Wilderness as an ecosystem resource

Wilderness is an ecosystem resource. Unlike the Arctic tundra or the tropical rain forest, wilderness cannot be defined in terms of specific biological, geological, or climatological characteristics. In principle, wilderness can be any ecosystem that is relatively unmodified by human activity, but the term “wilderness” has generally been applied to terrestrial as opposed to marine ecosystems.

Background

Characterizing wilderness as a natural resource may seem strange, but the same characteristics that make coal and oil natural resources make wilderness a natural resource as well. The term “natural resource” applies to any component of the natural world valued by humans. For most of human history, wilderness was not valued as a resource. Wilderness was either a place to be avoided, inhabited by wild beasts and dangerous to humans, or it was just leftover, unused land. As a species, humans have devoted much collective energy to modifying environments to suit their desires, and wilderness is now relatively scarce. Sierra Club head and environmental activist J. Michael McCloskey has argued that wilderness is valued only when society has educated leaders, the economy produces surpluses, and wilderness is increasingly scarce. In the United States these conditions began to be met in the late nineteenth century in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. In much of the world, these conditions have not yet been satisfied.

Wilderness Definitions

The word “wilderness” means, literally, characterized by wild animals. It suggests an absence of agriculture, industry, roads, and structures—that is, of human civilization generally. Wilderness is a place, typically remote from civilization, where the natural fauna and flora have not been significantly modified by human activity. In the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, it is “where the Earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

Wilderness Values

The values that make wilderness a resource in the modern world can be grouped into three broad categories: experiential, ecological, and intellectual. Economic consequences arise directly or indirectly from each of these value groups.

To many Americans, the most obvious value of wilderness is experiential. Wilderness is a venue for hiking, hunting, backpacking, canoeing, camping, fishing, and photography. Wilderness provides recreational users opportunities for solitude, physical challenges, emotional growth, and environmental education. Adventure-education programs are widespread in North America and include Outward Bound, Wilderness Vision Quest, and the National Outdoor Leadership School. The proliferation of these programs and their preference for unmodified ecosystems is one measure of the experiential value of wilderness.

The most direct experiential value of wilderness is outdoor recreation. Data about recreational use of wilderness are fragmentary at best. The most systematic effort to estimate recreational use of national forest and national park wilderness areas in the United States found irregular growth, from about three million visitor-days in 1965 to about seventeen million in 1994. Reliable subsequent estimates are unavailable, but experts agree that wilderness recreational use continues to grow in the United States. Popular areas are often crowded, and in some areas, wilderness managers have adopted quota and reservation systems to reduce congestion.

Although wilderness is often thought to exclude commercial enterprise, wilderness recreation has important economic impacts. It supports guides, outfitters, recreational-equipment manufacturing and retailing, and ecotourism. It is not uncommon for wilderness recreationists to travel for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers to visit a particular wilderness area.

Not all wilderness users are recreational. Outside the United States and in Alaska, wilderness may provide for the subsistence needs of indigenous peoples whose economies and cultures are dependent on wildland ecosystems. In the United States, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 specifically authorized subsistence use of Alaskan parks and wilderness areas by local rural residents, mostly indigenous Alaskan tribes.

The ecological values of wilderness are less apparent but arguably more important. Wilderness contributes to critical services such as regulation of the hydrologic cycle, modification, pollination, photosynthesis, and carbon sequestration. Wilderness areas are particularly valuable for the conservation of complex natural ecosystems, preservation of biological diversity, and protection for wilderness-dependent species.

Specific wilderness ecosystems that are of global importance because of their ecosystem services are under severe threat. Tropical rain forests are probably the oldest continuously functioning terrestrial ecosystems on Earth, and they are certainly among the most biologically rich. By most accounts, they are home to more than one-half of the world’s plant and animal species. Despite their global importance, tropical rain forests are being reduced by more than two hundred thousand square kilometers per year, with a concomitant loss of species numbering in the tens of thousands. One measure of the economic importance of global wilderness as a genetic repository is provided by the increasing energy expended there by the pharmaceuticals industry in search of natural compounds with medicinal value.

The intellectual value of wilderness comes in many varieties. Wilderness has important scientific value as a natural baseline against which to measure the impact of human activity elsewhere. As relatively undisturbed ecosystems become increasingly rare, their value to science will rise.

To Americans, wilderness also has symbolic and historical value. Early Americans battled the wilderness for their very survival, and the country’s history as a people is told in terms of westward expansion and life on the frontier. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that American democracy and the American character itself had been shaped by the country’s collective wilderness experience. It is no wonder that wilderness has come to be seen as a part of US national heritage.

For many, wilderness is a place of transcendence and spirituality, and the literature of wilderness is replete with references to the sacred. During his battle to prevent a dam in the wilderness of Yosemite National Park, Sierra Club founder John Muir famously compared flooding the Hetch Hetchy Valley with desecrating a temple. Reflecting the Judeo-Christian tradition, many Western authors and entrepreneurs have invoked images of Eden in reference to wilderness.

Literature and the visual arts provide a vicarious experience of wilderness for many Americans who may never visit a wilderness area in person. Edward Abbey introduced millions to the wilderness charms of the arid West. Sigurd F. Olson gave voice to the singing wilderness of boreal-forest canoe country. The wilderness images captured by photographers from Ansel Adams to David Muench have become a part of American culture through museum exhibits, exquisite art volumes, postcards, and calendars. To many people, simply knowing that wilderness exists and that it will be available to future generations is worth something.

