Pristine. That’s what I thought as I peered across a mirror-like lake at Sheridan Glacier. The stratified ice stretched into the distance, resting at the foot of great, black mountains. It seemed, at first glance, to be an unmoving, immense piece of the landscape, but faint popping and crashing noises coming from the glacier’s interior and the steady rivulets of meltwater flowing from cracks in the glacier’s surface suggested a whole different level of dynamism than the geology surrounding the ice. It was beautiful.
Pristine, however, is a human-invented term. “Natural” or “wild” are largely subjective concepts defined by people, but ironically, our presence or any sign of it is banished from wilderness. 51 years ago, we defined wilderness in this country as places “untrammelled by man” where we are allowed to be visitors, but not residents.
This definition is becoming increasingly obsolete. In a New York Times article published last year on the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Wilderness Act, Christopher Solomon writes, “we now know that, thanks to climate change, we’ve left no place unmolested and inadvertently put our fingerprints on even the most unpeopled corners of the planet.” For example, Sheridan Glacier may look wild, but like nearly every other glacier in the world, it’s receding, likely because of anthropogenic climate change.
We could throw up our hands and look at the loss of the “pristine” as a tragedy, but I think it’s more useful to think of this era as a chance to redefine our relationship with the natural world. In creating hard, dividing lines between people and nature, we artificially separated ourselves—both physically and psychologically—from wild places, sources of natural resources, and environmental problems. Maybe if we accept the inevitable trammeling of nature with the understanding that people and the natural world have a complex, intertwined, and reciprocal relationship, we can better think about and adapt to an unstable climate future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/opinion/sunday/the-wilderness-act-is-facing-a-midlife-crisis.html?_r=0
