Wilderness
- Concept, Function, & Management
Ian McTaggart Cowan
Berkeley, California April 17, 1968
It is 400 years since our forefathers landed on the coasts of this
continent. As a first act they moved the forest edge back far enough
for them to cultivate those few essential acres that meant survival
during the immediate winter. The trees they felled meant shelter
and fuel.
They brought with them the folk skills of much older cultures and
an indomitable courage fed in many cases by a despair of what their
homeland held for them that made the unknown hardships of a new
land seem tolerable. Some came lured by promises of free land, and
indeed for almost all this was central to their presence. Their
vision of the most desirable situation the world could produce was
of a rich and well-watered land that would respond easily, promptly,
and perpetually with an abundance of food for the new settlers.
The newcomers, no matter from which part of western Europe they
came, imported a rich and frightening folk attitude toward wilderness
acquired through the millennia of human struggle to survive living
essentially wild. Beasts that preyed upon man and his early domesticated
animals lurked in the forests and mountains. His enemies could approach
unseen as close as the forest permitted. Every field border was
a perpetual lesson that even a brief relaxation of the constant
struggle to keep down the weeds would see the forested wilderness
moving in on him. He knew, without realizing it, that the unstable
state in which he must cultivate set the inexorable forces of succession
against him.
Fear of the unknown made the forest a terrible place - full of
weird and menacing noises, fierce and dangerous animals, and quasi-human
monsters - ever ready to destroy any man venturing into it. The
wilderness was where you became lost, with all the terrors that
this conjured. Survival as part of it required that man return to
savagery, forsaking all concepts of religious ethic.
The successful colonizers of North America were in large measure
religious people, Christians, frequently fundamentalist in their
acceptance of the scriptures. This source supplemented their native,
folk fears of the unseen, unknown and alien. The Judeo-Christian
religion is rich in references to the wilderness as the antithesis
of land good for man's habitation and survival; it was rather a
rude, untamed, a cursed land to strive against with energy and devotion.
The pinnacle of achievement was to bring civilization to the wilderness.
The price of evil was visited on you in the return of your city
to become a waste of "salt pits and thorny bushes."
The Emerging Concept
Nash (1967) in his detailed and interesting account of the origin
of early North American attitudes toward wilderness, points to a
somewhat opposing view to the one expressed above: that of the biblical
role of the wilderness as a sanctuary, as a place where you could
be alone with your thoughts and where, under the hardest kind of
circumstances, you could find an escape from the evils of society.
It would be tempting to suggest that here are the earliest roots
of the revolution in attitude toward the wilderness. There is little
likelihood, however, that this is so.
To quote Nash, "The belief that good Christians should maintain
an aloofness from the pleasures of the world also helped to determine
attitude toward wilderness. The ideal focus for any Christian in
the Middle Ages was the attainment of heavenly beatitudes, not enjoyment
of the present situation. Such a view tended to check any appreciation
of natural beauty. Thus, during the Renaissance, Christianity offered
considerable resistance to the development of joy in perceiving
wild landscapes. Petrarch's 1336 ascent of Mount Ventaux provides
an example. He initially had no other purpose in climbing than experiencing
some of the delight he found in wandering free and alone among the
mountains, forests and streams. After an all-day effort, Petrarch
and his brother gained the summit. 'The great sweep of view spread
out before me,' Petrarch wrote to a friend, and 'I stood like one
dazed.' Clouds floated beneath his feet, and on the horizon he could
see the snow capped Alps. While thus transported with the magnificence
of the wild landscape he consulted a copy of Saint Augustine's Confessions
which pointed to the enjoyment of majestic scenery as a sinful departure
from proper thought. This spoilsport attitude of the Saint destroyed
Petrarch's delight.'
It hardly matters that this was a peculiarly western attitude toward
wildland and natural beauty. This attitude, derived from its several
sources, was the one that governed the thoughts and behavious of
European man on this continent during the first centuries of his
presence. He attacked nature, wilderness, wildlife and the native
peoples with an almost religious fervor. The elimination of wilderness
and all it meant was goal enough. There was no suggestion of a blending
of man and nature into a unique and satisfying partnership.
As Toqueville wrote the America he visited in 1831, "The Americans
themselves never think about (the wilds), they are insensible to
the wonders of inanimate nature.... Their eyes are fixed upon another
sight, the... march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning
the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature."
Any reading of the early history of this continent from the fragile
foothold on the eastern seaboard to the great march westward convinces
you that subjugation of the wilderness and all it stood for became
a national aim, a source of wonderment and pride that rallied men
to undertake incredible hardships.
Man is a problem-solving animal; he is at his best when challenging
goals are clearly visible. This was the goal, the guiding star and
inspiration of our first centuries on this continent. We must acknowledge
the role of this challenge. It seems to me most probable that existing
nations would not be here without it and the qualities it fostered
in the participants in the game. The national characteristics of
venturing anything, of fertile inventiveness, and quick, effective
adaptation of technological novelty to the benefit of man, may well
have originated largely from the unremitting struggle to convert
all of North America into the ingredients for a new way of life.
In making this point I neither condone nor excuse the excesses
that occurred. To a considerable extent our ecological wisdom today
is that of hindsight. It is recent and far from complete. There
is no denying that the momentum gained by man the converter in North
America, has carried him to a point where his own best interests
are threatened on many fronts, and it is not easy to alter course
without losing some way.
The profound change in attitude toward wilderness is an outgrowth
of the scientific revolution. We find its seeds in the explorations
of Aristotle. The concept of the world as a unified system, with
understandable design, where processes and natural events were not
the expression of the displeasure of God or the whim of a resident
spirit, developed slowly with the advance of science. The universe,
seen as a limitless, wonderfully complex and yet orderly and predictable
system led men to marvel. The majestic dimensions of this vision
led inevitably, in the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, to the concept of a divine mechanism.
It was an easy step to seeing the handiwork of God in the beauties
of nature that must always have delighted and awed man. The progress
of this evolution, in its early stage, is of course known only from
the works of the intellectuals of the day. I suspect that the concepts
they reflect were wider than they now appear to us. In North America
we were so busy hacking at the wilderness that we seldom paused
in admiration. But ideas flowed quite easily from the old world
to the new, and the era of biological exploration was upon us. The
flowering of European Romanticism soon found a source of attention
in the great continent that was becoming mapped, the biological
and geographic wonders that were becoming known. The Romantics of
the new world saw their environment in a new light, and a body of
literature expressed this new vision. It must he admitted that only
those standing far enough from the day-to-day frontier of contact
with the wildlands found this vision appealing. To the pioneer,
the frontiersman, trapper, and homesteader the wilderness still
was a thing to be tamed and made to produce the means of livelihood.
