Wilderness Environment Human
This book is about our ideas about wilderness. Many people like Marsh, Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold helped to change our ideas about how wilderness and the environment is treated. But before we talk about that, we must define what wilderness is and how our ideas of wilderness and the environment came to be. Wilderness is an unsettled area, an uninhabited area, a forest. It is somewhere where nature hasn't been disturbed by human beings. Somewhere where your surroundings are not designed by humans. Most people would say that back in the day the wilderness use to be considered an evil place. A place where people felt that they didn't belong. Wilderness was unknown, disordered, dangerous. So how did we get from there to our current appreciation for the environment?
One of the people who played a key role in popularizing the love of wilderness was John Muir. When he was studying at the University of Wisconsin, he discovered the ideas of natural theology and transcendentalism. He walked a thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico, then took a ship to San Francisco and headed for the mountains. When he got to the mountains, he discovered the Yosemite Valley and stayed there. Muir proposed the idea that many of the region's spectacular landforms were formed by glaciers. This idea went against many scientific ideas of the time, but Muir was soon proven correct by his meticulous studies of the area. His ideas came from transcendentalism. He believed that nature is a mirror reflecting the Creator. He said that, Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. John Muir took from his childhood the idea that wilderness is liberating. Muir thought that wilderness was far more appealing than civilization. He believed that the only way to find God was to spend time in the wilderness. He took glory in being alone in the wilderness. What he said that was new was seeing wild nature as having the right to exist for its own sake, not just for the benefit of human beings. He rejected the idea that the world was made for the use of man.
A specific example of the steps by which these ideas have had an impact on practice would be the Hetch Hetchy Fight. Although Muir did not win the fight, his ideas definitely had an impact on it. In 1901, John Muir led the Sierra Club and a group of civic and conservation organizations in a campaign to protect the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a part of Yosemite National Park, from being filled by a reservoir. San Francisco needed a reservoir. Urban water supplies at the time were usually based on a large lake that would be protected from development so the water would be clean. Muir argued that the wild mountain park should be saved from commercialism. He said that it should be preserved. The city of San Francisco argued that human health and comfort, much less human life, were more important than wilderness preservation. After a long battle, Congress passed the Raker Act in 1913, allowing the city of San Francisco to build a dam and reservoir at Hetch Hetchy, drowning this beautiful valley. Muir didn't give up his fight though but sought to mobilize public opinion. He asked them to write letters asking Congress to preserve the land. The debate made the public much more aware of the issue of development vs. preservation.
The debate over Hetch Hetchy made the public more aware of development and preservation. People started to realize that wilderness and the environment was something to be valued and treasured, not destroyed. They started to realize that it was not the evil place that they thought it was. They began to realize that it was something beautiful. They realized that if they wanted to keep this beautiful land they would have to find ways to preserve it.
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