50 Years of Wilderness: a Christian perspective

A bald eagle overlooking the Pacific Ocean

by Peter J. M. van der Burgt

2014 marked the 50th anniversary of the United States' Wilderness Act, which was signed into law on September 3, 1964, by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The act defines wilderness as [1]:

"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, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions..."

The United States  now has 758 wilderness areas with a total area of  445,000 km2 [2]. 52% of wilderness areas are in Alaska. All these areas are managed by four United States agencies: the US Forest Service, the US National Park Service, the US Bureau of Land Management, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Last summer I visited the Pacific Northwest and rented a car to see the national parks in this area. I spent three days in Olympic National Park, which is an International Biosphere reserve and a World Heritage Site, and 95 % of the park is designated as the Olympic Wilderness. I hiked on the Klahhane Ridge trail, on the triangle of trails at the Pacific Coast near Ozette, on Rialto Beach, and along the Hoh River from the Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Centre. From the Klahhane Ridge I could see vast expanses of pristine forests and mountains with no sign of human interference. The Pacific Coast near Ozette is the most undisturbed coast I have ever visited. Two bald eagles were overlooking the ocean, one sitting on a high branch in a tree and the other on the top of a sea stack. Hiking through the majestic rainforest with occasional views of the Hoh River was a refreshment for body and spirit.

So how should we look upon this as Christians? Has the preservation of wilderness any Christian significance, or should Christians dismiss wilderness as being of little relevance and focus on spiritual matters? Of course wilderness provides the possibility to be away from the world and alone with God, seeking spiritual refreshment or God's counseling. However, in my view there are two Christian aspects to preserving wilderness that are far more important.

The first aspect involves our obligation as Christians to be good stewards of God's creation, which has been given to us to manage but not to exploit. Psalm 24:1-2 states: "the Earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. The world and all its people belong to him," and the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), and we shall have to give account for managing what we have been given by God. This may include our use of nature’s resources.

After my hike near Ozette, I decided to visit the Makah Indian Reservation at the very north-west corner of the Olympic Peninsula. The Makah Museum has an impressive display of artifacts that were excavated after an old Makah village was exposed in 1970 by tidal erosion on the coast near Ozette. Over 55,000 artifacts were recovered, providing evidence of the long tradition of whaling of the Makah Indians [3]. In 1920 the Makah voluntarily stopped whaling to protect the remains of the strongly declined population of gray whales. Despite being granted a quota of up to five wales per year in 1997, the tribe caught only a single whale in 1999. The strong sense of sustainability and respect for natural resources that the North American Indians have had stands in strong contrast to the exploitation by many of the white settlers when they came to North America. In view of this, the preservation of nature in the national parks of North America and the preservation of wilderness in the United States are very positive developments and are of international significance.

Sustainability and preservation of natural resources are not the only relevant issues. Despite the wide dismissal of this in many Christian circles it is now abundantly clear that one of the gifts God has bestowed on creation is the ability to evolve. Evolvability of animals and plants enables adaptation to slowly changing environmental circumstances, but it also leads to species diversity and it has enabled humans to use and domesticate certain species of plants and animals. Domestication of wild grasses 7,000 to 12,000 years ago into crop grasses such as wheat, rice, maize (corn) and barley has been of unique importance for human civilization, because it has provided food security for human societies in all parts of the Earth [4]. During domestication, grasses went through dramatic genetic and phenotypic changes, resulting in enlargement of grain sizes which made these grasses relevant as food plants. 

Genetic variation in these grasses and many other food plants is considered of high importance, because it gives these plants resilience to diseases and the potential for many uses and adaptation to many environments. Important to recognize is that the wild plants, that were domesticated and became food plants, ultimately originated in wilderness, and are thus the products of four billion years of evolution, not in isolation but in interaction with many coevolving species of plants and animals in continuously changing ecosystems. When Christians are celebrating Thanksgiving and are thanking God for a bountiful harvest, they are effectively thanking God for four billion years of evolution.