It was the scientist-naturalist, artist, vacationer and writer -
those who were able to choose their contact and disengage at will
- who saw and expressed the concept of unaltered nature as something
of delight.
As the villages became towns and more were spawned on the periphery,
as the settlements on the two coastlines flowed together and merged,
travel in comfort became a fact of life. It was possible to travel
great distances and never face direct contact with wilderness conditions.
For those educated and well-to-do, the land beyond the frontiers
of settlement, the unbroken forests of the far north and west, the
great barriers of the Rockies and Sierra Nevada, the untouched lakes
and unfished streams, the bands of bighorn on the desert ranges
of the southwest, and the voice of a timberwolf in the evening,
became the stuff of dreams. Wilderness had to be sought, it was
novelty, it offered exciting possibilities for a change from the
established routines of city life, physically challenging and revitalizing
to the jaded spirit. Thus seen, it had the value of remoteness and
rarity, wilderness to them became not something to destroy but a
treasured opportunity for recreation.
Nash (1967) charts a course that moves cautiously but convincingly
through the impact of American independence upon the identification
of wilderness as a national symbol. He exposes the evolving impact
of this concept on the authors and poets of the day, and through
them to the national attitude. Inevitably, this trail of thought
led to expressions of sadness over the progressive destruction of
wildland with all its endowment of changing life.
By the middle of the nineteenth century our population had developed
a capacity for altering nature unique in the world. No other people
anywhere at any time had so rapidly and irrevocably altered the
face of a continent. Thousands of square miles of forest land lay
in unimaginable devastation from logging and fire. The buffalo and
its consorts on the Great Plains were gone along with the clouds
of passenger pigeons; the sea otter no longer haunted the kelp beds
of the Pacific. As yet there was no national conscience to view
this misbehaviour as reprehensible and, in the larger sense, destructive
even to the interest of succeeding generations who must build their
lives in the wreckage.
There is no doubt that had we a chance to rerun the film of history
as North Americans developed their nations, many of the details
could be different. I wonder, though, whether this unrivaled assault
on the natural resources was not an almost inescapable event in
the gestation of the twentieth century on this continent. Starting
with nothing but the passion and the restlessness distilled in the
discontented of Europe, the new American, in three centuries, built
the capital and the technology upon which an era of unprecedented
riches developed. It was essential that such an evolution be freewheeling
and uncontained as it was inevitable that in ignorance, which was
excusable, and avarice, which was not, certain irreversible errors
took place.
Thoreau, Bryant, Cole, Parkman, and Cooper were leaders in developing
new sensitivity among Americans for the lands of this continent.
It has seemed to me that Catlin (1926) had the most realistic vision
of what lay ahead. He was devoted to the wilderness and all it meant,
and sharpened his perspectives in a series of excursions into the
Great Plains and the farther west. He was convinced of the worth
of wilderness and sensed that the progressive separation of people
from wildland and its creatures would lead to increasing appreciation-and
a yearning for contact with it:
"...The further we become separated from that pristine wildness
and beauty, the more pleasure does the mind of enlightened man feel
in recurring to those scenes."
It was Catlin, also, who in 1832 had the first vision of a National
Park as the immediate answer to what he saw as the inevitable spread
of settlement and town building, removal of the living resources,
and personal appropriation of more and more land. He saw the possibility
of the nation acting as a matter of design to retain large segments
of wildland dedicated to the perpetuation of the native peoples,
landscapes, and wildlife. He saw "a beautiful and thrilling
specimen for America to preserve and hold up to the view of her
refined citizens and the world in future ages! A nation's Park containing
man and beast in all the wild and freshness of their natures beauty!"
"I would ask no other monument to my memory...than the reputation
of having been the founder of such an institution" (Catlin,
1926, p. 295). This same thought was even more eloquently expressed
by Thoreau (1858). He writes, "Why should not we...have our
National preserves...in which the bear and panther, and some even
of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be 'civilized off the
face of the earth' ...our forests...not for idle sport or food,
but for inspiration and our own true recreations?"
Within twenty years, the dream of Catlin, Thoreau, and their contemporaries
was to become a reality with the creation of Yellowstone National
Park out of 3,000 square miles of Wyoming's Rocky Mountains. The
initial impetus for this imaginative innovation in public policy
was certainly the preservation of the museum qualities of this extraordinary
assemblage of mountains, forests, lakes, and hotsprings. Much later
the realization arose that it was far more than that.
Probably the most important role of Yellowstone to the wilderness
movement in North America was its service as a proving ground. At
last the protagonists of the values of the unspoiled natural environment
had a rallying point. At the same time, the champions of the unquestioned
right of anyone to acquire public land and to do with it what brought
him greatest profit had met an impediment. I doubt that any other
area in the world has had a more important impact on our evolving
concepts of the role of the federal government in the preservation
of wildland and wildlife; of the rights of the public versus the
rights of private citizens regarding land values; and of the competing
claims of federal and state governments on the management of wildlife.
Wilderness: Pragmatic or Romantic?
The ink was hardly dry on the birth certificate before some were
seeking to destroy the new infant. The protagonists of private privilege
attacked it during budget debates, the railroad builders sought
rights of way through it, and the now-familiar derogatory comparisons
between developing mineral wealth versus the preservation of a few
buffaloes and elk, or what you will, was already being drawn. In
the incessant battles that have been waged around Yellowstone since
this first National Park was created we have learned much.
We have been forced to examine our concepts of the National Parks,
and the part they can play in North America as its population continues
to grow and becomes progressively more city-bound. We have studied
the role of the private and public sectors in providing, guaranteeing,
and operating the facilities for public use of wildland recreational
opportunities. The mechanism for obtaining and using the advice
of private experts in the solution of problems of principle and
practice in the management of National Parks has been explored in
detail. This park certainly will continue to be in forefront, as
solutions are sought for the besetting problems of the 70's - more
people, more leisure, and more and more varied mechanical transport.
