Rediscovering Wilderness
How Technology Is Un-wilding Our Solitude and Shaping the Future of Outdoor Ethics
What does wilderness mean to you? What about wildness? Please consider letting me know how you define these topics in the Comments below.
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Wilderness Ethics
The type of wilderness I enjoy is hard to define, but I know it when I experience it. It’s standing alone on a ridge late in the day on a cold December afternoon. Wind blowing, snow flying, sweat freezing on my back, and my red fingers gripping a muzzleloader as I chase a deer until sunset. It’s having to paddle a rowboat back to camp across the lake in the dark after my struggling 2.5 Suzuki outboard fails. It’s finding a streambed on a mountainside filled with so much snow that the untouched powder below my skis feels endless. These places are wild to me, and I seek them out because they offer moments of solitude, freedom, fear, and thrill.
I was first able to give these feelings context after reading Wilderness Ethics, Guy Waterman and Laura Waterman’s landmark environmental call to action, published in 1993. Even then, the Watermans were asking how technology would transform our experience of being outdoors. Thirty years later, the question is: What exactly does it mean to be in the wilderness?
Un-wilding
Humans have been systematically un-wilding the earth for a long time, but this process has rapidly accelerated in the past 150 years, as roads, electricity, cellular networks, and broadband have greatly simplified exploring and living in remote places. Today, there are many people in areas where there used to be few. In the backcountry, this influx leads to overuse and degradation of the natural landscape. One needs to look no further than crowded trailhead parking lots and trail erosion for proof.
Guy and Laura Waterman moved to Vermont in the 1970s as part of the Back to the Land movement. They homesteaded and became preeminent figures in New England’s hiking and climbing communities. The Watermans’ numerous books laid the foundation for modern backcountry ethics; their prescient observations and recommendations are as relevant today as when Wilderness Ethics was published.
Already in 1979, when their first book, Backwoods Ethics, came out, the Watermans were concerned about the symptoms of overuse they observed during their adventures in the mountains. Northern New England once had seemingly unlimited space to explore and make camp, but this limitlessness declined in the 1960s and 1970s as more people ventured out to escape the city. Recollecting an encounter with a group of Boy Scouts in the mid-1960s in the White Mountains, the Watermans described a scene that is startling by today’s backcountry standards. After realizing that the shelter couldn’t accommodate the scout troop, the boys made a new camp farther down the trail:
“. . . a beehive of activity, centering around an enormous jerry-built lean-to, large enough to sleep 14 underneath, with long fresh-cut poles (some up to six inches in diameter) lashed together and covered over with a thick matting of fresh-cut evergreen branches. . . . Just multiply that troop of 14 by several hundred other Scouting outfits, summer camps, outdoor clubs, and college outing clubs . . . try to imagine what would be left of the woods, had that pattern continued unchecked.”
The ethic the Watermans advocated for involved treading lightly: Use a camp stove, sleep in a hammock, stay off alpine vegetation, and leave your dog at home. Pack it in, pack it out. Don’t litter the woods with plastic flagging. This is basic appropriate outdoor behavior that ensures future enjoyment of unspoiled places. What happens, though, when we add to the mix technology and the promise of unlimited connectivity, even in the world’s remotest places? This question already concerned the Watermans when they published Wilderness Ethics.
“All too evident today are the thousands of affluent but nervous people, seeking some sort of synthetic physical challenge. In every outdoor activity that once demanded well-earned skills and genuine honest-to-God risk, you can now buy a guided weekend of imitation thrills on a guaranteed no-risk basis.”
And in the three decades since Wilderness Ethics was published, technology has rendered our wild places less wild, our remotest places less remote, if only virtually.
Crowds, connectivity, and safety replace the sense of wildness, danger, and the unknown that make heading to the outdoors so thrilling. I once listened to a person make dinner reservations while eating lunch at the top of Vermont’s Mount Mansfield. Did I imagine it or was she speaking louder than necessary so we could all hear the posh restaurant’s name? As our technological capabilities expand, the size of our wilderness shrinks, which raises the question: How un-wild do we want to make wilderness?
