Of What Avail? Rethinking wilderness in the age of high technology
by Chris Dunn
(Written May, 2015)
Of what avail are 40 freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
-Aldo Leopold
In 1922 Aldo Leopold embarked on a journey to explore the Colorado River Delta – an intricate spiderweb of channels where “the river was nowhere and everywhere, for he [the river] could not decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the Gulf. So he traveled them all, and so did we. He divided and rejoined, he twisted and turned, he meandered in awesome jungles, he all but ran in circles, he dallied with lovely groves, he got lost and was glad of it, and so were we.”[1] Leopold witnessed a lush world of bobcats, deer, raccoons, coyotes, the elusive jaguar, and all variety of birds – duck, quail, geese, cranes and egrets. At the conclusion of describing his two-week-long trip paddling, camping, and cooking freshly hunted game over fragrant mesquite fires he asks the opening question.
We are aware of course that we live in a world very different to that when Leopold explored the Delta and later wrote about it in The Sand County Almanac, first published in 1945. The Colorado today almost never reaches the sea, at times ending nearly 100 miles short. Many of the world’s landscapes, such as the Colorado River Delta, are significantly altered. Yet we also have areas legally protected in their natural state as designated wilderness. Leopold was instrumental in the creation of the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico, the first American wilderness. It would later become formally designated under the Wilderness Act of 1964 which ensures that some lands remain undeveloped and untrammeled.
We should be grateful for the Wilderness Act and other protections afforded to wilderness and wild lands. Yet the world has continued on its relentless path of change with landscapes beyond the borders of protected wilderness changing much as the Colorado River Delta has. Meanwhile the development of the Internet and its various sibling forms of information technology has altered our human world, more so than perhaps anything else in recent history. Technology, specifically information technology, does endow us with many freedoms, for instance a previously unknown convenience, instantaneity, and access to the vast wealth of knowledge and information which the collective efforts of humanity have brought online.
However as we have been swept away by the allure – the new freedoms – that these technologies provide, I fear many of us have forgotten to consider of what avail, to what end, are these technologies directed, particularly as they relate to wilderness and other wild areas. These places, largely spared from the developments present on so much of the Earth such as clear cutting or road intrusion, have nevertheless been shaped by technological developments. Perhaps less noticeable, I will argue that technology has been similarly degrading to wilderness and wildness – we are losing blank spots on the map.
Those who were not born immersed into the digital world, the still living generations of human beings who are not so called “digital natives,” and those also blessed with a certain level of awareness, often lament “the kids with their heads down in cell phones and other gadgets ignoring the world around them.” They recognize the importance of undistracted attunement that comes from spending time in nature without such distractions. However, the rising tide and growing ubiquity of technology threatens wilderness and wildness in two primary respects: first by mediating our perceptions and relationships to the world around us, and second by changing our expectations of wilderness.[2]
These changes are evident in the communication and connection that is increasingly becoming available on every corner of the Earth. Communication technology such as satellite phones, rescue devices such as personal locator beacon’s, SPOT, and hybrid technologies such as Delorme inReach are undermining the necessary approach and experience that wilderness historically required and for which designated wilderness was in part protected to house. This is perhaps epitomized most by the foolhardy rescues that have come about due to abuses of devices such as SPOT. For instance, in an infamous case in Grand Canyon National Park a group triggered their SPOT device on three separate occasions within 24 hours, once because their water tasted salty.[3] In addition to potential abuses like this, visitors may come to rely on technology inappropriately as a perceived substitution for wilderness skills, or to have unrealistic expectations of the availability of rescue, in other words a false sense of security.[4]
However, as both technology and methods and availability of rescue improve, the sense of security that technology-reliant visitors have, may become more accurate, no longer a false sense. Coupled with other outdoor technologies, technical skill will then come to replace traditional, primitive wilderness skills as the operating currency for negotiating in wilderness.[5] Furthermore even when these devices are carried and employed in the best possible ways, the very availability of rescue enabled by such devices changes the context of wilderness by, for instance, undermining the necessity of risk and self-reliance, and thus redefining the places understood to be wilderness. Leo McAvoy has proposed that some areas be set-aside as rescue-free wilderness in order to ensure that these core aspects of wilderness are preserved as well as providing opportunities “for challenge, choice, and the personal testing of oneself at the edge of life.”[6]
Similarly the concept of remoteness is losing its meaning in the technological context. Remoteness means to be far removed in space, time, or relation, yet when instantaneous connection with the rest of the world is available, wilderness can no longer be thought of as remote. Because of such interconnectedness, wilderness is becoming, even in the furthest reaches of the Arctic or Antarctic, scarcely comparable to Leopold’s Delta where he shared his “wilderness with the wildest of living fowl,” finding “a common home in the remote fastnesses of space and time; we were both back in the Pleistocene.”[7]
The underlying issue is that we are applying the logic of technology to nature and to wilderness. We are coming to expect wilderness to be unfolded before us in the same manner as a device – an object of our own creation, serving a particular purpose, “available at the push of a button.” In other words the freedoms that technology gives – the ubiquitous availability of instantaneity, safety, and ease[8] are beginning to be inappropriately expected of wilderness.
