Humanity’s relationship with nature periodically shifts between symbiotic and parasitic. We feed off nature in order to survive, and in exchange, we carefully monitor how our behavior affects the environment and the organisms within it. Responsibility is the price we pay for dominance and sentience. To help fulfill this duty, the United States government established the Wilderness Act in 1954 with the intention of becoming passive “guardians” of nature instead of encroaching “gardeners.” Countless acres of wild lands, henceforth referred to as the “wilderness,” were declared off-limits to American industry and placed under federal oversight; the United States hoped that at least some small portion of nature could be free from the influence
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Why, then, is the wilderness worth preserving, since it cannot be mined or built on? Surprisingly, its isolation is quite valuable. The wilderness is an excellent indicator of the environment’s overall health, which is not easily gauged in populated, industrialized areas due to human influence. One cannot, for example, measure the air quality of the American west coast while standing in the middle of Los Angeles. As writer Gary Ferguson states in his article, “What the Wilderness Act has taught us”, the wilderness allows us to better understand how natural systems function properly (Ferguson 2). By gauging the general health of the environment, we can make nature-conscious decisions when growing crops, planning construction projects, and otherwise using unprotected land to fulfill our needs. The connection between the wilderness and the rest of nature may seem difficult to quantify, but its existence is proven by a simple fact. There is no physical barrier between the wilderness and unprotected land. The “hard green line,” established by the Wilderness Act to segregate wild lands, is little more than a metaphor. Unfortunately, the intangibility of the barrier ultimately proved fatal to the …show more content…
Opponents of the gardener stance will argue that we should not meddle with what we cannot fully understand (Solomon 4). This is also a valid objection, but it should be noted that some of mankind’s greatest steps have been into unknown territory. The space program and the invention of the microprocessor have become landmark achievements in human history, and yet no one could have anticipated how much these advancements would benefit us. Likewise, the progress we can make in environmental sustainability if we take the initiative is inconceivable. We stand at the tipping point between evolution and stagnancy in the field of wilderness conservation, and as Darwin theorized, evolution is the more natural
Why, then, is the wilderness worth preserving, since it cannot be mined or built on? Surprisingly, its isolation is quite valuable. The wilderness is an excellent indicator of the environment’s overall health, which is not easily gauged in populated, industrialized areas due to human influence. One cannot, for example, measure the air quality of the American west coast while standing in the middle of Los Angeles. As writer Gary Ferguson states in his article, “What the Wilderness Act has taught us”, the wilderness allows us to better understand how natural systems function properly (Ferguson 2). By gauging the general health of the environment, we can make nature-conscious decisions when growing crops, planning construction projects, and otherwise using unprotected land to fulfill our needs. The connection between the wilderness and the rest of nature may seem difficult to quantify, but its existence is proven by a simple fact. There is no physical barrier between the wilderness and unprotected land. The “hard green line,” established by the Wilderness Act to segregate wild lands, is little more than a metaphor. Unfortunately, the intangibility of the barrier ultimately proved fatal to the …show more content…
Opponents of the gardener stance will argue that we should not meddle with what we cannot fully understand (Solomon 4). This is also a valid objection, but it should be noted that some of mankind’s greatest steps have been into unknown territory. The space program and the invention of the microprocessor have become landmark achievements in human history, and yet no one could have anticipated how much these advancements would benefit us. Likewise, the progress we can make in environmental sustainability if we take the initiative is inconceivable. We stand at the tipping point between evolution and stagnancy in the field of wilderness conservation, and as Darwin theorized, evolution is the more natural