But Yellowstone was created largely as a living museum, with no
thought of its value in the preservation of wilderness. In lockstep
with the debates on Yellowstone was the campaign that finally led
to the designation of the Adirondack Forest Reserve in New York
State. Here again no wilderness concept, as we now recognize it,
was among the stated purposes of the reserve. The major interest
was utilitarian, to maintain the watersheds that nourish the Hudson
Valley, to move its commerce and water its cities.
The conflicts that finally crystallized the wilderness concept
were fought across the continent as the newly created National Forests
received their terms of reference. The establishment of these great
tracts of forest land as national treasures was a monumental action
to gainsay the right of private despoilers. In every sense it marked
a victory for conservation. Even in this triumph, however, one of
the greatest and continuing schisms in the conservation movement
arose. Its background is simple: The concept of wilderness brooks
only the most trivial consumptive use of its resources. The concept
of sustained-yield harvest, on the other hand, rests upon periodic
removal of the entire tree crop with all that this entails in disturbance
and modification of the environment. The champions of the two causes
were John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, both men of immense capacity,
sensitivity, and imagination - the romanticist and the pragmatist.
Both were sincerely dedicated to improving man's orientation to
his natural environment, both conservationists in every sense.
Pinchot's influence carried the day at that time, and it has taken
the intervening half century to work out the compromise. At the
same time, the conflict was in many ways an essential part of the
maturing of the wilderness ideal and its proponents. The intensity
of debate sharpened concepts, ideals, objectives, and alternatives.
What Muir sought was absolute protection for "his" wilderness
for no other reason than its loneliness. He saw it as the antithesis
to civilization and the antidote for many of its ills. He sought
to educate men to become part of nature, not its antagonist, and
to recover a respect for the right to live for all nature without
payment of toll to man. His was the dedication of the mystic. He
saw the need for resources in the service of man but he saw the
glory of God in the untouched wilderness.
He lived in a period when conservation became popular. At the root
of the concern were both the revulsion against the earlier excesses
of those who exploited as if the continent's resources were limitless
and indestructible, and the rising anxiety about the physical deterioration
of the landscape. An already affluent society, largely separated
from wildland, gave rise to a growing body of influential devotees
of wilderness pursuits. One outcome of John Muir's fight for the
Sierra of California was the birth of the Sierra Club with a founding
dedication to "preserve the forests and other features of the
Sierra Nevada Mountains." As the Yellowstone provided an immediate
objective to the conservationists so the Sierra Club became the
rallying point and the means of expression for the many who found
in wild creatures and unaltered landscapes an essential component
of life.
The simple formality in Warren Olney's office in San Francisco
that June 4, 1892, when 27 dedicated men founded the Sierra Club,
can be seen in retrospect as the next landmark along the route to
the formal and sophisticated concept of wilderness as a valuable
and thoroughly desirable use of national lands. Here, for the first
time, was a company of citizens, dedicating themselves as a private
body to work for a cause, which they valued, of course, but which
they saw as of primary and ever-increasing importance as an essential
ingredient in the kind of nations this continent was to nourish.
Its medium of action was to be public education and political persuasion.
No personal financial gain was contemplated. It was a new venture
- the public in defense of the public domain in a dollar-hungry
society where convertibility had automatic priority. It has been
the prototype of a number of other organizations with related dedications.
As a society develops so also do its rules. Law, evolved to reflect
the legal position of land as a commodity, is designed for those
who would exploit it. The developer, in general, has greater claim
under such law. It is an interesting commentary that in British
Columbia, probably one of the best-watered areas of the continent,
the water act defines 14 legal uses for water in order of priority.
Nowhere among them is water as an environment for aquatic creatures.
Here also the range act does not recognize wild grazers as range
users. One of the most urgent and overdue legal reforms in both
Canada and the United States is the overhaul of our concepts of
the right to abuse land as the logical concomitant of individual
liberty in private ownership.
The components of the evolution were almost all in place. The unquestioning
right to turn everything possible into immediate short-term profit
had been challenged and powerful citizen groups in the United States
were geared to do battle in this context. The National Parks of
the United States and Canada enjoyed the protection of acts of Congress
or Parliament and, particularly in the United States, any raids
on their convertible resources were likely to be expensive and to
result in serious loss of public esteem. In Canada the citizen groups
were lacking and the National Parks were violated repeatedly and
quietly. The citizen group is essential to our social organization
where wildland values are concerned. The Civil Service and elected
representatives, unguided by the organized conscience of the dedicated,
are too vulnerable to the economic religion of our time. A powerful
force in this context arose with the Wilderness Society and its
lifelong president Olaus J. Murie.
The first half of the twentieth century made its contribution in
the form of the science of ecology, The integrated systems point
of view developed. The environment and its entire cargo of life
was seen as an interrelated web of cause and effect, where every
plant and animal plays an essential role in the drama. So viewed,
the wilderness took on new meaning. Many biologists had a hand in
developing and fleshing out the ecological view of the continent
but some names seem inseparable from the movement to relate ecology
to management of wild land and its biota. Victor E. Shelford of
Illinois was writing vigorously on the establishment and management
of ecological reserves (1920). Joseph Grinnell of the University
of California, in his quiet scholarly way, exposed the details and
told his story in two hundred or more documents. Half a continent
away, Aldo Leopold was becoming a household word among the knowledgeable.
His rare insight and missionary zeal coupled with a delightful and
poignant prose style made him a unique and effective leader in his
field; his momentum has long outlived him.
Wilderness Values and Evaluation
We have been watching the progress of an idea through the consciousness
of the peoples of a continent: The discovery that one of the most
unique attributes of this continent was the majesty and diversity
of its wild landscapes and wildlife. The great sweep of American
ecosystems from the frigideserts of Ellesmere Island to tropical
rain forests of the Caribbean shore; the Appalachians, Rockies and
Sierra Nevada, the Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Saskatchewan, Colorado,
Fraser and Columbia; the bristle cone pines, the great sequoias,
the cypress-lined Bayous with their limpkins, spoonbills, and alligators;
the ivory bill, whooping crane, grizzly, and bighorn - symbols of
a quality that was distinctively American. In this day when all
ancient values are questioned it is important to note that it was
the burgeoning pride of a young nation seeking for symbols of its
greatness that recognized these natural attributes as its equivalent
of the antiquities of the old world.
