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Reflections on Endangered Experiences, December 2009 IJW

Reflections on Endangered Experiences: Returning to Our Roots, by Joseph W. Roggenbuck is published in the December 2009 issue of the International Journal of Wilderness.  To read other select articles from this and other issues, and to subscribe to the IJW please visit www.ijw.org.

Introduction

My purpose here is to reflect on a happy career as a wilderness researcher, teacher, and enthusiast, and to offer concerns, insights, and recommendations about an idea, a system of special places, and a profession that are very dear to me. This essay is organized into four parts. First, I outline my own background, and the persons, ideas, and events that spurred my lifelong excitement for wilderness. This information will help the reader make sense of and assess the value of my ideas.

It is also a thanksgiving for those who have nurtured me and a plea for wilderness visionaries to stay the course. I fear the numbers of wilderness supporters, at least in academia, in the world of ideas, scholarship, and teaching, are dwindling.

Second, I discuss the vital experiences—from the broad array of valued experiences in wilderness—that I believe we as a profession have mostly overlooked. I see these experiences as deep connections with nature resulting sometimes in (or from) transcendent experiences; some would call these spiritual experiences. Related to these experiences, and perhaps facilitators of these experiences, are solitude and primitive living. We have emphasized solitude but have done little on understanding and fostering the primitive. Given broad cultural shifts and changes in leisure activities, I think these experiences of the primitive—of merging with wild nature—and perhaps transcendence are known less than in the recent past. Hence, I call these wilderness experiences endangered.

Figure 1—Sunsets remain an attraction in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Photo by Joseph W. Roggenbuck.

Third, I turn to the major challenges of the wilderness idea and to wilderness values that have shaken my own solace during my career. Some of these challenges trouble me still; others have fostered creative growth. The first challenge was that the American ideal of wilderness, of which we were all so proud, might not be an exemplary or even a relevant model for wildland protection of the world. The next challenge was a bombshell: our wilderness idea might not be appropriate or ideal even for ourselves. Indeed, the environmental philosophers Callicott and Nelson have noted that our wilderness idea is under siege, and is “alleged to be ethnocentric, androcentric, phallocentric, unscientific, unphilosophic, impolitic, outmoded, even genocidal” (1998, p. 2). This was a real stinger and news to me (even after I looked up all those words in my dictionary). Callicott and Nelson (1998) and Cronon (1995) go on to suggest that our wilderness idea, on which our wilderness movement and our Wilderness Act (1964) are based, might not be an ideal way for humans to relate to nature, for humans to protect or enable nature (see figure 1).

Fourth, I conclude with some concerns and suggestions about the future. I come home to where I started. For me, the wilderness is a special place; it is a special experience. It endures.  Continue reading >

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