The spiritual values of wilderness.

• Author: Nagle, John Copeland
• Position: The Rule of Capture and Its Consequences

1. INTRODUCTION II. WILDERNESS LAW A. The Wilderness Act B. Alaskan Lands C. The National Wilderness Area III. WILDERNESS THEOLOGY A. Religious Conceptions of Wilderness Before the Wilderness Act B. Religious Influences on the Wilderness Act C. Religious Conceptions of Wilderness Since the Wilderness Act IV. INTEGRATING SPIRITUAL VALUES AND WILDERNESS LAW A. Identifying Wilderness Areas B. The Management of Wilderness Lands V. CONCLUSION I. INTRODUCTION

   In 1964, Congress enacted a law to preserve those areas "where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." (1) That law, the Wilderness Act, (2) has been extolled and imitated for seeking to protect the shrinking amount of wilderness lands in the United States and throughout the world. (3) It now governs the use of more than one hundred million acres of land owned by the federal government throughout the United States. (4) More than half of those lands were designated as wilderness by a single act, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), (5) passed by Congress in 1980.

   But many are not satisfied with the amount of lands that have already been designated as wilderness in Alaska and elsewhere. For example, Alaska is still described as "the last wilderness," (6) and many people want to keep it that way. The status of the Arctic coastal range has been especially controversial, with competing proposals to open the area to oil exploration or to designate the lands as wilderness. To achieve the latter, Representative Edward Markey introduced the Udall-Eisenhower Arctic Wilderness Act of 2005, which would "permanently protect the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from development by granting it full wilderness status." (7) In addition, disputes over the management of the Kenai National Wilderness Area, also in Alaska, demonstrate that the meaning of the Wilderness Act, and of the wilderness it protects, remains uncertain. ANILCA established the Kenai National Wilderness Area, which now comprises 1,350,000 acres and includes five kinds of ecosystems. (8) Since its creation, the managers of the Kenai Wilderness have faced numerous questions concerning which activities are appropriate in a wilderness area, including snowmobiling and other recreational uses, oil and gas development, wildlife protection, hunting and fishing, and subsistence use by Alaska Natives. Most recently, in Wilderness Society v. United States Fish & Wildlife Service, (9) a unanimous en banc Ninth Circuit held that the Wilderness Act prohibits a program to add sockeye salmon to Tustumena Lake within the Kenai wilderness area. The Kenai wilderness area thus raises questions of what is wilderness, which lands should be designated as wilderness areas, what kinds of human activities are compatible with wilderness, and ultimately why we preserve land as wilderness subject to the restrictions of the Wilderness Act.

   The answers to these questions about the meaning of wilderness have proved difficult to ascertain. In recent years, the explanations have emphasized biodiversity, recreation, or any of a number of general themes that were sounded by the Congress that enacted the Wilderness Act and the proponents of wilderness preservation before or since. (10) But writing two years after the Wilderness Act became law, Michael McCloskey (who later became president of the Sierra Club) argued:

    [C]urrent valuations of wilderness axe a product of a long

   evolution in American thinking. The evolution has blended many

   political, religions, and cultural meanings into deeply felt personal convictions. Those who felt those convictions meant to translate them into law in the Wilderness Act. Those who administer the law must look to these convictions to understand why the law exists. The convictions cannot be easily manipulated or refashioned to suit the administrators. (11)

   This article focuses upon a particular set of convictions that played a significant role in the drive for wilderness preservation: the spiritual values of wilderness lands. Representative Markey invoked those values in 2005 when he quoted Morris Udall, the namesake of Markey's proposed new Alaskan wilderness area, who once proclaimed that "[t]here ought to be a few places left in the world left the way the Almighty made them." (12) John Muir used similar language over one hundred years before when he first visited Alaska. Muir wrote eloquently of "[t]he great wilderness of Alaska," yet he insisted that words are not "capable of describing the peculiar awe one experiences in entering these virgin mansions of the icy north, notwithstanding they are only the perfectly natural effect of simple and appreciable manifestations of the presence of God." (13) Muir described a glacier whose "[e]very feature glowed with intention, reflecting the plans of God"; and he "rejoic[ed] in the possession of so blessed a day, and feeling that in very foundational truth we had been in one of God's own temples and had seen Him and heard Him working and preaching like a man." (14) Indeed, Roderick Nash insists that "the major theme in [Muir's] writings about Alaska was the way that wilderness symbolized divinity." (15)