As with other resources, the value of what remains evolves with the changing needs of society, and it increases with scarcity. For most of the twentieth century, wilderness was valued primarily as recreational space. In the latter half of the twentieth century, increased awareness of global climate change and mass extinction increased the value humans placed on wilderness for ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and preservation of biological diversity.

Wilderness Distribution

No reliable inventory of Earth’s wilderness exists. Every ecosystem has undergone a degree of modification from human activity, and there is no agreement on the degree of modification required to disqualify an area as wilderness. Between 1987 and 2003, different studies variously estimated the Earth’s remaining wild areas (excluding Antarctica) to be 17 percent (excluding Antarctica), 34 percent, 38 percent, 46 percent, and 52 percent of Earth’s land area, with the more optimistic estimates allowing for greater ecological disturbance and human population densities of up to ten per square kilometer.

Regardless of the definition employed, the remaining relatively undisturbed lands are found disproportionately in polar, arid, and alpine ecosystems, areas relatively hostile to human habitation and relatively poor in terms of biological diversity. Rapid population growth and effective technologies for modifying the natural environment are shrinking global wilderness, and a relatively small proportion of these less disturbed lands have any kind of governmental protection. A 2002 study by Conservation International noted that only 7 percent of the area it had identified as wilderness had any kind of legal protection.

Wilderness levels across the world continued to decline throughout the 2010s and 2020s. Though wilderness conservation organizations worked across the world, ever-increasing human needs continued to push populations to clear wild lands. In 2021, studies showed that the majority of the world's remaining wilderness existed in just five countries.

Wilderness Preservation

Wilderness is preserved in varying degrees in a variety of conservation systems around the world. Although total wilderness is shrinking, protected landscapes, including wilderness areas, are growing. In 2009, the World Database of Protected Areas reported growth in protected areas generally, from about 0.4 percent of the Earth’s land area in 1964 to about 3.3 percent in 2007. The 2007 figure included about 1,650 national parks, protecting about 353 million hectares in more than 140 countries, and more than 1,300 wilderness areas covering 52 million hectares. Some of the most significant of the world’s natural areas have been granted international recognition, and thus protection, by designating them as United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Biosphere Reserves, UNESCO World Heritage Sites, or Ramsar Convention Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar Sites).

In the United States, wilderness preservation, as a concept distinct from national parks protection, was pioneered by the Forest Service in the 1920s, nurtured by conservation groups such as the Wilderness Society, and eventually institutionalized by Congress in the Wilderness Act of 1964. The Wilderness Act defined wilderness as “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.” Between 1964 and 2016, the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS) grew to 762 units comprising more than 44.1 million hectares (441,107 square kilometers, or 170,313 square miles). Most of that increase resulted from passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980. Two-thirds of the total area and most of the largest wilderness units are in Alaska.

Unlike the national park concept, the wilderness concept has not been widely emulated. Only Australia and Canada have designated significant numbers of large wilderness areas. Even in the United States, the system of designated wilderness areas fails to protect the full diversity of ecosystems. A 1988 analysis by George D. Davis concluded that only 157 of the 261 ecotypes occurring in the United States were represented in the wilderness system. In 2005, using the less specific Bailey’s province-level ecosystem classification, Gregory H. Aplet and others found 43 of 52 ecoregions represented in the NWPS, some of them poorly represented. As with global wilderness, the US NWPS underrepresents ecosystems that are biologically rich and easily susceptible to human modification. Wilderness advocates often complain that American wilderness designations protect mostly and ice.

Wilderness Management

Around the world, most wilderness is unmanaged and unprotected. In the United States, four separate agencies have the responsibility to manage wilderness areas established within their respective jurisdictions: the National Park Service manages 40 percent of NWPS lands by area, and the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management manage 33 percent, 18 percent, and 8 percent, respectively. However, the Forest Service remains the nation’s primary wilderness management agency, with responsibility for 59 percent of the wilderness area in the contiguous forty-eight states and the greatest number of wilderness users.

Legal wilderness designation imposes use and management restrictions beyond those that would otherwise apply. The Wilderness Act prohibits roads, structures, commercial development, and motor use. Exceptions are made for existing mining, grazing, and use and for the administrative necessity of the managing agencies.

Wilderness managers confront a number of difficult challenges. The central challenge is to protect wilderness ecosystems so as to allow nature to take its course, but this is much more complex than it appears. In the United States, wilderness areas serve multiple, and often conflicting, purposes. Even recreational use takes a toll, causing erosion, introducing exotic plants, and sometimes starting fires. There is an obvious tension between managing wilderness for naturalness and managing it for the pleasure of recreational visitors.

Among the tough questions wilderness managers must confront are whether recreational use should be rationed, whether to control exotic or invasive species, whether to reintroduce species—often top predators—that had been previously extirpated, whether natural fires should be extinguished or allowed to burn, and whether artificial fires should be ignited to compensate for the unnatural effects of decades of fire suppression. All these issues are complicated by the need to consider impacts outside the wilderness boundary. Nearby landowners may object to management choices designed to restore naturalness. In the United States, management decisions to allow natural fires to burn and to reintroduce wolves into ecosystems from which they were previously eradicated have provoked heated and prolonged controversies. Additional complications arise because political compromises made in Congress have allowed a number of inappropriate uses to continue within wilderness boundaries: water impoundments, developments, recreational motorboat use, and even some aircraft use. The most significant inappropriate, but perfectly legal, use is commercial grazing, which has dramatically altered many wilderness ecosystems in the western United States.

Managers are constrained in other ways. In most wilderness areas, the management of fish and wildlife is within the jurisdiction of state authorities. Finally, despite the increased difficulty and expense, managers are often expected to do most of their work within wilderness areas without motor vehicles or power tools.

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