As I was writing this letter in a cafe, two elderly women walked in, and scanned the room. One turned to the other and said, “Everyone is on computers. No one is talking. It’s depressing.” I laughed because, well, I think they were missing the point—that though we seem immersed in electronics, we actually socialize, and, yes, even have more time to talk to each other. But that’s not to say our plugged-in lives don’t extract a cost: for all that technology gives us that’s a godsend when it comes to the outdoors—better navigation, the ability to work remote and go on trips full office jobs don’t allow, clean solutions to energy, etc.—in 2014, we are more trapped in time than any of our ancestors. Everything we do is based on schedules, spreadsheets, alarms, clocks on our phones, hours budgeted. The more we make ourselves aware of each second in the day, the more we are beholden to the clock.
It’s not that way in the wilderness. When we get out in the wild we can live on “river time.” We can put our electronics away if we want and tune in instead to the rhythm of our footfalls or the current of a stream. I’m not a Luddite, and I’m not suggesting we should give up on our technological advances. I am saying that we need to escape them. And I’m thankful that we have a place where we can do that.
Fifty years ago today, an amazing bill became law, a bill that would never make it through the bile and lobbyist culture of our current Congresses. The Wilderness Act, which was written by The Wilderness Society’s Howard Zahniser, preserved land simply for its own sake. It defined these new “Wilderness” (with a capital W) areas as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
Now, in the past 50 years, and even more so, in the past 10, there has been a lot of argument about what exactly those words mean—Does Wilderness lock away land? Why are cows on Wilderness? Why are mountain bikes banned from Wilderness? But putting aside all those interpretations, I’m still amazed that Zahniser—along with other proponents of this concept of Wilderness such as Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall and Arthur Carhart—had the vision to see that places where people (and our electronics) were just visitors would be gone if not protected. I’m even more amazed they wrote and passed a bill that at its heart preserves land, not for profit or use but for its own intrinsic beauty.
A lot has changed in 50 years and it is essential that we not only celebrate this pure idea of wilderness, but also create new designations, adopt a new imagination when we think about how we take care of our vast, priceless public lands. We need to find designations that allow for mountain bikes and other motorized uses, but don’t allow for the destruction of lands for cheap gain. We need to figure out how to manage the pressure of so many people who can now, thanks in big part to their electronics, work and live closer to the wild. Those of us who love and play and find solace in these places need to find a way to communicate their importance to people who don’t feel it the same way we do. We need to… talk. We also should simply celebrate how lucky we are that we have these places outside of time.
And sometimes we just need to return to them. To head up to a Wilderness area like James Peak, or the windy ridges of Rocky Mountain National Park, or the summit of Holy Cross, or the deep silences of the Black Ridge Canyons and just lose track of time. We have been there and know how they call to us. We know we are more with them. We know we need to keep them.
Doug Schnitzspahn is the editor-in-chief of Elevation Outdoors.
