Why wilderness?

American Forests, Nov-Dec, 1994 by Sigurd Olson

SIGURD OLSON was a major player in the development of natural-resources conservation in this country. He was an ecologist a half-century before that term became an environmental buzzword. As wilderness ecologist for the Izaak Walton League, consultant to the President's Quetico-Superior Committee, member of the Interior Department's advisory board on Parks, Monuments, and Historic Sites, and president of both the National Parks Association and the Wilderness Society, Olson had far-reaching influence on public policy.

His writings include probably hundreds of magazine articles and nine books, among them The Singing Wilderness, Listening Point, and Runes of the Noah.

"Why Wilderness?" which appeared in the September 1938 issue of this magazine, is vintage early Olson and not an example of his best writing. Many readers today will object to his macho chest-thumping and wince at his use of cliches (". . . adventurers ready to die with their boots on"). But as I have been reminded in the course of poring through old issues of this now-100-year-old magazine, public mores, attitudes, and language usage were far different a half-century ago.

"I named my cabin Listening Point," Olson wrote, "because only when one comes to listen, only when one is aware and still, can things be seen and heard." Listen closely, and you will hear in these words the fire and soon-to-be-eloquence of a 20th-century voyageur who would become perhaps the nation's premier champion of the wilderness concept.

BILL ROONEY

In some men, the need of unbroken country, primitive conditions, and intimate contact with the earth is a deeply rooted cancer gnawing forever at the illusion of contentment with things as they are. For months or years this hidden longing may go unnoticed and then, without warning, flare forth in an all-consuming passion that will not bear denial. Perhaps it is the passing of a flock of wild geese in the spring, perhaps the sound of running water or the smell of thawing earth that brings the transformation. Whatever it is, the need is more than can be borne with fortitude, and for the good of their families and friends, and their own restless souls, they head toward the last frontiers and escape.

I have seen them come to the "jumping-off places" of the North, these men whereof I speak. I have seen the hunger in their eyes, the torturing hunger for action, distance, and solitude, and a chance to live as they will. I know these men and the craving that is theirs; I know also that in the world today there are only two types of experience which can put their minds at peace, the way of wilderness or the way of war.

As a guide in the primitive lake regions of the Hudson's Bay watershed, I have lived with men from every walk of life, have learned to know them more intimately than their closest friends at home, their dreams, their hopes, their aspirations. I have seen them come from the cities down below, worried and sick at heart, and have watched them change under the stimulus of wilderness living into happy, carefree, joyous men to whom the successful taking of a trout or the running of a rapids meant far more than the rise and fall of stocks and bonds.

Ask these men what it is they have found, and it would be difficult for them to say. This they do know, that hidden back there in the country beyond the steel and the traffic of towns is something real, something as definite as life itself, that for some reason or other is an answer and a challenge to civilization.

At first, I accepted the change that was wrought in such men with the matter-of-factness of any woodsman, but as the years went by, I began to marvel at the infallibility of the wilderness formula. I came to see that here was a way of life as necessary and as deeply rooted in some men as the love of home and family, a vital cultural aspect of life which brought happiness and lasting content.

The idea of wilderness enjoyment is not new. Since the beginning of time poets have sung of the healing power of solitude and of communion with nature, but for them the wilderness meant the joys of contemplation. Typical of this tone of interpretation is Thoreau with his "tonic of wildness," but to him the wild meant the pastoral meadows of Concord and Walden Pond, and the joy he had, though unmistakably genuine, did not approach the fierce, unquenchable desire of my men of today. For them, the out-of-doors is not enough; nor are the delights of meditation. They need the sense of actual struggle and accomplishment, where the odds are real and where they know that they are no longer playing make-believe. These men need more than picnics, puffing streams, or fields of daffodils to stifle their discontent, more than mere solitude and contemplation to give them peace.

Burroughs, another lover of the out-of-doors, spoke often of the wilderness, but he knew it not at all. When he regretted having to leave Old Slabsides on the Hudson for the wilds of Alaska and the West, we knew there was little of the primitive urge in his nature. For him the wild had little charm.