This is evident in our loss of blank spots on the map. In our era, we are perhaps more inclined to take Leopold’s quote figuratively rather than literally. Figuratively, even with a perfectly mapped Earth there is still great meaning in his sentiment. Just before Leopold asks the question “Of what avail are 40 freedoms without a blank spot on the map?” he states that “I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.” “Blank spots” can thus be interpreted in part to simply mean wild country. However, I believe that Leopold also meant this literally. For instance, he states, “The Delta having no place names, we had to devise our own as we went” and again, indicating that though some semblance of a map did exist it barely captured the actualities of the place, “On the map the Delta was bisected by the river, but in fact the river was nowhere and everywhere.”[9] Though both senses are ultimately connected as are wildness and “blankness.”
Where we are and where we are headed
Consider where we are and where we are headed. The technological transformation of mapping, and thus our approach to wilderness and wild places, is astounding. Having its roots in guide books and topographical maps; evolving into outdoor internet databases such as Summit Post, and GPS, this transformation has really only exploded recently, barely scratching the surface of its potential.
The directions along which I foresee outdoor technology and mapping heading can be divided into four primary categories, though the lines between these are sometimes blurry and as technology advances, these will become further integrated into a single phenomenon. These are: first, greater precision of mapping; second, virtualization of landscapes; third, bridging divides between the virtual and physical; and fourth, the advent of real time mapping.
Greater precision of mapping
The first needs little explanation. As time goes on, more geographic data is collected, greater opportunities exist for verification, and thus maps become ever more detailed and accurate. This trend is well illustrated in the case of the 3D Elevation Program, “an effort to chart all 50 states with airborne lasers (lidar) or radar (ifsar). The new technology permits astonishingly precise measurements of terrain, buildings and roads, waterways, coastline, even vegetation, right down to individual plants.” As an example, presently “Mars is better mapped than the state of Alaska,” a testament to its wilderness character, yet new efforts intend to apply these same methods to the state including its parks and designated wilderness. We might expect the same efforts to envelop the globe in time giving us economically valuable geographic information but forever blotting out the world’s remaining blank spots.[10]
Virtualization of landscapes
As mapping has migrated to the digital realm via GIS and other means the data is often transformed into a format that is accessible, user friendly, and intuitive. Places become reproduced as immersive graphical environments, in other words virtual. Often these virtual platforms are used for planning but at times become something of an end product in themselves, providing “virtual tours” for instance, giving one the virtual experience of flying over and into three dimensional renditions of canyons and valleys from the comfort of home.
Many digital mapping programs exist, but Google Earth and its sister products stand out most on this account, and at the moment Google is the undisputed leader in the industry. Google Earth is a virtual globe composed of maps, satellite imagery, and aerial photographs. The entire world is brought to one’s fingertips allowing seamless navigation to any point on the planet, the capacity to zoom in to any point of interest, measure precise distances, simulate flight, even navigate backwards in historical time. Google is applying the same concept to the oceans, the Moon, other planets like Mars, and the starry sky; the universe it seems is the limit.
A unique feature of Google Earth allows users to upload pictures and descriptions of places either manually or by geotagging. Hiking routes can also be submitted. This information can then be viewed by anyone who wishes, or happens to stumble upon them. One outdoor explorer had an encounter with a similar feature in National Geographic’s TOPO!:
“One day last summer, I logged into National Geographic’s TOPO! Explorer website, hoping to use its satellite view feature to scope out forest cover near a couple of Boundary Waters campsites. What the screen threw back at me, though, was a different sort of forest, made up of red and blue digital pushpins – tiny pixilated markers – planted along my proposed route like the flags of an imperial conqueror. It seems mn_hiker08 had been here before – and he wanted to tell me all about it…Weeks later, though, when I took my own trip, mn_hiker08 followed me through the Boundary Waters like Banquo’s ghost. All the landmarks seemed weirdly familiar. Everywhere I looked there were giant blue pushpins hovering above the shoreline. There’s the outcropping where mn_hiker08 camped! There’s where his daughter caught the walleye! Altogether gone was that voyageur vibe, that sense of paddling through an undiscovered country.”[11]
Even the virtual counterparts of the remotest wilderness areas are becoming populated by such photos, routes, and trip descriptions and there is no reason not to expect that eventually the globe would be wrapped in multiple layers of them.
Another unique feature of Google Earth is Street View where one can see and virtually navigate through the mapped places as they appear on the ground via photographed images, with even indoor and underwater maps and views beginning to be incorporated. Google Trails directly applies the Street View concept to protected outdoor areas such as national and state parks. Examples abound including Grand Canyon, Galapagos Islands, and a partnership with California State Parks. It also allows users to have access to detailed Trimble GPS-based interactive hiking information that includes highlighted sites and features, directions to trailheads, difficulty ratings, even audio and video, much of this content made available in partnerships with magazines such as Backpacker and Bicycling. “Essentially, anytime, anywhere you can launch Google Earth, you can view hundreds of hikes that have already been logged and completed.”[12] These can then be automatically uploaded to a mobile phone. Google’s aim is “to stitch together a comprehensive view of the world”[13] where all places including wilderness become virtually encompassed in such a way. It is worth noting that Nature Valley, the granola bar company, has a similar trails program.[14]
Meanwhile as Google is pursuing its aims of migrating the entirety of the Earth (and beyond) into the virtual realm, the National Park Service has less ambitious but similar aspirations for some of those areas held under its protection, introducing its own line of virtual tours. Examples include eTours and eHikes at parks across the country, and iHike[15] which presents virtual hikes of National Park trails aimed at a younger audience for educational purposes. You can even eClimb Grand Teton: “Ever wonder what it might feel like to climb and actually stand atop the Grand Teton? You may now make this exhilarating trek without the physical effort, sweat and anxieties associated with such a lofty goal and experience the Grand's 13,770-foot summit via our eClimb.”[16]
Granted, some parks are more realistic in their presentation of an eHike: “while we realize there is no substitute for actually lacing up the boots, hitting the trail, smelling the wilds of nature, and working up a sweat to reach your final destination, eHikes is a tool that will…hopefully help you reconnect and relive your experiences in Glacier National Park. We also recognize that not everyone is able to reach different destinations in the park, so this provides those individuals with the opportunity to see, and maybe imagine, what a trip into Glacier's wilderness is like.”[17]
These seem deliberately constructed as a means to maintain interest in and support for the parks in the age of high technology. Clearly it is important to preserve these places and public will is necessary to accomplish this, but at what cost? What message are we presenting about nature and about wilderness? How is this contributing toward shifting baseline standards of what wilderness is and ought to be, especially considering that wilderness is meant to be protected in perpetuity.
