In 1883 Teddy Roosevelt went hunting in the Dakota and Montana territories and successfully came back with a trophy-sized bison head that was hung on the wall in the family’s redoubt in Oyster Bay. Roosevelt went out West because he believed that the bison herd was on the way to becoming extinct, and he wanted to hunt this splendid animal before it was too late.
Over the following four years, Roosevelt returned multiple times to the West, partially seeking a refuge to overcome his grief from the premature death of his first wife, partially to manage a cattle ranch which eventually went broke, and partially to live and hunt in what was still considered part of the American frontier and wilderness zone. He wrote numerous books and articles about living and hunting beyond the edge of civilization, and on volume, The Wilderness Hunter, remains a classic description of the frontier life to this day.
When the 11th Census was published after 1890, it was noted that the frontier was ‘closed,’ which meant there was no square mile of territory within the American continent that did not hold at least one human being staying there in a more or less permanent way. And three years later, the eminent historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a now-famous address in which he noted that the ‘closing’ of the frontier marked a fundamental turning-point in the history of the country, insofar as a country whose basic development had been based on conquering a huge frontier would now become a country whose history would be determined by how and in which ways the former frontier zone was developed and changed.
Since Turner published his essay, we have been concerned about the preservation of natural spaces because of the fear that economic development will destroy wilderness zones. And believe me, if you join the Wilderness Society, or the Sierra Club, or any of the other non-profit organizations that promote the naturalist agenda, you’ll get an email every day reminding you of the ‘threats’ to wilderness and naturalist life. And anyone who has gone through adulthood without reading either Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind should ask themselves how they missed either or both of these classic works?
Which brings to mind a question that I want to pose to the readership of KOS: Are we sure that so much of what used to be considered wilderness has really disappeared, never to reappear in its primeval, natural state?
This past weekend I tramped around the northwestern corner of Massachusetts known as the Monroe Plateau. It’s a densely-wooded, mountainous zone, settled by farmers in the decades following the Revolutionary War. Then along came then Industrial Revolution with red-brick factories springing up here and there. The factories paid a living wage, the returns from farming were marginal to none, and by the end of the nineteenth century the Plateau was reverting to a natural, uninhabited (read: wilderness) zone.
The one road that now runs through the Plateau has become an impassable, rock-strewn path; go 1,000 yards onto the woods in any direction and if you don’t mark your trail you might not get out; the 1890 Census definition of wilderness certainly applies here. I suspect that as our economy moves further away from manufacturing (sorry Donald, those jobs you shipped to Mexico aren’t coming back and you’re not about to put a 30% tax on the clothing you import) there will be many more sites throughout America that, like the Monroe Plateau, will once again become wilderness zones.
Assuming that economic development portends the permanent eradication of wilderness assumes that development operates on a trajectory that doesn’t change. But such an assumption may or may not be true. There are many places throughout the United States whose population density has declined over the last several decades as jobs moved away and then people moved away in search of jobs.
It only took four or five generations for the Monroe Plateau to go back to what it was before this wilderness area was first opened and its frontier closed. That cycle may represent more than a life span for people, but for nature it’s just a speck of time.