Not only could the North American wilderness be made to yield its
treasure in the form of timber, mineral, grass and hydropower but
it had value of a different kind in its unspoiled state. The central
argument since the inception of this concept has been to identify
these values and to relate them to those of the more familiar marketplace.
We have seen that the origins of the wilderness concept lay in
the recognition that some people enjoyed the contact with unaltered
landscapes. In the solitude they offered, in the soul-stirring scenes
of infinite variety, there was a fascination in the swiftly changing
vision of wild creatures and in the surging vitality of many small
lives. Perhaps it was the contrast, perhaps nostalgia for the vision
of a vanishing past, perhaps the search for challenge. Today we
might say it was the unknowing search for variety of sensory input
without which no creature, no man, develops full potential. Whatever
underlay the discovery, the values of wilderness were most easily
described in romantic if not spiritual terms. In this value system,
wilderness was arrayed alongside cathedrals, art galleries, museums,
opera houses, and medicine in the abstract. It made men whole, lightened
the burdens of civilization, stimulated visions, it was psychedelic
in the truest sense. It was also public, not private - a treasure
to be left unaltered in a nation worshipping the bulldozer, and
where the unquestioned standard of value was the "fast buck."
Wilderness was not seen not as a use but an antiuse.
The violent clash of interest was inevitable - a national, unquestioned
dedication had been called to question. The comparisons were incomparable.
Thwarting the exploitation of a mineral resource for the preservation
of the beauty of a landscape is still incomprehensible to many.
The wilderness dream lacked the powerful association with culture
that had developed an aura around the religious and artistic temples
of the cities. The spiritual and physical fallout was more esoteric
and certainly less marketable, but it had persuasive pleaders and
it soon gained strength from an exploding demand for outdoor recreation.
But the protectors were resisted by those who maintained that no
land was serving until it was altered to man's whim, and vehement
demands arose to put an economic value on wilderness and National
Parks. These demands were as vigorously denied as inappropriate
by the champions of wildlands.
Nonetheless the economist is not comfortable until most of man's
likes and wants can be fitted to the economic equation. Several
ingenious approaches to such quantification have been proposed.
The cost of all goods and services devoted to participation was
among the first devices, followed by Sumner's proposal of alternative
time value. Both provided some sort of statistical base for comparison,
but the need was for more than mere figures. A philosophical framework
within which legitimate comparisons can be made with alternative
uses of land is essential.
In the meantime, the ecologists added several demands and opportunities
to the role of wildland for recreational purposes
To them the unaltered ecosystem is a standard against which the
extent and consequence of the impact of change can be measured.
"Wild places reveal what the land was, what it is, and what
it ought to be" (Leopold, 1941). Each ecosystem is a storehouse
of unextracted information ready to yield its many in sights to
today's and tomorrow's ecologists in direct relation to the penetration
of the research approach. The natural biota of such ecosystems is
seen also as a reservoir of the genetic constructs from millions
of years of evolutionary trial and elimination. The potential gain
to man from this store of DNA is as yet unguessed. Plant and animal
breeding and culture have produced crop bionts that direct energy
into greater productivity than was possible in the wild, where the
energy was put to combating diseases, pests, and inhospitable climate.
Frequently these changes have been accompanied by loss of biological
diversity. This, in turn, may give rise to the need to reintroduce
some wild genetic characteristic that may be drawn from the wildlife
pool in the ecological reserves.
I am sure, also, that as we learn to fashion DNA complexes to our
ends, the search will be for templates that convey the required
message. These again will often send the researcher to the unaltered
wild species. Further, as Spurr (1963) has stated, "an understanding
of the nature and dynamics of the wild community is vitally important
to an understanding of life itself."
Concern is also growing for the survival of many wild species that
seem incapable of adapting to the environmental alterations we impose.
For each of these troubled species we recognize there may well be
ten we are unaware of. The only way to assure their survival for
our present and future interest is to preserve intact large enough
segments of their habitat.
Others have mentioned the untapped resources of biological chemicals,
remaining unknown in the list of species, that can be maintained
only in natural ecosystems as opportunities for our future use.
Quinine, cortisone, heparin, digitalis and strychnine are among
the better known of a host of drugs discovered first in wild plants.
Because only a fraction of the potential medicinal yield of wild
plants has yet been realized, it makes good sense to preserve the
opportunity to examine all species for their potential.
Viewed in light of these claims for potential good, preservation
of wilderness conditions acquires a source of entry into the economic
equation. It assumes the role of preserving our option. Krutilla
(1967) has developed this view with ingenious insight. He defines
the central problem as providing for the present and future the
amenities and values associated with unspoiled natural environments
for which the market is unlikely to provide. He asks "on what
basis, then, can we make decisions when we confront a choice entailing
action which will have an irreversibly adverse consequence for rare
phenomena of nature.... If the use which promises the highest present
net value is incompatible with preserving the environment in its
natural state, does it necessarily follow that the market will allocate
the resources efficiently?"
The economic conundrum is that the potential losers cannot influence
the decision in their favour by their aggregate willingness to pay,
yet the owner of a resource he uses may not be able or willing to
compensate the loser from what he has gained through exploitation.
Krutilla proposes the notion of option demand - a willingness to
pay for retaining an option to use an area or ecosystem that would
be impossible to replace once altered and for which there is no
close substitute. In the normal market, options are tradeable. In
the matter of a resource such as wilderness, however, one experiences
all the frustrations of organizing a market for public goods. Especially
it is true that many of those likely to profit by the maintenance
of an option will not contribute to it because they know they cannot
be excluded from the later benefits.
"Analysis of this situation reveals, that there is a variety
of unconventional economic problems associated with the natural
environment which involves the irreproducibility of unique phenomena
of nature - or the irreversibility of some consequence inimical
to human welfare. Further, it appears that the utility to individuals
of direct association with natural environments may be increasing
while the supply is beyond the capacity of man to augment. Then,
too, the real cost of refraining from immediately converting our
remaining rare natural environments may not be very great. Moreover,
with the continued advance of technology, more substitutes for conventional
natural resources will be found for the industrial and agricultural
sectors." (Krutilla, 1967, p. 184).
To these must be added the legacy concept so ably introduced by
Aldo Leopold (1966, p. 222) in his framing of ecological conscience.