Naturally there are technical hurdles. Much of Google’s imagery on Google Earth, especially in remote locations and on some islands ranges from poor resolution to nonexistent. However, no great leap of imagination is required to predict these hurdles being cleared eventually giving us an entire globe of high resolution, reliable imagery. As these trends continue we should expect to see totally replicated virtual wilderness environments in the future, perhaps being integrated into games, simulations, movies, and other media.
Bridging divides between the virtual and the physical
As virtual environments are expanded and improved, so too are devices which will be able to take greater advantage of these. While portable mapping devices such as GPS are currently the most common and rudimentary example of this, future devices will allow not just for armchair virtuality, but will integrate the virtual into portable outdoor technology. Google Maps is already among the most popular mobile apps. Google (and others) also have dreams of bringing access to the internet to all places via low lying satellites.[18] Yet universal internet access is already possible with SPOT’s connect device that allows smart phones to connect to satellites.[19] Now you can update your Facebook status anywhere, even in the most “remote” wilderness. Meanwhile cellular coverage encroaches into wilderness via towers along its boundaries.
The combination of improved devices and connection will allow for nearly seamless access to the full realm of data at all times and in all places. As the virtual becomes ubiquitous in tandem with ever-present, ever-connected devices, the eventuality is a bridging of the divide between the virtual and the physical. This could take many forms but is epitomized by augmented reality, where virtual imagery, technological information, and possibly even heightened and expanded sensation is integrated seamlessly into perception of the surrounding physical environment, often by devices such as Google Glass.
Not only is rudimentary augmented reality currently a reality, but it has already been applied to the outdoors. Augmented Outdoors has a Peaks App for smartphones that identifies peak names, elevation, and distances;[20] Spyglass integrates compass, GPS, altimeter, speedometer, sextant, and tracking of sun, moon, and stars;[21] and RideOn are ski goggles with similar features. These are very rudimentary and pale in comparison to future possibilities. All of the power of Google Earth and beyond may soon be made available as a part of one’s day-to-day interactions with the outdoors. Applications, some of which already exist, could someday range from identification of features such as botany and constellations to enhanced sensation including auditory, while the devices used to carry this will become increasingly invisible – already surface projected augmented reality, as well as contacts and direct retinal displays, are in development – and biological integration is likely to follow.
The advent of real time mapping
Carrying this trend into the future we can expect as a realistic possibility the integration of not just prerecorded data into our maps and virtual devices, but access to real time data. Google Maps currently integrates this in its traffic mapping feature, utilizing so called “meta-data,” in this case information gathered from users’ cellular phones. Already in wilderness and protected lands there exist all variety of sensors and data collectors, measuring river flows, animal movements, tides, weather, soundscapes, and seismic activity, just to name a few. Maps could easily soon integrate such measures in real time. There already exist wildlife collars capable of sending real time data via satellites. Additional future possibilities applicable to the outdoors might include trail conditions, integration of live satellite or drone imagery, even the locations of other people; essentially anything that can be tracked, measured, and compiled into a map, which barring technical restraints for which we are constantly innovating ways to overcome, is potentially everything.
We are weaving together a global digital nervous system with the ultimate aspiration (whether or not fully realizable) of a totalizing God-like perspective on all things and places; in other words to map omnipotence; to make all things and places “transparent.” Philosopher and technological theorist, Albert Borgmann, writes of transparency thus:
“In the hands of experts, technological information promises to render reality not just perspicuous or surveyable but altogether transparent. Transparency seems to be the perfection of information about reality. Natural information makes the world perspicuous. It opens reality up, but it does not encompass it. The world remains endlessly open and eminently contingent. The signs of natural information, moreover, are transient. They come forward and recede and are unavailable to record and transport information. Though traditional maps could encompass a region, the globe, and even the universe, they failed to penetrate and dominate reality. Information had to be wrested laboriously from heaven and earth, and once committed to paper and constituting a map, the information presented a rigid and limited aspect of reality...The genius of information technology consists in making information pliable by digitizing it, making it abundantly available by collecting and storing astronomical amounts of it, and putting it at our disposal through powerful processing and display devices. When it comes to information about reality, geographical information systems (GIS) are the paradigm of technological information…cartographers…set out to render reality transparent.”[22]
Borgmann suggests that information technology [as epitomized by GIS] aspires to “overwhelm the contingency of reality;” to “reveal its very secret.”[23]
In Borgmann’s view, to make a thing transparent is to convert it into technological information, which serves to make the thing available and consumable – to commodify it. The virtual is the highest level of commodification, totally separating the end product from the contingency – the uncertainty, skill, and difficulty, traditionally required to attain the fruits of reality. “Technology as a way of taking up with reality has put the power of technological information in the service of radical disburdenment. At the limit, virtual reality takes up with the contingency of the world by avoiding it altogether. The computer, when it harbors virtual reality, is no longer a machine that helps us cope with the world by making a beneficial difference in reality; it makes all the difference and liberates us from actual reality.”[24]
Rethinking Wilderness
What are we accomplishing here? Why are we doing this? Of what avail? Compare the technological approach to wilderness to the following from John McPhee’s Alaska classic Coming into the Country:
“Waldrop is a Brooks Range guide, who leads long journeys, mainly on foot, on both sides of the Arctic Divide. Much of the time, he does not know exactly where he is. Maps lack detail, he explains; many mountains are unnamed. He generally has a fair idea of his position, within eight miles or so, but he finds it impossible to plan things more precisely than that, and people who expect to know just where they are and to follow an exact schedule, who are (in his words) ‘set in their ways’ are likely to be unhappy on such trips, and unenjoyable company. Waldrop...does not want his Brooks Range any other way. He wants it imprecise. He wants to preserve the surprises.”[25]
Or to Leopold’s own approach in the Delta “Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander.”