Shortly after my return to Ireland I encountered an article in an Irish environmental newspaper [5] about logging and salmon fisheries management in the Pacific Northwest. The article gives a review of the book Salmon People and Place [6]. In it the author Jim Lichatovich highlights the problems with salmon management and recovery programs attempting to counter the strong decline in salmon populations in the Northwest. Here again exploitation of natural resources conflicts with the recognition of the importance of sustainability and maintaining ecological diversity. On page 195 Lichatovich states: "We enthusiastically accepted the gift of salmon, but failed to treat it with the respect it deserves.  We failed to meet our obligation to return the gift in the way that only humans can. We failed to return the gift of salmon with the gift of stewardship."

The second Christian aspect of preserving wilderness involves God's plans for the future (the end times) and our understanding of these plans. Christian eschatology is a complicated subject, and there are widely differing viewpoints in Christian circles [7]. Opinions are easy to come by and are often strong.  Eschatology is far outside the scope of this article, but our understanding of what God is going to do in the future is undoubtedly affecting our appreciation or denunciation of the importance of preserving wilderness. I want to briefly highlight two points that might be of relevance for our thinking on these matters.

In Acts 1:6-8 the risen Christ meets with the apostles, and in response to their question as to whether God is going to free Israel now and restore the kingdom, he answers: "The Father sets those dates, and they are not for you to know. But when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, you will receive power and will tell people about Me everywhere―in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the Earth." Simplified and amplified this becomes: "Stop reading Left Behind and spread the Word."

One of the essentials of the Christian faith is the hope that God is working towards a definite end and will make all things new. So if God is going to create a new heaven and a new earth in the future (Rev. 21:1), even if this might take much longer than we would presently anticipate, what is the point of preserving wilderness? David Wilkinson [8] has extensively discussed creation and new creation from the perspective of a dialogue between theology and science, and sees the movement from creation to new creation as a transformation of the present creation rather than a complete destruction of the old creation. This indicates that we should be careful as Christians not to dismiss the value of the present creation.

With an ever-increasing human population on Earth, preservation of the environment, ecology, and species diversity are becoming increasingly important for mankind. Christians who believe in God who is the Creator of the universe and the natural world should be at the forefront of care for the environment. From this perspective, concern for the preservation of wilderness is an important responsibility of the Christian before God.

References

[1]       Wilderness Act: wilderness.nps.gov/document/wildernessAct.pdf
[2]       www.wilderness50th.org; "50 Years of Wilderness," National Geographic Vol. 226, No. 3, September 2014.
[3]       www.makah.com; "The Makah Nation: A Whaling People," flyer published by the Makah Nation; "Ozette, A Makah Village in 1491," National Geographic Vol. 180, No. 4, October 1991.
[4]       See for instance: S. Glémin and T. Bataillon, New Phytologist 183, 237-290 (2009) and E. Callaway, Nature 514, S58-S59 (2014)
[5]       Sherkin Comment 2014, issue no 57, page 25 (see also www.sherkinmarine.ie)
[6]       Jim Lichatowich: Salmon, People and Place - A Biologist's Search for Salmon Recovery, Oregon State University Press 2013
[7]       Timothy Paul Jones: Four Views of the End Times, Rose Publishing 2010
[8]       David Wilkinson: Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe, T&T Clark International 2010

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Peter van der Burgt is a senior lecturer in Experimental Physics at the National University of Ireland Maynooth.  He graduated in physics from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and did post-doctoral research at North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC) and at the University of Windsor (Windsor, Ontario, Canada), before moving to Ireland.  He has been a long-time member of ASA and is on the committee of Christians in Science Ireland, which is a local group of CiS.

His research interest is in fragmentation of biomolecules such as the nucleobases in collisions with low-energy electrons.  These processes are relevant for the understanding of radiation induced damage in living organisms on the molecular scale.

He is a member of the Irish Christian Hillwalking Club and of Mountaineering Ireland.    He frequently hikes in the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin, and in other areas in Europe and North America.  He is a big admirer of the national parks in the USA and Canada.