The conservation of natural environments and biota, including the
wilderness to which our attention is directed, therefore requires
action toward the achievement of a higher level of future wellbeing
than would be feasible if all possibly convertible resources were
sold today for what the market will pay. The action demanded may
well violate conventional benefit cost criteria but the reason for
the action is clear.
At the same time we must admit that, taking all values into account,
we have hardly begun to specify the size of the demand for wilderness.
We know that the presence of opportunity, by encouraging the acquisition
of skills and experience itself builds demand (Davidson, et al,
1966), but the nature and focus of this demand for different kinds
and qualities of wilderness is unknown.
Ecologists and their colleagues have estimated that the need for
ecological reserves in North America approximates ten million acres.
This is far less than 1 per cent of the total land area of the continent,
and its allocation for this purpose would make little impact upon
the resource-based industries.
To a certain extent these ecological reserves may function as wilderness
areas, but they will certainly be destroyed by any considerable
use for recreational purposes. In my view they may be specially
designated areas within wilderness tracts or other publicly owned
wildlands.
So far I have been emphasizing the somewhat prosaic values of wilderness
to man. There is, however, a strong body of public opinion that
represents in the twentieth century the romanticism of Marsh and
Muir. They argue that the benefits to the wilderness traveler from
his experiences are beyond the market place. They are deeply personal,
spiritually moving, healing, restorative, recreative in the truest
sense. They have been the inspiration for much of our art, poetry,
and literature. Wilderness to these, and I am one, has a meaning
that cannot to be valued in the economic sense any more than can
great music, the Taj Mahal, or Ankor Wat. Appreciation and the capacity
to respond deeply get close to the being of man.
Though the wilderness concept has gained much ground on this continent
in the last half century, it is constantly under challenge to match
values with those proposed by potential users of living or contained
elements of the wilderness areas in a destructive way. At such times
the doctrine of multiple use is the shibboleth. This doctrine, however,
can be interpreted in more than one way. Congressman Ullman (1960)
interprets it as the need to convert all usable resources at will
into salable products. By inference, the least salable use therefore
takes the bottom position on the totem pole. The wilderness concept,
as discussed here, does involve multiple use in the truest sense
watershed conservation, preservation of valuable genetic material,
the opportunity for scientific study, education, and the host of
divergent but compatible uses we collect under the recreation umbrella.
Wilderness areas emerge from our analysis in quite a different
guise, and this must be strongly emphasized. In Canada where so
much of the land is unoccupied and may well be uninhabitable, widespread
political confusion exists between an area of wilderness and a Wilderness
Area. The latter is not merely a tract of wildland for which no
one has yet found any other use. It is a carefully selected category
of use, chosen for the richness, magnificence, diversity, or other
special quality that it offers in unspoiled state. Certainly its
designation and maintenance includes preservation but not exclusively.
As a category of use it must have clearly recognizable criteria,
it is subject to management for human benefit consistent with the
maintenance of its wilderness quality. Its use will be consonant
with all other high-quality pursuits of man - the maintenance of
low density is a sine qua non.
What is Wilderness?
The early pleas for modification of our destructive exploitation
of the living resources of the North American continent were essentially
negative in their orientation. Their central theme was to bar the
exploiter from some part of the remaining hinterland so it will
remain unaltered. A large component of this attitude still lies
behind the conservation movement. The most obtrusive change in the
primitive landscapes of this continent were those wrought by the
logger. The devastation he left was an invitation to wildfire that
over huge areas completed the destruction. Inevitably, the first
reaction was to restrict the activity that caused the most obvious
insult to those who were hurt.
The maturing of the wilderness concept, however, crystallized the
ecological and social benefits that the nation could derive from
maintaining certain substantial parts of its landscapes unaltered
by man. Wilderness became a category of use.
Leopold (1925) saw this vision clearly more than forty years ago.
His statement is dramatic and succinct and I can do no better than
quote it. "The term wilderness, as here used, means a wild,
roadless area where those who are so inclined may enjoy primitive
modes of travel and subsistence, such as exploration trips by pack
train or canoe."
"The first idea is that wilderness is a resource, not only
in the physical sense of the raw materials it contains, but also
in the sense of a distinctive environment, which may, if rightly
used, yield certain social values. Such a conception ought not to
be difficult, because we have lately learned to think of other forms
of land use in the same way. We no longer think of a municipal golf
links, for instance, as merely soil and grass.
"The second idea is that the value of wilderness varies enormously
with location. As with other resources, it is impossible to dissociate
value from location. There are wilderness areas in Siberia which
are probably very similar in character to parts of our Lake states,
but their value to us is negligible, compared with what the value
of a similar area in the Lake states would be, just as the value
of a golf links would be negligible if located so as to be out of
reach of golfers.
"The third idea is that wilderness, in the sense of an environment
as distinguished from a quantity of physical materials, is somewhere
between the class of non-reproducible resources like minerals, and
the reproducible resources like forests. It does not disappear proportionately
to use, as minerals do.... On the other hand, wilderness cannot
be built at will, like a city park or a tennis court.... Neither
can a wilderness be grown like timber, because it is something more
than trees. The practical point is that if we want wilderness, we
must foresee our want and preserve the proper areas against the
encroachment of inimical uses.
"Fourth, wilderness exists in all degrees, from the little
accidental wild spot at the head of a ravine in a Corn Belt wood
lot to vast expanses of virgin country.
... "Wilderness is a relative condition. As a form of land
use it cannot be a rigid entity of unchanging content, exclusive
of all other forms. On the contrary, it must be a flexible thing,
accommodating itself to other forms and blending with them in that
highly localized give-and-take scheme of land-planning which employs
the criterion of 'highest use'.... For it is not to be supposed
that a public wilderness area is a new kind of public land reservation,
distinct from public forests and public parks. It is rather a new
kind of land dedication within our system of public forests and
parks."
In final emphasis of his concept of wilderness as a use category
Leopold proposes to exclude from his consideration any degree of
wilderness so absolute as to forbid reasonable protection. This
vision involves no "deep freeze" areas from which man
is excluded entirely. It is not land and life in a museum cabinet
to be viewed only from the outside. It is rather an asset to be
enjoyed by many forms of use that leave no legacy of alteration.