Is not Waldrop’s approach the sort of wilderness that we ought to be actively seeking to preserve? I believe that it is, while admitting that it is not the only approach to wilderness. At times we may have the privilege of exploring new and sizeable terrain like that found in the Brooks Range, while at other times we will be in a wild place that we are intimately familiar with, having spent time in direct contact with it. Both types of experience are threatened and in order to preserve them, wilderness needs to be reconsidered in the light of high technology, especially information and communication technology. Wilderness is one of the few places on Earth that we have deliberately chosen to restrain ourselves and our technologies. We have chosen to keep out roads, structures and mechanization. Can we apply this same restraint to our digital technologies? Wilderness should be a place where we leave our divine powers behind, where we respect the mysterious and sacred quality of these places, where we re-immerse ourselves in the world as our ancestors knew it, and feel what they felt.
Our understanding of wilderness should continue to account for the same threats – still ensuring that “an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition,”[26] and including the same forms of restraint, but also taking into account “an increasing population, accompanied by expanding technological power and growing digitalization, does not monitor, map, and virtualize, or otherwise seamlessly connect via communication and navigation technology all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands remote, unknown, untransparent, left unto themselves in their truly primitive condition.”
We can no longer rely on the inherent shortcomings of technology as checks to preserve wilderness in its primeval state. We should assume that technological hurdles will be overcome, that in the future technological capabilities will be exponentially greater than they are at present, that information technology will be ubiquitous in its reach, and seamless in its application.
Therefore I propose that a legal and ethical framework should be codified that explicitly calls for a wilderness deliberately conceived in the light of high technology; a wilderness that limits the technological information available and that limits the use, by both users and managers, of certain classes of technologies that are detrimental to the spirit and intent of the Wilderness Act, yet is flexible enough to adapt to future changes in technology. This could take the form of either an amendment to the Wilderness Act, a new Digital Wilderness Act that might create a new subset of wilderness, or a shift in policy by those agencies responsible for managing wilderness. An additional educational component would also be valuable. These should all be considered as possibilities and should be implemented rapidly in order to keep pace with changes in technology. I would argue also that such measures ought to also be considered in areas outside of designated wilderness.
In this article I focus solely on information technology as I believe it to be one of the most significant threats among the various forms of technologies utilized in relation to wilderness, though I do realize that similar criticisms could be extended to other forms of technology and advanced outdoor equipment. I also realize the inherent difficulties of actually implementing and enforcing this idea. For instance, questions like what is to be the precise line that delineates those technologies allowed and those forbidden; and practical issues like how to keep such technologies out of certain areas, and how to effectively manage and study wilderness without falling into the temptation of fully utilizing the power of technology. Nevertheless I believe that it can and should be done.
The framers of the Wilderness Act could not have foreseen the precise lines along which technology would develop. For instance, in 1964 when the Act was passed, computers were expensive - costing millions of dollars, massive – sometimes filling multiple rooms with less power than today’s desktops and smartphones. Mobile phones did exist but were designed for use in a vehicle; they were expensive and rare, weighed 40 pounds, and had a rotary dial. Satellite technology was barely in existence. It wasn’t until 1965 that global satellite communications really began.[27] This was also the year that Gordon Moore of Intel coined his famous observation known as “Moore’s Law” which correctly predicted the exponential increase in computing capacity which has developed since that time.
Howard Zahniser and others at the time would have had some conceptions of the technological possibilities rapidly developing around them, and though limitations on technological power beyond those placed on mechanized recreation may not be explicitly codified in the Wilderness Act, nevertheless the spirit of the Act is in accordance with such restraint. This is seen in two primary respects, first in its call for primitive recreation and second in its mandate that wilderness be left untrammeled.
The Wilderness Act states that wilderness must have “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.” Primitive can generally be defined as: pertaining to past or original conditions. We already see in this definition a necessary contrariness to technology. This should be expressed in terms of the primitive use of both our bodies and our minds. The Wilderness Act already creates a space for the former, hence its limitation on mechanization. Likewise we should create deliberate spaces that limit our access to technological information, allowing our minds to return to their primeval state of full unmediated awareness of our immediate encompassing environment. Exercising this kind of restraint while in wilderness will include a degree of fear and humility, both good and necessary elements of the experience.