Shrinking the wilderness
The story of two people killed in a Canadian national park a year ago was widely reported. A repeated detail was that the couple used a Garmin inReach device to send an SOS that included their coordinates and the final ominous message, “Bear attack bad.” Satellite communicators aren’t new, but their cost has decreased considerably in recent years. A Cabela’s flyer I received last summer has Garmin’s inReach Mini Satellite Communicator for sale at $249.98. I bought one three years ago, and I cannot overstate the number of logistical challenges this little device has helped resolve around hunting season. My family no longer wonders where I am or if I’m OK, and my hunting buddies can quickly adapt to circumstances, saving hours of driving. Every October, November, and December, I splurge on the $64.95 a month plan, which allows me to send unlimited text messages from anywhere and to anyone on the globe.
Satellite communicators have saved the lives of even experienced outdoors people, such as a Colorado hiker who became stranded on a ledge in unpredictable conditions in Rocky Mountain National Park in the summer of 2022. No one would deny that it was a great thing that he entered the woods with a satellite beacon in his gear. But how should we feel about the guy who proposed to his girlfriend using his Garmin inReach while backpacking in the Sawtooth Range of Utah?
As advanced connectivity technology becomes ubiquitous, I look back at the Watermans’ discussions of wilderness ethics and wonder if wilderness even exists anymore. Safety and preparedness are paramount to any outdoor adventurer. But so is adventure. And if global communication via a device that fits into the palm of our hand is the outdoors enthusiast’s new normal, one wonders just how wild the wilderness can be.
A Solitude Worth Preserving
As we venture into the outdoors, do we leave no trace, or do we litter? Do we stay in designated campsites or do we make new ones, cutting trees for a single night’s stay? Do we trample the alpine vegetation, destroying it, or do we stay on the designated trail? For most stewards of the outdoors, the answers to these questions are obvious.
The more complex choices relate to the mental spaces we carve out for ourselves. Just as Wilderness Ethics was published, cell phones were on the cusp of becoming commonplace. Today, cellular coverage and social media have created a new set of challenges. Do we post the location of a remote campsite, fishing spot, or ski line on social media? Do we need 100 percent connectivity at all times? Is it even possible to get lost anymore? Is the possibility of getting lost integral to the wilderness experience?
If more people want to access public lands, that’s a good thing. But how can we accommodate the variety of interests and abilities without turning the entire globe into one big connected playground where ever-fancier gadgets replace skill? Navigating where contemporary connectivity and wilderness preservation meet is pivotal; overuse of wild spaces challenges the core of solitude and wildness, redefining the concept of wilderness.
I remember shooting a deer in a remote area before I owned an inReach. After I caught up with the buck, I rested my muzzleloader against a little striped maple, and the deer’s last few breaths dissipated. The deer had led me on a chase into an unfamiliar zone. Removing my iPhone from my pocket and sealed quarter-gallon ziplock bag, I planned to look at my map, figure out where I was, and call my buddy to help me field dress and drag the deer.
As I stood above that buck, clumped snowflakes melted on our backs. Unlocking the screen of my iPhone with numb fingers took three tries. Google Maps opened, and I started typing a text to my buddies: “Got one!” The message wasn’t sending, and the map wasn’t loading. I looked at the upper right-hand corner of the screen. No Service. Chuckling to myself, I got to work. For the next two hours, I was alone but not lonely. It was a solitude that was precious and fragile, a solitude worth preserving.
For additional reading, consider checking out Laura Waterman’s latest book, Calling Wild Places Home.
Guy and Laura Waterman were/are the spirits of consideration and the values they write about kindled part of my love of the land. I never met Guy, Laura once and her caring soft spoken manner remains with me.
I am no fan of tech in the outdoors. I have lots of opinions about location devices. We need individuals, and society at large, to want to protect vast spaces of land. We also need them to understand their impact.
Another good read, raising important questions.
Robert Mcfarlane (in Mountains of the Mind, I think) spends some time on the definition of wilderness, pointing to the "er" and its apparent origin in "deor", its Old English meaning being "beast", particularly "wild beast" - making wilderness a place of wild beasts. I like this. It makes wilderness an undomesticated, uncultivated place, non-human place, but a habited place nonetheless. It seems to subtly but deliberately avoid suggesting "barren wasteland".