   As Nash has explained in his exposition of Wilderness in the American Mind, (16) religious themes have played a prominent role in the evolving American attitude toward wilderness. "Wilderness appreciation was a faith," writes Nash. (17) Yet Nash concludes that "[i]n the last several decades the course of American thought on the subject of wilderness and religion has swung away from a direct linking of God and wilderness." (18) But that is not because the linkage has disappeared. According to the leading wilderness management text:

    Spiritual development as a wilderness benefit has received little attention and study, in part because spiritual experiences axe intensely personal, often inexpressible, and because of the varied personal meanings of spirituality that has made it difficult to define them operationally. In addition, spirituality is often thought of in a religious notion, and as most wilderness research is federally funded, spirituality might have been avoided as something that would hinder approval of funding or research methods. (19) 

   Indeed, the extensive congressional hearings preceding the enactment of the Wilderness Act contained abundant references to the spiritual values of wilderness, just as religion played a significant role in the more famous congressional enactment in 1964 of the Civil Rights Act. (20) Additionally, the religious voice for wilderness preservation has continued to develop during the forty years since the Wilderness Act became law, a voice whose implications have yet to be explored by Nash and most of the more recent legal scholars to consider wilderness.

   This article seeks to apply the emerging literature examining the religious--and specifically biblical--basis for wilderness preservation to the enduring questions about wilderness and the Wilderness Act. The examination is particularly timely as the Wilderness Act recently celebrated its fortieth birthday amidst attacks by developers and leading environmentalists alike who see the idea of wilderness protection as elitist, anthropocentric, and demeaning to indigenous populations. (21) The recent litigation and other management issues confronting the Kenai wilderness area provide a helpful vehicle to consider the spiritual values of wilderness preservation. This examination is especially appropriate because it involves Alaskan lands, which have long inspired wilderness thinkers, which are subject to an arguably distinct statutory framework for wilderness under ANILCA, and which were long ago described by John Muir in prose that emphasized the role of God as the creator of these amazing wilderness lands.

   Part II of this article describes the Wilderness Act in general and the legal issues involving the Kenai National Wilderness Area in particular. Part III begins by examining the role that religions arguments played in wilderness debates prior to the enactment of the Wilderness Act, using Nash's famous discussion as the template. Part III then recounts the frequent citations to the spiritual values of wilderness that appear in the numerous congressional hearings held in the years preceding the enactment of the Wilderness Act in 1964. The witnesses referred to the spiritual values of wilderness in general, the parallels to biblical events that occurred in the wilderness, and to four specific spiritual values: preservation of land as it was created by God, wilderness as a place of encountering God, wilderness as a place of spiritual renewal, and wilderness as a place of escape. These repeated references to the spiritual values of wilderness, often voiced in the testimony of individual citizens rather than organized groups, have been forgotten and thus overlooked in current wilderness disputes. Part III continues by tracing theological scholarship since 1964 that examines the role of wilderness in the biblical teachings and the implications of that role for wilderness preservation today. This writing identifies a fifth theme in the spiritual values of wilderness: wilderness as a place of spiritual testing. The work of Susan Power Bratton is especially helpful in examining all of these theological observations. (22) Part IV shows how the lessons of that theological scholarship can aid in answering the questions about wilderness preservation and the Wilderness Act that were raised in the Tustumena Lake litigation and that arise throughout the Kenai wilderness area. These lessons show that the spiritual values of wilderness often complement the other reasons for wilderness preservation, and wilderness lands offer a special opportunity to achieve those spiritual values.

2. WILDERNESS LAW

   1. The Wilderness Act

      Congress enacted the Wilderness Act in 1964...