Modifying wilderness designations should be a last resort

The Dec. 15-21 issue of the Taos News featured a long piece by J.R. Logan titled “Wilderness and the current geological age.” Logan writes that he hopes to start a “rational dialogue” about wilderness with this piece. While I can’t share all the thoughts this evokes in a short My Turn column, I can start — and add more later.

With the Hermits Peak–Calf Canyon Fire of 2022 freshly in mind, we should, as J.R is, be thinking about how to minimize the likelihood of such conflagrations, but I think removing or modifying wilderness designations should be far down the list of actions needed. Logan writes that there are about 160,000 acres of designated wilderness in Taos County. Total county acreage is 1,410,560. Is there not considerable work to be done on the 1,250,560 acres to reduce wildfire risk before invading designated wilderness?

These numbers raise the issue of the scale of the challenges of “managing” the portions of the county that are forest, and certainly there is much non-forested acreage in Taos County. “Restoration” of damaged forests by thinning is labor-intensive and expensive. In thinking about what needs to be done on this front, it seems to me that master-planning for forest restoration where it is needed throughout the country should be done before contending that designating wilderness sets us up for wildfire devastation and disaster. Risk prioritization would be good.

I even have an issue with the title of the piece which reflects the anthropocentric hubris of our times, accepting the idea that we have entered a new geologic age, the “Anthropocene,” in which we humans have taken on power to shape Earth, like plate tectonics, vulcanism and other geomorphological forces. I consider this assertion questionable, and worry that this might be a case of “pride goes before the fall.” But we can argue about this another time.

Logan argues that we have moved past a time when designating wilderness, as under the Wilderness Act of 1964, is a good idea and is likely to be “devastating for forests and watersheds.” In coming to his conclusions, I feel that he suggests that there was no pristine or “untrammeled” wilderness in these parts anyway because human forces, be they Indigenous or Hispanic, have long impacted the very areas federally designated today as wilderness areas. He does not understand, or perhaps accept, that “purity” was longago rejected as a criterion for designating places relatively unscathed by human activity as having “wilderness character.” There is a relative, not an absolute, wilderness value at play here. Wilderness character is defined as a place primarily free of human impact and one where one can experience nature relatively free of the manifestations of modern society. I would argue that the wilderness areas around here, like Wheeler Peak and Columbine-Hondo, limited as they are, have these characteristics. Also, who can argue that having such places today is less important than it was nearly 60 years ago, when the Wilderness Act was approved, given increased human population and all the stresses that modern society has brought us?

At its core, the idea of deciding to set aside a few places to protect wild nature is about restraint and humility. We can develop every acre and extract from it the resource values we seek, but should we? Wilderness advocates say ‘no!’ In his famous “Wilderness Letter,” the writer Wallace Stegner wrote of the wilderness idea as a ”resource in itself.” He wrote that “Being an intangible and spiritual resource, it will seem mystical to the practical-minded — but, then, anything that cannot be moved by a bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to them.”

J.R. Logan is “practical-minded” and much of what he writes in the Taos News is useful in thinking about how we should be managing our forests and protecting our communities from wildfire. As he contends, we have “trammeled” our landscapes and, in doing so, created the potential for greater wildfires than before, due to overgrazing, fire suppression and climate change, among other contributors. It is not reasonable to suggest that designating wilderness in a few places, “locking them up” as wilderness, opponents like to say, is setting these [forest] systems up for disaster.”

I will address additional points raised by this J.R. Logan article later. He writes that he does not intend to “dog on the idea of wilderness,” whatever that means, but if it means what I think it does, he is doing just that in this piece.

Onward with “rational dialogue.”