Joseph Roggenbuck, working from the historic writings of Bob Marshall, Aldo Leopold, and others on the subject, states that “primitive experiences represent immediate and deep contact with raw nature without the clutter and aid of modern conveniences.”[28] Marshall himself defines wilderness not only as a primitive environment, but states that “it requires anyone who exists in it to depend exclusively on his own effort for survival.”[29]
Considering the above observations and definitions of primitiveness together, along with common understandings expressed by wilderness thinkers and managers, three primary qualities of wilderness that information technology and mapping often disrupt are remoteness, self-reliance, and raw or unmediated experiences of wilderness. High technology removes the necessity for primitive recreation and as I will argue later, also degrades and threatens outstanding opportunities for primitive recreation. Additionally it endangers primitive experiences of wilderness, and ultimately the primitive character of wilderness.
The Wilderness Act also states that, “a wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.” Untrammeled is an uncommon term and so requires a bit of explanation. “A ‘trammel’ is a net used for catching fish, or a device used to keep horses from walking. To trammel something is to catch, shackle or restrain it. Untrammeled means something is free or unrestrained. So, wilderness areas are to be unconstrained by humans. Zahniser defined untrammeled as ‘not being subject to human controls and manipulations that hamper the free play of natural forces.’”[30] Untrammeled is unrestrained, uncontrolled, and thus potentially unpredictable and even dangerous[31]. Untrammeled is also closely akin to the word wild, the root word, and inseparably at the core, of wilderness.
This requirement that wilderness areas remain untrammeled is threatened by technology, both presently and in the future. In part because there is a crucial missing link in our understanding of the relationship of technology to wilderness and nature: technological information is deeply connected with control. As quoted above, Borgmann writes that modern mapping (and information technology more generally) works to make reality transparent and thus to “penetrate and dominate reality.” Mapping in its increasingly immense precision, virtualization, latent possibilities for real time, and as utilized in devices like those that provide augmented reality, works to make the unpredictable predictable, the uncontrollable controllable, to dominate wilderness by making it easily available and consumable as a commodity.
The transparency brought about by technology and mapping does not directly hamper “the free play of natural forces” in the same way that a dam hampers a river. The process is more subtle, but nevertheless threatens the Wilderness Act’s mandate to preserve wilderness untrammeled. It does this in three main respects. First, the means required to attain technological information including installations, overflights, digital surveillance, the sedation or capture of wildlife in order to collar or install sensors, and other such techniques, are often inherently invasive and inhibiting, and thus a direct form of trammeling.
Information and control
Second, technological information forms the basis for control. Though mapping and information technology may not control directly, once something is made transparent – once technological information is procured – it is easily exposed to the possibility of direct and precise forms of control. The unpredictability of wilderness is made predictable, and thus controllable through technological information. This pattern is found in the larger relationship of science to technology. While there is likely no necessary connection between the possession of technical or scientific knowledge and its technical application, there are countless historical examples of this occurring. Einstein’s breakthroughs in the realm of physics, mathematically demonstrating the relationship of mass and energy, were used within a few decades to create nuclear weapons and energy. Genetic engineering was applied within a century after the advent of genetic theory, but especially soon after the exact mechanisms were discovered, namely the structure of DNA.
Though wilderness has deliberately been set-aside as an area meant to be apart from control and manipulation, though not necessarily apart from influence, the larger patterns that shape our world are powerful and subtle and thus it would be difficult to expect wilderness to be an exception to this rule without deliberate changes in ethics, laws, and policies. Already there are calls for direct manipulation and control in wilderness for the cause of restoration, both to mitigate prior ecological damage such as fire suppression, invasive species, and predator control, or to compensate for outside anthropic disturbances such as those caused by climate change or air and water-born chemical pollution.[32] For example, dumping lime in streams to compensate for acid precipitation, transporting members of habitats northward to compensate for predicted habitat shifts caused by rising temperatures, or dipping frogs in antibacterial solution.[33] Naturally, the basis for this manipulation will be the scientific data garnered from wilderness, and the models built from this information.
Commodification of wilderness
Lastly and perhaps most importantly, technological commodification radically threatens the future prospects of preserving wilderness untrammeled. It does this by making wilderness easily available and consumable. Wilderness is a place but it is really only known as an experience. To enter into wilderness is to immerse into its depths. Technology however seeks to procure only certain aspects of wilderness while leaving behind others. The place is decoupled from the necessities that entering into it once required. The skill, risk, difficulty, and self-reliance once required to survive and navigate within wilderness is increasingly removed, leaving a superficial shell that does not fully engage. This is part of what it means to commodify. “We believe we make contact with the wild, but this is an illusion. In both the national parks and wilderness areas, we accept a reduced category of experience, a semblance of wild nature, a fake, and no one complains.”[34]
We have previously seen from Albert Borgmann that the virtual is the final result of commodification, a commodity in its purest form. We have also seen in the technological examples detailed above that this pattern of commodification as the virtual is taking place in the wilderness context. Virtual renditions of wilderness are being created and will continue to improve in their immersiveness while the actual wilderness becomes more akin to the virtual in its ease and availability, and in the integration of the virtual into the actual via devices such as augmented reality. As this line blurs, the lines of where control does or ought to end blur as well.
The collective effect of this commodification of wilderness is to undermine that which makes wilderness stand out as something full and complete unto itself, as a wild otherness. Once something is commodified it no longer reveals itself as independent from human artifice – it fades into the background as yet another object available for manipulation, a device.[35] This process of commodification lubricates the path to control. If wilderness is no longer revealed in the depths of its being, experienced and understood to be wild and untrammeled, then it becomes a smaller step to justify various forms of manipulating, controlling, or trammeling.