Spurr (1963) reaches a different definition of wilderness, starting
from much the same principle. "Each of us wants the knowledge
that whether we use it or not, whether we visit it or not, there
exists available to us a refuge from the sights and sounds and smells
of man." He departs along a different trail that he labels
biocoenocentric (biocentric) as opposed to the anthropocentric marker
he would put on the Leopoldian con-cept. His emphasis is on the
omnipresence of change including that introduced by man - be it
only the introduction of weeds, or the now universal atmospheric
fallout of radiation products and insecticides. "...is there
such a thing today as a wilderness devoid of man's influence? The
answer is clearly no." In the absolute sense he is undoubtedly
right, and thus no such thing exists as true wilderness in this
definition. He goes on to propose that "the new wilderness
will be a new forest ecosystem relatively undisturbed by man but
with a new combination of plants and animals living in a new climate
and growing on a new soil...it will be equally attractive to the
generation that will see it."
It is his contention that the wilderness of the past has already
gone beyond return and that we should depend upon the skills of
the manager to assemble a new wilderness for new generations that
it will enjoy as fully as the original one which, not having known,
they will not miss.
Two years ago Spurr (1966), in his Albright lecture, even more
emphatically favored an ersatz wilderness assembled from the bits
and pieces left to us from years of human use of the continent.
He concludes with the advice that "we should be positive and
not negative; we should be active and not passive; we should be
wilderness managers, and not conservationists." I should urge
those reading this last sentence of Spurr's document to turn immediately
to his first sentence where he announces his intention to apply
semantic elaboration. This he has done with skill.
The promoter of wilderness concepts is indeed a person actively
striving for positive values to benefit man, truly a manager and
also a conservationist. I part company with Spurr on his route to
the conclusion. However, it contains many inarguable facts nearly
wrapped in reductio ad absurdum.
The concept of wilderness toward which most of us strive today
is the one outlined so well by Leopold forty years ago. Lois Crisler
(1958) has summarized it succinctly. "Great wilderness has
two characteristics, remoteness and the presence of wild animals
in something like pristine variety and numbers. Remoteness cannot
be imitated in cheap materials; and wilderness without animals is
mere scenery."
Wilderness Today
The Wilderness Act of 1964 introduced a new era in the story of
wilderness use in North America. From that year on there was to
be, over half of the continent, a National Wilderness preservation
system composed of areas of federally owned land, largely in the
National Parks and National Forests, to be designated officially
as Wilderness Areas. They were to be administered for use and enjoyment
as wilderness in ways that would leave them unimpaired.
For the first time anywhere a land-use category defined as wilderness
was created and defined concisely and inclusively: "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 Act 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."
The prohibitions of certain kinds of activity that are also part,
of the Act are of particular importance as they imply the recognition
of certain adjuncts of human activity that have special capacity
to destroy the quality of wilderness: .... "There shall be
no permanent road within any wilderness area...and except as necessary
to meet minimum requirements for administering the area...or in
emergencies involving the health or safety of persons using the
area, there shall be no temporary road, no use of motor vehicles,
motorized equipment or motor boats, no landing of aircraft, no other
form of mechanical transport, and no structure or installation within
any such area."
There are exceptions to these general prohibitions that are designed
to protect existing rights to resource use in certain wilderness
areas during a phasing-out period. The most serious exceptions concern
mining and flooding by hydro impoundment. These could provide serious
erosion of the wilderness areas and will have to be resisted one
by one as each is proposed for implementation.
Translating basic legislative provisions into procedure is a task
of the greatest complexity. The accumulated weight of endless series
of single small decisions builds steadily into policy. Particularly
during the early years of any new legislative entity it is necessary
to arrange for constant vigilance, steady cooperation, and frequent
review of policy decisions. Only in this way can the dreams that
crystallize as a legislative act evolve into a worthy organism.
One of the most unique aspects of this continent is the freedom
with which the citizens of Canada and the United States share the
total recreational potential. Few areas exist in other parts of
the world in which two nations share so completely the recreational
resources, and indeed the convertible resources, of their lands.
Nevertheless, differences in ecology, population density, standard
of living, ethnic background, and political organization lead to
often different attitudes toward resource use and different routes
to common ideals. To a considerable extent the citizens of the United
States encounter first the consequences of population density and
the mechanized capacity for altering the natural environment.
It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the recognition of
wilderness values is more advanced in the United States than in
Canada. Here the vast, almost uninhabited, northern half of the
nation has maintained the illusion that wilderness is present in
such abundance that no special concern is needed for its survival.
It is true that there are vast areas of Canada where human impact
has been negligible, where wilderness adventure can be had today
almost unchanged from centuries past. Remote, inaccessible, and
frequently inhospitable, much of this Arctic wilderness cannot be
used by the average seeker of wilderness solitude. The requirements
in terms of cost and previous experience rule out all but the hardiest
and most knowledgeable. Canada needs wilderness areas close to the
populous southern fifth of the country - areas of special quality
managed exclusively for this category of recreation and research.
In Canada the natural resources belong to the provinces, and except
for the two northern territories, federal land is almost confined
to the National Parks. The pattern of wilderness development must
therefore be different. Within the larger National Parks zoning
for wilderness use is included in new outlines of policy, but the
areas will be few and small. The provinces are the key to any successful
development as they own huge tracts of land. Some of them are already
experimenting with wilderness concepts. Ontario has had inviolate
areas for more than fifteen years (Harkness, 1952). British Columbia
has recently created some. It must be recognized, however, that
the fiscal structure of Canada renders such land allocation more
vulnerable to reclassification and invasion than do the patterns
developing in the United States. I am not aware of any such region
in Canada that cannot be altered by executive whim or cabinet order.
None enjoys the protection that would require legislative debate
of any change.
We in Canada are still more of a frontier nation, facing vast areas
for which we have as yet found little economic use. Although Canadian
art, poetry, and literature have strong wilderness flavour, they
have not captured the public imagination and we lack the counterpart
of the Sierra Club or Wilderness Society with their sharply focussed
dedication. Because both nations share the prospects of vanishing
wild lands on this continent, there is an urgency to our cooperation
in a mutual endeavour to establish areas sufficient in size, quality,
and diversity to take care of the scientific and recreational needs
of all North Americans and their guests into the foreseeable future.
We have custody of unique biotas and habitats, we have a responsibility
for their care and management, including the maintenance of adequate
examples of all of them in their pristine condition. This responsibility
is as yet but dimly recognized.
Today mining, flooding as a consequence of dam building, and aggressive
tourism are the most serious threats to the natural, preserved areas.
