Ellipse
What is wilderness? The thought hovered as I rafted a stretch of the Wapiti River from remote northeastern British Columba into northwestern Alberta. Other than our launch and take-out points, there’d been no sign of humanity. Just original forest and a wild, at times unnavigable, river. The wilderness of deep time was also represented in this unexplored stretch—95 million-year-old dinosaur footprints graced the sandstone shelves lining the riverbank, and their fossilized bones eroded regularly out of the surrounding strata. Yet despite this decidedly removed feel, I knew that above the canyon’s soaring walls, unseen from river level, were hectares of clear-cuts and myriad oil, gas and coal leases. The same notion had plagued me the year before while descending the Yukon’s Snake River, a 300-kilometre watercourse widely considered to be pristine—no roads, no residents, no development. By the standards of those who purport to “protect” watersheds—governments, industry, NGOs, individuals—the Snake was wilderness personified. Or was it? Everyone from canoe and hunting outfitters to commercial prospectors seemed to think they could have a piece of this untrammeled area without altering its fundamental nature. “Wilderness” had a lot of stakeholders.
“Our experience in nature depends on how we choose to position ourselves within it.”
The wilderness definition I’d found myself mulling on that trip was a matter of degree—not this, but that; some, but not all; us, but not
— Chili Thom, ARTIST AND ADVENTURER
There’s room for humanity in this picture, of course, if we remain a part and not apart. This demarcates the difference between our colonizers’ “out
them. As many variants as special interests concerned with it. The problem was that all such constructs and thoughts concerning them were human—relative and contextual. Perhaps real wilderness defines itself by functionality—the natural intertwining of landforms and waterways; the presence of indigenous, co-evolved plant and animal life; intact ecosystems operating the way they have since they arose. there” concept of wilderness and the participatory wilderness of indigenous peoples. I once asked Guujaaw, a renowned artist and then-president of the Haida Council, about the relationship between the cultural depth of his people and the natural/biological dimensions of Haida Gwaii. “Our rich culture reflects the richness of both the land and marine wilderness,” he’d replied. And while a sustainable existence that doesn’t outright destroy an ecosystem might preserve something akin to wilderness, there are other, more facile, ideas. I learned that years ago, while investigating the counterintuitive but widespread belief in monsters like Lake Okanagan’s celebrated Ogopogo. “Humans love mystery and discovery,” mused someone whose parents claimed to have seen the creature. “Life would be horrifically dull if we knew everything there was to know. We want to believe there are things out there that can’t be explained.” True. Our need to believe in the unexplained seems inherent in the fabric of the self-consciousness it co-evolved with. It can also be argued that nature would lose much of its identity if it were fully circumscribed—and so would we. Consider the Sasquatch investigator who’d spent enormous sums of time and money searching for the mythical beast, but who, in a moment of startling candour, told an interviewer: “It would actually be a shame if we found one. Without Bigfoot out there, there’d be no such thing as wilderness left.” Which begs the question of which is worse for humanity—the failure of investigation, or the failure of imagination? In the end we’re back to the beginning: is wilderness no human footprint or very little? Does long use and transient habitation by First Nations qualify or disqualify? Without consensus, do we simply look to nature for answers about how and what to preserve? Or do we require a new definition in this age of reclamation, where something like the historically (and currently) logged territory of massive Algonquin Provincial Park represents the largest preserved “wilderness” in Ontario. And what of piecemeal protection, such as allowing a land-scarring mine that might benefit society for only as long as the changing economics of demand last, when we know that true wilderness, the type that the Earth doesn’t make anymore, offers the wealth of connection in perpetuity? I’ve been confronting the wilderness conundrum my entire existence: from nature-addled child through professional lives as a biologist, teacher, adventurer, and writer. From searching for undescribed species in the lost forests of Vietnam only to find the bulk of them in the most heinously altered landscapes, to arguing the merits of bringing people into the winter mountains by mechanized means that seem anathema to the received view of pristine, the question lingers: What is wilderness? I’m not sure. But it’s a question we need to keep asking, before the answer is “nothing.” —Leslie Anthony
Lake of Two Rivers, Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada. MIKE GRANDMAISON PHOTO
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MLA 2017/2018
MLA 2017/2018
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