Ultimately to protect wilderness we need to preserve the inherent capacity of wilderness to produce the wilderness experience that includes the aforementioned components like risk and remoteness. For wilderness to be protected wild and untrammeled it must be experienced as such by those who choose to engage with it. The experience component is crucial. Wilderness is valuable in and of itself apart from human use and visitation; however, like it or not, wilderness’ fate also fully depends on us and thus “If the experience opportunities were gone there would likely be no wilderness areas today.”[36] Similarly if a degraded, commodified experience of wilderness becomes the default then untrammeled wilderness will likely not persist into the future.
Due to its adverse effects on the untrammeled quality of wilderness and its disruption of primitive recreation, the technological phenomenon as expressed especially in information technology and mapping is thus contrary to the spirit of the Wilderness Act if not the explicit language codified therein. Therefore adopting legal or ethical frameworks or management policy that limits or prohibits certain types of technologies is in accordance with the Wilderness Act. However, because the Wilderness Act was written in a time prior to certain technological developments, frameworks in place to protect wilderness will need to be updated and modified to explicitly address high technology. In order to effectively protect wilderness in perpetuity as mandated by the Wilderness Act, we should act now.
Response to possible rebuttals
I will concede that information technology in its present manifestation does allow an individual to choose what virtual maps to consult or what devices to bring or to leave at home in an attempt to have a wilderness experience. Further, one might argue, to set up any legal prohibitions or even to officially discourage usage of whatever devices one wishes is a needless prohibition that impinges on the freedom of the individual to enjoy wilderness as they choose. This argument, however, fails in four crucial respects.
Long-term technological developments
First, it does not account for the long-term considerations of the development of information technologies, which will undoubtedly become increasingly more ubiquitous, powerful, and in a sense, inescapable, perhaps someday becoming so ingrained into our everyday mode of mental and physical being that we lose all sense of any other possibilities, and I believe that this would be a negative outcome not only for us but for the natural world that wilderness areas are meant to protect. We must consider the long-term trends of technology, namely its ever-increasing power and ubiquity. Again, wilderness is meant to be protected for perpetuity.
Shifting baselines
Second, even in the current context of technology where I as an individual can choose to leave my devices at home, as information technologies, both at home and in the outdoors, becomes the new norm this shifts the baseline expectations for how people ought to operate in wilderness. For instance, if the mass of people are bringing GPS and satellite phones into the wilderness, this becomes normalized, shifting popular perception to the position that by not relying on such technologies one is being negligent and foolhardy. Once popular expectation shifts, land management agencies may begin to encourage or even require these tools. Furthermore, a part of this process is that technological skill replaces wilderness skill and though there may technically still be opportunities, the combination of pressures from popular and agency expectations impedes the Wilderness Act’s requirement that “outstanding opportunities” for primitive recreation be available.
Changing places
Third, ignoring for a moment possible agency expectations or requirements, consider hypothetically that the mass of individuals visiting wilderness do so with the increasingly powerful aid of various information technologies that ensure reliable rescue, communication, and navigation. In this case part of what makes an area wilderness or wild has been lost. As an example, I as an individual can still choose to walk up New Hampshire’s Mt Washington, but I am much less inclined to so given that a road leads to the top and great crowds amass there for that reason.
Similarly, if wilderness loses its remoteness, its inherent difficulty, its inherent risk, its necessity for skill, the required assumption of the responsibility for one’s own fate, and thus its command of one’s awareness, the place itself has changed, not merely one’s individual experience of the place, and for the worse. Thus someone who wishes to engage with a wilderness whose very nature necessitates risk, skill, difficulty, and responsibility is increasingly unable to do so.
Those places protected as wilderness should be such that it is for the most part necessarily conducive to certain requirements and thus a certain type of experience[1]. In general I believe it is a mistake to do as some wilderness thinkers have done and decouple those places protected as wilderness from the “wilderness experience.” Though this might be useful at times, such a split threatens to isolate the experience as a kind of commodity that can be consumed independent of the fullness of reality and necessities that follow from a physical place.[37] When wilderness no longer necessarily produces a kind of experience, it is no longer the same place.
Information technology changes those places protected as wilderness by undermining the qualities formerly inherent to such places such as risk and remoteness. In addition it can also produce physical effects on the ground. First, it could potentially lead to more people entering wild or previously less accessible areas leading to greater impacts, in part due to creating a better sense of security, whether or not this sense is fully accurate. Admittedly this may be a mixed blessing, since in a democracy wilderness needs popular support, and this may be the better alternative than having people staying home playing video games or watching movies. Secondly, precision mapping can create or concentrate impacts by highlighting particular features, in turn drawing people along particular routes and to particular locations. Trails already do this as well, but technology inflates this, drawing further attention to “highlights.” However the largest effect will be on trail-less areas.
Trail-less wilderness allows opportunities for one of the fullest wilderness experiences possible, allowing visitors to wander like a wild animal across a wild landscape giving the total freedom to choose a route and campsite, taking one’s cues directly from the landscape rather than from human direction.
“What struck me most was the experience of hiking without a trail. Every step was a decision, every detail a guide. I was forced to be more aware of and immersed in the natural world. The result was a profound sense of engagement and place.”[38]
Such wilderness is nearly devoid of modern human artifacts like signs and bridges, necessitating route finding and river crossing. Though far less common in the contiguous United States, the majority of Alaska’s wilderness is trail-less and considering that Alaska has nearly half of all designated wilderness this is significant.