Outside the National Parks no part of any wilderness area is immune
if someone wants to develop a mining location with its routes of
access. The pertinence of this statement will be vivid to those
following the present confrontation between mining interests and
the protectors of Glacier Peak wilderness. It is significant that
this conflict is regarded as serious enough to merit a series of
letters in "Science" during the winter of 1967-68. One
letter (Hunt, 1968) suggests to apply an economic yardstick "by
determining if the mineral deposits are of a quality and extent
sufficient to affect the national economy as distinguished from
those which are not important nationally, no matter how valuable
they may be to the owners."
There is precedent in Canada for the application of such a yardstick.
A strategically important mineral needed during the Second World
War was available only in a National Park. It was mined under government
supervision with minimum disturbance, and without profit to the
operators. The mine was closed as soon as the emergency was over.
It may not be popular to ask why a public resource in a nationally
designated protected area should be destroyed for private gain.
The question, however, is a proper one.
The conflicts with dam builders are too fresh in our minds to require
documentation. We in Canada are still destroying hundreds of miles
of potentially magnificent recreation land by flooding forest land
without clearing. The result would make strong men weep, but the
immediate economic arguments prevail.
It was Leopold (1925) who remarked that, generally speaking, it
is not timber, and certainly not agriculture, which is causing the
decimation of wilderness areas but rather the desire to attract
tourists. The events of the forty years since this was written have
firmly established its truth. We can witness this even in our National
Parks. A fire-protection road is bulldozed to give access to the
hinterland, and because special access is allowed to some visitors
who are not there for fire protection purposes, the call goes up
for wider access, for road improvements and like tentacles the auto
road sinuates into the wild areas with its burden of noise, fumes,
and filth.
The management of wilderness, for its several stated functions,
demands of the administrator a stronger definition of Objectives
and greater ingenuity than perhaps any other form of land management.
The quality of wilderness is an ephemeral thing best nurtured in
neglect. But this is impossible if the area is to be used with adequate
provision for human safety and enjoyment. Some management is essential
but with so light a touch that it makes hardly a mark on the unblemished
canvas of the wild.
What should be our policy toward the three great natural forces
of change - fire, flood, and insects? Native man in North America
made no attempt to thwart their impact. Should our attitude toward
lightning fires originating in a wilderness area be different from
our reaction to fire threatening invasion from outside? Certainly
in boreal environments, the complete exclusion of fire will in the
long Tun lead to progressive monotony in an area that owes its quality
to diversity. There will be no dissent from the exclusion of man-made
fire.
In a world where more people mean more restriction, freedom to
enjoy wilderness with a minimum of regulation will be the ideal.
The erosive forces will be the sights, sounds, and smells of civilization.
By his very nature man is a changer of the environment; it will
be most difficult to resist his urges to change. Campsites, portages,
fords, and temporary stopping Places will be challenges for improvement.
Here certainly the integrity of the environment must be of first
concern. Wood cutting, garbage disposal, and camp sanitation present
practical problems that will differ from region to region. The extension
of rough roads for fire protection must be carefully scrutinized.
If "tailor made" cigarettes are a serious additional fire
hazard, will these be tolerated in the most vulnerable areas? A
litter of indestructible butts is a growing blight from the beaches
of Waikiki to Pikes Peak.
Fishing for local use will probably be encouraged, but fishing
for removal prohibited. Can bow hunting be regarded as a compatible
use in some areas, or snaring rabbits and grouse?
Where horses are used can these be wild pastured en route, will
corrals for holding them be tolerated? Trampling by large numbers
of horses can be most destructive in certain environments, and wild
pasturing may be intolerable. Where this is true what kind of horse
feed may be carried - much of it includes weed seed foreign to the
wilderness.
And what about the blathering cacophony of the transistor radio
and its relatives - do these belong in the primitive scene?
We have almost no knowledge yet of the present demand for wilderness
recreation. We can be certain, however, that the smaller areas and
those closer to population centers will be in high demand. On these,
protection from numbers will be a prime concern, and an early task
- a novel one, the establishment of a graphic relationship between
numbers and quality. Inevitably, reservations will be required for
the opportunity to use some of the more favoured areas. We accept
the necessity of reserving our place at the symphony or opera, so
why not in the choicest wild lands of this continent?
We can be certain that advertising will increase demand if we desire
to distribute the users more widely. Many more will get to know
the restorative peace of the wilderness if they can be introduced
to it by those already skilled in the art of travel in wildland.
What then should be the role of guides?
In times long gone, entire villages may have moved along the rivers
and trails of the hinterland, war parties and raiding groups came
and went. Each moved in its own cosmos of trappings, sounds, and
smells. What are our present-day views as to tolerable party size?
The family group, two families together, or the guided herd that
has become the pattern of some of our trail rides? I suspect that
destruction of the elements that are distinctively wilderness increases
as the square of group size. The children of Israel probably hold
the record for wilderness use - but can you imagine the back trail!
You will recall that Moses had to take to the hills to gain the
peace to think.
We have recognized more functions for our wilderness areas than
recreation. The scientific output will emerge but slowly over the
years. Ecologists are scarce and their tasks ahead immense. Already
the needed areas are being determined and set aside. Early and detailed
study of each area will be desirable to provide the background against
which future research will gain meaning. Time is an essential component
of the processes to be studied on these ecological reserves, and
researchers certainly will change. A centralized data bank to receive
the field information should have a high priority. Without it the
invaluable data arising from each separate study will be dissipated
through as many files.
Another urgent need, largely neglected to this point, exists for
wilderness research. The effective stewardship of wilderness requires
information about the evolutionary trends in undisturbed wild areas
of many kinds. Not only must we concern ourselves with the processes
within our wild areas, but even greater importance is knowledge
of the impact that our activities on surrounding areas have upon
the contained wilderness. Industrial activity and human communities
on areas adjacent, as well as lumbering, mining, ranching, fishing,
hunting, and trapping will all have their influence on the contained
wilderness. Pollutants by air and water, noise, disturbance, and
the selective removal of living creatures will add their influence.
The need for knowledge about the total impact of man on the natural
environment is most urgent.
The wilderness story in North America is perhaps a prototype evolution
for an idea in a democracy. A century has seen it pass from a romantic
dream of poets to a legal social entity, moved along its course
by the gathering strength of popular demand. The proponents sought
no economic gain, and for all the more sophisticated reasons we
now recognize in favour of maintaining large areas of undisturbed
landscapes, the most powerful motive is still ethical, romantic,
arid cultural.
