Wilderness has been defined as 'untouched' areas of the environment, which have born no or very little human influence in their recent history. Areas of wilderness are as they are independently of any human intentions, they exhibit the non-purposive strivings of the physical world, and of natural selection. The meaning of wilderness has changed over time: pre-19th century it had a largely negative connotation of danger, the unknown, the uninhabitable. Writers like Emerson, Thoreau and Muir, however, contributed to a shift in meaning whereby the concept became romanticised, becoming associated with escape from the artificial, a 'return' to nature offering spiritual renewal and the possibility of appreciating one's place in the cosmos.
The concept of wilderness has been appealed to by the preservation movement, which is concerned with maintaining certain natural environments in a particular state, rather than mere 'sustainable development'. This movement has tended to consider certain environments in certain states to possess a non-economic value which ought to be considered before we begin a sustained engagement with these areas. 'Wilderness' has offered one way of arguing for this, the basic idea being that (increasingly scare) wild environments are valuable in some non-economic sense, and should be given special consideration as such.
Krieger (1973) has argued that wilderness will not serve the role that the preservation movement wants it to. As a social constructionist, he takes the concept to be socially contingent, and one which does not reflect any mind-independent natural kind. This has two consequences: firstly, the idea that wilderness is a human construct threatens the notion of its intrinsic value, rendering it valuable only relative to our judgements. Secondly, and relatedly, Krieger claims that social engineering could be used to adjust our evaluative responses such that all the values recognised by the romantics could be experienced - even better experienced - in artificially created faux-natural landscapes.
Krieger's view sits comfortably with the mainstream American conservationist movement, namely that environmental policies should be based around a humanistic desirdatum: that of maximising human satisfactions and minimizing human harms. In all consideration of the environment, the effects on humanity are the primary concern. From this perspective, the concept of wildnerness is important only in so far it affects human beings; if we can artificially engineer a 'wilderness experience' which ticks all the right affective boxes, then so much for non-artificial wilderness.
I find this perspective fairly persuasive, but it nevertheless leaves me feeling a little uneasy. Would I trade the exploring the Icelandic highlands for a human created 'wilderness experience'?
Katz (1992) tries to discuss this worry. Drawing an analogy with art pieces, he takes the causal history of an object to be an important part of its value; the original is more valuable than a forgery. This is a good intuition pump, but I can imagine Krieger responding that we could socially re-engineer this attitude, or even simply lie to those who enter the wilderness experience, telling a false causal historical story which would elicit the same evaluative responses. Describing the value of wilderness in terms of the way human beings value it is to firmly remain within the framework of the anthropocentric consideration of the environment, and thus always open to the possibility of a 'non wild' substitute being submitted which better meets whatever evaluative criteria have been proposed.
Could we describe the value of wilderness in any other way? Well, Katz presents a second argument in which he takes wilderness to present a claim against human technological domination. The wild 'other' is resistent to the process of amalgamation into the anthropic world, its presence reminds us of the existence of things beyond ourselves.
I quite like the idea of the wild 'other', but can it do the work the preservationists want it to? Namely, can the wild 'other' of environmental philosophy be ascribed moral standing like the 'other' of sociology, politics and ethical philosophy more broadly? Only by ascribing it moral standing can we talk of the 'domination' of the wild in a negative light. Katz suggests that wilderness has moral standing in so far as it can also be considered as a self-realizing subject, not a mere passive object. He writes:
In the context of enviornmental philosophy, domination is the anthropocentric alteration of natural processes. The entities and systems of nature are not permitted to be free, to pursue their own independent and unplanned course of development.Well, the obvious worry here is whether we can really consider 'the entities and systems of nature' as a subject. If their course of development is entirely non-intentional, unplanned, can they really be considered as such. The notion of 'self-realisation' is, to me, somewhat intentional. We have to ask: what makes the preservation of autonomy, of independent self-realisation morally desirable? Can we provide an answer which does not invoke the notion of purposive agency?
References:
Katz, E. (1992) 'The Call of the Wild', Environmental Ethics 14, pp. 265-73
Krieger, M. (1973) 'What's Wrong with Plastic Trees?', Science 179, pp. 446-55
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