also by definition it can offer no solution to the environmental and other problems that confront us. To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.¹¹

To maintain such a fantasy in the face of overwhelming evidence, Conon points out the many ways in which “wilderness” appeals to a mythological erasure of history, and with it, responsibility.

Indeed, one of the most striking proofs of the cultural invention of wilderness is its thoroughgoing erasure of the history from which it sprang. In virtually all of its manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from history. Seen as the original garden, it is a place outside of time, from which human beings had to be ejected before the fallen world of history could properly begin. Seen as the frontier, it is a savage world at the dawn of civilization, whose transformation represents the very beginning of the national historical epic. Seen as the bold landscape of frontier heroism, it is the place of youth and childhood, into which men escape by abandoning their pasts and entering a world of freedom where the constraints of civilization fade into memory. Seen as the sacred sublime, it is the home of a God who transcends history by standing as the One who remains untouched and unchanged by time’s arrow. No matter what the angle from which we regard it, wilderness offers us the illusion that we can escape the cares and troubles of the world in which our past has ensnared us.¹²

With the Romantic baggage of this cultural construction, the Friends of Allegheny Wilderness and others like them that seek to protect more of the surviving ecological communities around us under the Wilderness Act will face an uphill battle. For all his good intentions and other noble work, Howard Zahniser’s law suffered from all the foibles of all other laws—including the fact that it rigidly sets in place all the unknown misconceptions and unexamined biases of its authors.

According to the Friends of Allegheny Wilderness, though, designation under the Wilderness Act isn’t a recognition of historical status—since, as we’ve already seen, that would eliminate all wilderness. Rather, they insist that wilderness protection is a designation the the government can use to protect lands today, by cordoning them off from human development. This is a definition that makes a great deal more sense, but it’s still a careful parsing of the law’s text that opens the group up to some legitimate criticism from those who point out the history of the Allegheny.

Of course, one type of development is emphatically not the same as another. Doug Carlson points to Seneca horticulture, and argues that it justifies logging, but Seneca horticulture created greater biodiversity and a stronger ecology; when loggers are down, the ecology is diminished, and the “black cherry tree farm” of the Allegheny is what remains. Modern permaculture is roughly indistinguishable from horticulture; in fact, they use many of the very same methods once employed by horticulturalists like the Seneca. In permaculture, “Zone 5″ is wlderness. Its mere existence interplays with the vast permacultural gardens, by providing homes to the plants and animals that keep such a garden healthy, and as a non-human community that can teach us how the world works in a given place when we’re not around.

But beyond theory, the Allegheny faces a dire situation right now. Under these circumstances, wilderness protection is vital in order to preserve some healthy core of the Allegheny National Forest, so that even if the logging companies get their way, there will still be something left for the forest to have a chance to regenerate again. This alone is reason for whole-hearted support for the Friends of Allegheny Wilderness.

But it’s hardly enough. “Wilderness” is the root of all human society and prosperity. It is the grounding for our language, the source of our strength, and the ultimate root of all human community. It nourishes us, strengthens us, and makes us who we are. Cut off from it, we go insane. This is the very reason why we cannot be fooled by this dualistic notion of “wilderness” that separates the human world apart from the non-human world. The question is not what is “wild” and what is not—we are not a nobler, higher order of being to be separated out from all others. A city is as “wild” as a bee’s hive (and it cleaves significantly more to the stereotypes of danger the word employs). Once we move beyond that false dichotomy, we move beyond the shallow questons of aesthetics, to the questions that are so crucial—like the health of a given community, its ecological health and biodiversity. Seen in those terms, a city might well be “wild,” but it is certainly a cause for grave concern. A farm is “wild,” but it is a catastrophe that rips out the existing biodiversity and replaces it with an unsustainable monoculture.

In the Allegheny, wilderness is a start, but it can’t be the end. We also need to reconcile our relationship with the non-human world, and permaculture represents an opportunity for precisely that. Humans have a place in nature, and just like any apex predator, it is a keystone role. The problem is not with humanity itself—we do not eradicate the “wilderness” simply by existing. The problem is simply with one way of life of the many we’ve tried, one that eradicates anything and everything in its path. We know other ways of life, and for the sake of the wilderness—and that means for our own sakes as well—we’d best remember them with all haste.