When Thoreau said that "in wildness is the preservation of
the world," I am sure he was looking beyond the canyons and
wild water, the trees, the ponds, and the wild creatures. He and
the many disciples who followed were looking at the symbolic meaning.
As Olson (1961) has said, "I put wilderness in the realm of
all cultural things. We preserve paintings, we preserve our masterpieces
of music, art and literature. We treasure them. We build great buildings
to protect them. We should at the same time treasure wilderness
because wilderness has the same impact on the human mind and spirit"....
"It seems to me that our real problem in fighting for wilderness
is to look at it as part of our culture and as worthy of preserving
as any other facet of our culture."
In half of North America we are now beyond the dream stage. Wilderness
is now a legal entity and we face next the even more difficult task
of designing the working principles that will govern its management
and perhaps even its survival. Very possibly wilderness may be in
as much danger from its friends as it has been from its enemies,
of its being trampled in the stampede of users. Evolution is never
finished and this applies equally to ideas as to organisms. Those
that have laboured so hard to reach the present stage in our wilderness
concepts have plenty of scope for continuing dedication and ingenuity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
Anonymous. 1965. Complete text of the Wilderness Act. The Living
Wilder-ness. 86:31-34.
Catlin, G. 1926. North American Indians. 1. Edinburgh: John Grant,
298 pp.
Crisler, Lois. 1958. Arctic wild. New York: Harper and Bros., 301
pp.
Darling, F. and J. P. Milton ed. 1966. Future environments of North
America. New York: The Natural History Press, Garden City, 767 pp.
Davidson, P., F. G. Adams, and J. Seneca. 1966. The social value
of water recreation facilities resulting from an improvement in
water quality: The Delaware Estuary. (In) Kneese, A. V. and S. C.
Smith ed. Water Research. Baltimore.
Harkness, H. J. K. 1952. Zoning needs for wilderness. The Living
Wilderness 40:23-25.
Hunt, Charles B. 1968. Copper deposit at Glacier Peak. Science
159 (3820): 1148-85.
Krutilla, J. V. 1967. Conservation reconsidered. Resources for
the Future, Inc., Amer. Econ. Rev. Sept, pp. 777-86.
Leopold, A. 1925. Wilderness as a form of land use. Jour. of Land
and Public Utility Econ. 1: 398-404.
1941. Wilderness as a land laboratory, Living Wilderness 6: 3.
1966. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 269
pp.
McAdoo, W. 1886. Congressional Record, 49th Congress, 2nd Session.
18: 94 and 152-54-.
Nash, R. 1967. Wilderness and the American mind. New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 256 pp.
Olson, S. F. 1961. The spiritual aspects of wilderness. [In] Wilderness,
America's Living Heritage. Sierra Club, San Francisco, pp. 16-25,
38.
Shelford, V. E. 1920. Preserves of natural conditions. Trans. Ill.
Star Acad. Sci. 13:37-58-.
Spurr, S. H. 1963. The value of wilderness to science. [In] Tomorrow's
Wilder-ness. Sierra Club, San Francisco, pp. 59-75.
1966. Wilderness management. Sixth Horace M. Albright Conservation
Lectureship. Univ. Calif. School of Forestry, Berkeley, pp. 1-14
Sumner, L. 1956. Your stake in Alaska's wildlife and wilderness.
Sierra Club Bul. pp. 1-17-
Thoreau, H. 1858. Maine woods writings. Atlantic Monthly 3: 208.
Tocqueville, A. de. 1953. Democracy in America. Phillips Bradley
ed. New York: Alfred Knopf, Vol 11, p. 47.
Ullman, A. 1960. Multiple use and the proposed wilderness preservation
sys-tem. The Living Wilderness 71:30-33.
Introducing: Ian McTaggart Cowan
Few of us could suddenly conceive of a new creature "with the
neck of a giraffe and the digestive tract of a spruce bud worm"
busily converting the extensive spruce foliage of the northern forests
into protein consumable by man. In a whimsical aside to his presentation
of this Albright Lecture, Ian McTaggart Cowan conjured up just such
a vision. The potentialities of his mind, like those of the reservoir
of DNA to which he was referring, seem endless.
As Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the University of
British Columbia, Ian Cowan is an educator and administrator. He
is also a wildlife biologist of major attainments, a man wholly
at home in the wilderness, and an individual who can impart his
own enthusiasm for his field to widely varying audiences.
Dean Cowan graduated from the University of British Columbia in
1932. He came to Berkeley for graduate studies leading to the Ph.D.
in Zoology from the University of California in 1935. He then returned
to British Columbia to serve as a biologist in the Provincial Museum.
In 1940 he was appointed as assistant professor in the Department
of Zoology, University of British Columbia. Promoted to professor
of zoology in 1945, he served as head of the department from 1953
to 1964. In 1964 he was advanced to his present post as Dean of
Graduate Studies. While carrying these greatly expanded responsibilities,
he has held to his own field, continuing to teach a course in wildlife
biology and to guide the research of a group of doctoral candidates.
His interests in large mammals and ecology led him to extensive
field studies in the Canadian Arctic, throughout British Columbia,
in the Rocky Mountains National Parks, and in Western Mexico, Scotland,
Finland, and certain of the Pacific Islands. These studies in turn
have led to some one hundred fifty publications, including books
on the birds and on the mammals of British Columbia. He has also
developed several extensive television and radio series.
His awards and distinctions are a measure of his interests and
energy. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a fellow
of the California Academy of Sciences, a fellow and past president
of the Arctic Institute of North America, a fellow of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, a past president of
the Biological Council of Canada, a director of the Canadian Audubon
Society, and a past member of the executive board of the International
Union for Conservation of Nature. His record of public service includes
substantial periods as a member of the National Research Council
of Canada, a member of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada, a
member of the City of Vancouver Museums Board, and a member of the
advisory committee of the Secretary of Interior of the United States.
As an ecologist, Dean Cowan integrates knowledge in his own field
of study. As an individual, he integrates a far wider range of knowledge
in terms of his many interests. In this Albright Lecture, he brings
both breadth and focus to his theme. His is not a voice in the wilderness,
but a voice for the wilderness.
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