Guide books, Backpacker Magazine articles, and internet databases are already having an impact, but pale in comparison to the potential inherent in high technology. Joe Van Horn points out that the combination of GPS and the internet threatens to destroy the trail-less quality of some of Alaska’s wilderness, particularly in popular parks such as Denali by drawing people along particular routes which concentrates impacts like litter and erosion and over time may erode trails and may eventually necessitate designated hardened campgrounds and latrines,[39] the sum total being to erode the wilderness experience and wilderness character of these places. The technological developments I outlined previously such as increased accuracy and virtualization threaten this even further.
Information technology not only changes expectations of wilderness, but changes the place, thus changing the experience that flows from the place.
In accordance with the spirit of Wilderness
A fourth failure of the argument that the decision to choose what devices to utilize in wilderness, or what types and how mapping software and information is used, should be totally left up to the individual, is that wilderness, particularly that protected by the Wilderness Act, is by definition a place meant to limit certain types of human artifact and activity, and to maintain the inherent capacity of the place to produce a wilderness experience. Prohibiting or discouraging against the use of certain technologies is a form of limitation and thus one could argue an encroachment on freedom, much as the prohibition against mechanization limits the capacity to achieve certain speeds overland. However both types of prohibition create a space for a different type of freedom – ultimately self-reliance – forcing an encounter with true freedom. It is thus in the spirit of the Wilderness Act to actively discourage or legally prohibit the use of certain technologies.
The individualized ethic of choosing to leave one’s devices at home is insufficient to protect the increasingly fragile wilderness experience into the future, especially as an inherent part of the places protected as wilderness, thus changing and threatening the places themselves. Wilderness traditionally included the understanding that the experience was an inherent aspect of the place, albeit once developments and mechanization were barred. High technology acts to commodify wilderness, in part by separating wilderness from its traditional requirements.
Conclusion
Technology is powerful – it is the great hope of the world’s economy. Technology is seductive – in its promise of ease and comfort. Meanwhile, in large part due to technology, we are increasingly losing our collective memory of the place that wilderness was, and the experience that entering into it necessitated. We are also losing the necessary humility that comes from feeling our own limitations in the context of nature, of coming to terms with a world larger than ourselves and our technologies. This comes from intimate, direct personal experience with the wild world. Preserving blank spots on the map and encountering the world as unmediated as possible by devices is integral to preserving and maintaining our sense of reality in the most basic sense: the ground beneath our feet, the wind in our hair, sensual contact with an actual physical external world that is not an instrument of humanity.
New vision is granted to us when we view the world phenomenologically; no longer simply as a repository of information to be mined and compiled in maps and databases, but as a fully living, immersive, perhaps spiritual world in which we must understand ourselves in relation to its entirety, as a mortal being perched between earth and sky.[40]
Not only is this important for us to experience but it is crucial for the preservation of the more-than-human world of nature and wilderness. For once we have such experiences of nature, we come to understand our place in things, come to understand that we belong to the Earth, rather than the Earth belonging to us. Such a revolution in understanding ourselves in relation to nature is absolutely necessary to truly preserve the wild nature of our world, and ultimately ourselves.[41]
Shortly before this essay’s opening quote, Leopold writes, “man always kills the thing he loves,” and afterwards continues, “By this time the Delta has probably been made safe for cows, and forever dull for adventuring hunters. Freedom from fear has arrived, but a glory has departed from the green lagoons.”[42] Our technological workings including our increasing reliance on information technologies and mapping is doing precisely this – keeping our fears at bay, but dulling our world and, in crucial respects, us.
Though Leopold draws a rhetorical line between freedom and blank spots on the map, in fact perhaps we need these blank spots in order to preserve freedom – both for wilderness and for ourselves. In an era where our lives are becoming increasingly digital, and our digital lives are becoming increasingly tracked and monitored by government and private entities; where the same mechanisms of espionage are employed in wilderness to track and monitor wildlife and other aspects of the physical and biological world; where the world is becoming increasingly known, mapped, made utterly transparent; we need even more these spaces free from such incursions.
The “blank” to which Leopold refers – the unknown, mysterious quality of wilderness, in part captured by the term wildness is in some ways a symbol for ourselves. We will only truly respect, and truly preserve, that nature which we recognize as having its own agency, in other words as being self-willed, in other words that which is wild.
Wildness is only evident when the mysterious core of a thing is preserved and allowed to operate according to its own will, its own internal dynamic of freedom. Totalizing transparency is a basis for control and is thus contrary to such preservation and allowance. It undermines the wildness of both wilderness and ourselves, which in turn undermines preservation. Blank spots are thus integral to preservation – In wildness is the preservation of the world.[43]
Science and technology, as immensely valuable, powerful, and indispensable as these are in our modern context, are at a certain level invasive and destructive, and thus ought to have their limitations. All other values ought not be subsumed to them. All things ought not to be objects of total knowledge and made totally transparent for a universal audience as the internet and information technology uniquely allows. Let there be a core of ourselves: internally, and of our world: externally, that remains free from such invasions – that is a mystery, a soul, a blank spot on the map.
[1] Of course one can enter into a protected wilderness and have all variety of experiences within a given range of possible experiences. For instance one may go with friends or alone, to rock climb or to walk. My intent here is not to dictate the exact type of experience one may have, but to draw general limits is a necessity in light of technological development.
[1] Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford UP, 1966. 150. Print.
[2] Borrie, Bill. “Impacts of Technology on the Meaning of Wilderness.” USDA Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-14. (2000): 87-88. Web. 7 Apr. 2015.
