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As we near the 40th anniversary of the 1964 Wilderness Act, it becomes more and more obvious that wilderness designation is not a good way to protect land from the ravages of humanity.
The idea was good, to set aside parcels where the
earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man,
where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.
But it hasn't worked that way -- many wilderness areas have become popular destinations and they get trammeled hard. This puts federal land management agencies, like the Forest Service and the BLM, in a quandary.
On one hand, they're supposed to preserve the wilderness in a pristine state. On the other, they're part of a political system that responds to constituencies, and the more constituents, the greater the response.
In other words, the more people who visit wilderness areas, the more political support for wilderness and the more financial support, from the public treasury, for the land managers.
But the more people who visit, the more difficult it is to maintain wilderness characteristics. If I'm the only visitor this year to a given parcel, it doesn't much matter where I walk or relieve myself; the remnants of my passage will quickly fade away.
But if there are dozens of people hiking there every clement day, then the human presence starts to matter a lot. Footpaths erode into gullies or expand into mudholes, and human excrement fouls the water. So at some point, the land managers have to protect the wilderness by developing it with privies and constructed trails and then it's not exactly a wilderness any more.
A story in yesterday's Post explained how this is happening on the trail to Mt. Bierstadt above Georgetown, and I've heard forest rangers talk about the same problem across the state, from Indian Peaks to Sangre de Cristo.
When an area becomes an official Wilderness, it gets formal protection from logging, mining and similar disruptive activities. But it also gets more popular with hikers, and that brings about another kind of disruption.
So, is there a way out of this dilemma?
For years, I thought we in the media might be able to help by pointing out that our mountains offer many ways to kill visitors: lightning, avalanche, hail, hypothermia, hypoxia, wildfire, mountain lions and bears, to name a few. And there are many painful, or even fatal, diseases of the high country, among them giardia, plague, hantavirus, tick fever and spotted fever. Just publicize these possibilities, and fewer people will visit, and some of the wilderness dilemma goes away.
But there are problems with this approach. First, even the chambers of commerce and the local tourist guides include safety information about bears, ticks, fires and the like, and it doesn't seem to make a whit of difference.
Indeed, there are millions of thrill-seekers in America who enjoy risking their lives, and the more dangerous you make a place sound, the more they want to visit it: Dude, it was totally awesome. I was running a fever of 102 after I drank from the creek, when the lightning hit just ahead, and then this big mama bear came at me just before the rockslide caught us.
And that was after you wrecked your bike on the single-track? Gotta try that place myself, man. What's the best way to get to Tomichi Pass?
So perhaps we should try a new approach, something like Zoned Wilderness. Instead of declaring that a parcel is either wilderness or non-wilderness, we go by degrees.
The wildest stuff would be Primeval Wilderness, and it would be illegal for any human to enter it at any time for any reason. People still would, of course, but they'd face hard prison time if they were caught, and there would be no search-and-rescue in these zones.
Next down would be Primitive Wilderness, open to all who had the proper equipment (no climbing 14ers in T-shirts, shorts and running shoes that leave you vulnerable to afternoon thunderstorm hypoxia) but not too much equipment (no cell phones).
And most of our current wilderness could be managed as Pedestrian Recreation Zones, which is what they've turned into anyway. Then we could get rid of the pretense that a place that needs privies and boardwalks is a wilderness untrammeled by man.
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