[3] Burnett, Jim. “This Third Time Was Anything But Charming – SPOT Misuse at Grand Canyon National Park.” National Parks Traveler. 21 Oct. 2009. Web. 7 Apr. 2015.
[4] Pope, Kristen and Martin, Steven R. “Visitor Perceptions of Technology, Risk, and Rescue in Wilderness.” International Journal of Wilderness, vol 17.2. Aug. 2011: 19-26, 48. Web. 7 Apr. 2015
[5] Borrie, “Impacts of Technology on the Meaning of Wilderness.”
[6] McAvoy, L.H. “Rescue-Free Wilderness Areas.” In, Miles, J. & Priest, S. (Eds.). Adventure Education. 1999. 325-330; 328. State College, PA: Venture Publishing. Print.
[7] Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. 157.
[8] Borgmann, Albert. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. 130. Print.
[9] Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. 150.
[10] Montgomery, Lori. “Map Experts, Pilots Aim to Improve Alaska's Outdated Charts with Technology.” Fairbanks News-Miner. 16 Oct. 2014. Web. 7 Apr. 2015.
[11] Kevin, B. “The Crux: Antisocial Climber: One Man's Plea: May Online Adventure Networks Byte the Dust.” Montana Headwall, Spring 2010, 58, 56. As quoted in “Threats to Wilderness by Technology.” Wilderness.net. Web. 7 Apr. 2015.
[12] Fox, Larry. “Hikes on the Fly.” Google Official Blog. 12 Apr. 2007. Web. 7 Apr. 2015.
[13] Nieva, Richard. “A Walk in the Park: Google Maps Hits the Trails in California.” CNET Mag., 7 Oct. 2014. Web. 7 Apr. 2015.
[14] Newman, Andrew Adam. “Marketers Promoting a Granola Bar Hit the Trails in National Parks.” The New York Times., 7 Mar. 2012. Web. 7 Apr. 2015.
[15] I Hike Virtual Trails. National Park Service. n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2015. <www.nps.gov/webrangers/ihike>
[16] Summit the Grand Teton Via an eClimb Virtual Experience. National Park Service, Grand Teton National Park. 13 Feb. 2015. Web. 7 Apr. 2015.
[17] eHikes. National Park Service, Glacier National Park. n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2015. <http://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/photosmultimedia/ehikes.htm>
[18] Barr, Alistair and Pasztor, Andy. “Google Invests in Satellites to Spread Internet Access.” The Wall Street Journal. 1 Jun. 2014. Web. 7 Apr. 2014.
[19] Stevenson, Jason. “Prof Hike: The End of Off-the-Grid. Spot's new gadget adds satellite reception to smartphones anywhere.” Backpacker Magazine. n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2015.
[20] Augment your world with the new Peaks 3.5! Augmented Outdoors. n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2015. <www.augmented-outdoors.com>
[21] Steele, Billy. “Spyglass Beefs Up iOS Navigation with Augmented Reality for the Great Outdoors.” Engadget.com. 20 May 2014. Web. 7 Apr. 2015.
[22] Borgmann, Albert. Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 168. Print.
[23] Mullins, Phil. “The Problem of Meaning and Borgmann's Realist Response.” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, vol. 6.1. Fall 2002. Web. 7 Apr. 2015.
[24] Borgmann, Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. 183.
[25] McPhee, John. Coming Into the Country. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977. Print.
[26] PL 88-577
[27] Whalen, David J. “Communications Satellites: Making the Global Village Possible.” NASA.gov. NASA History Division. n.d. Web. 7 April 2015.
[28] Roggenbuck, Joseph. “Managing for Primitive Recreation in Wilderness.” International Journal of Wilderness, vol 10.3. Dec. 2004: 21-24, 22. Web. 7 Apr. 2015.
[29] Marshall, Robert. “The Problem of Wilderness.” The Great New Wilderness Debate. Ed. J. Baird Callicot and Michael P. Nelson. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998. 185. Print.
[30] “What is “Wilderness”?” Wilderness.net. Web. 7 Apr. 2015. <www.wilderness.net/NWPS/WhatIsWilderness>
[31] McAvoy, Rescue-Free Wilderness Areas.
[32] Smith, Jordan Fisher. “The Wilderness Paradox.” Orion, vol 33.4. Sep./Oct. 2014. Web. 7 Apr. 2015.
[33] Alpert, Peter. “Managing the Wild: Should Stewards be Pilots.” and Landres, Peter. “Managing Wildness in Designated Wilderness.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 2: 494-499. 2004. Part of “Managing for Naturalness and Wildness.” Aldo Leopold Wilderness Institute. n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2015.
[34] Turner, Jack. The Abstract Wild. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 1996. 29. Print.
[35] See: The Device Paradigm, Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life.
[36] McAvoy, Rescue-Free Wilderness Area.1.
[37] Borgmann, Albert, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life.
[38] Miles, Barger. Preserving Absence: An Exploration of Trail-less Wilderness. 2013. Web. 7 Apr. 2015 <http://milesbarger.com/portfolio/12_Masters_Degree_Final_Project.pdf>
[39] Van Horn, Joe. “GPS and the Internet: Possible Effects on the Protection of Remote Areas and Wilderness Values.” International Journal of Wilderness, vol 13.3. Dec. 2007: 7-11. Web. 7 Apr. 2015.
[40] Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Basic Writings. San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 1993.
[41] Turner, The Abstract Wild.
[42] Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. 152.
[43] Thoreau, Henry D. “Walking.” The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau. Ed. Lewis Hyde. New York, NY: North Point Press, 2002, 168.