What defines "Wilderness?"

Hi, I’m Kevin Stiles, Interpretive Ranger at Shenandoah National Park. I want to start you off with a question: When was the last time you truly felt away from civilization? Maybe it was when you were on desert stretch of highway with no cell phone signal; perhaps it was out hiking a trail in one of our national parks; or maybe it was just camping at a location that wasn’t your home. One of the difficulties of wilderness is defining it as what can feel like wilderness or being apart from civilization can vary wildly from person to person. Here at Shenandoah National Park, we are able to designate around 80,000 acres of land as wilderness, because in 1974 it was deemed that land met the criterion set out in the 1964 Wilderness Act which sought to define the term legally, but how we got there is quite a journey and it is important that we, as stewards of the land, understand that the law is not a boundary of what is wilderness, but rather a foundation and something we’ve been building upon since 1935 and is our job as visitors and as park rangers to protect that legacy 85 years in the making. So what makes land wilderness? Well the wilderness movement has actually been building in the country since the last parts of the 19th century.

Several decades of work went into trying to define what 01:44 - was wilderness and what land should be set aside. This culminated in an act of congress in 1964, and this act of congress tried to set out what land would be preserved as wilderness and what characteristics it would have to have to maintain that wilderness designation. Now in an ideal world, wilderness would be land untrammeled–a place where humanity is a visitor and does not remain; where no influence of modern civilization can be seen. However, in today’s world that simply isn’t really feasible, so there’s a bit more of a practical definition attached to the Wilderness Act. It is land where man’s presence is largely unseen, and where the primary force is nature.

Lots of modifiers and other language like that is used 02:40 - to recognize that we have land that is affected by man, but where nature is still dominant the law states that there are five characteristics to wilderness: 1. Untrammeled; 2. Natural; 3. Undeveloped; 4. A place where people can enjoy solitude or unconfined primitive recreation; and 5. Other features of natural beauty or some sort of significance. Now for the first one, untrammeled, that’s a really strange–and some would say archaic–word, but the people who wrote the 1964 act picked it for a very specific reason. It represents the desire for nature to be uncontrolled by humanity’s desires and our actions every time we, at the National Park Service, try to alter the landscape.

We are trammeling on it, 03:37 - and so according to the law, we must justify our attempts to change the wilderness land, whether it be trying to relocate a problematic bear, or trying to put out a fire, or maybe even just controlling some problematic plant species. All of these are trying to put our desires into the land. Now that may sound similar to natural, but natural focuses rather than on our actions, but rather their effect natural means that the park is largely unaffected by the uh by the acts of man and our attempts to control it. It’s hard to describe when natural begins. An ecologist might say that natural is the processes of the various organisms allowing to happen without interference.

04:29 - Some would argue that it requires modern civilization to have no impact, though it’s hard to pin down the exact year or time frame where modern civilization begins. All this requires discussion, especially when we talk about altering the landscape. The third characteristic unconfined, or uh, primitive recreation and solitude - well, again, those have a lot of different meanings; different people. For some, solitude is simply getting away from the city. Others want to be miles away from a living soul and want to truly feel alone in the wilderness, and so we must be able to grant those different experiences to different people.

05:13 - Unconfined recreation means that we try to allow people to enjoy nature, to explore, to be spontaneous, and so we, as the park service, have to be very careful about what rules, and why we do things, like roping off land to protect natural species, and over-usage. Another aspect of wilderness is undeveloped. That means that it’s free from the mechanization and development of modern civilization. Now obviously that means something like, say a road–which is why the Skyline Drive isn’t in any of the wilderness areas of the park. But, it goes much deeper than that. According to one of the original authors of the 1964 Wilderness Act, it was…

mechanization was anything that immediately made man master of the domain, 06:03 - and so even things–like drones for instance–go against that wilderness characteristic, and so we try to keep the trails free from those things–even say UTVs, or other things that would immediately make us master of the wilderness here at Shenandoah National Park. And, the last characteristic is features. Of note, these are generally speaking going to be historic structures or things of that nature, which, while maybe not natural or representing man’s encumbrance on the landscape, it can still be something of note and worth preserving especially if it’s the only one of its kind. And, so we at the park service have to carefully consider each case about whether or not we need to raise something in order to ensure the net the wilderness characteristic, or if it should be left for preservation, and for those who come later to be able to enjoy with a better understanding of what wilderness is. We can now understand how Shenandoah became wilderness after land was acquired around 1935. A report by the federal government said that about 20 percent of the land had been completely clear-cut, another 50 percent had seen substantial harvesting of wood and other uh resources, and only 30 percent of it remained untouched.

The people who lived 07:25 - up here who numbered in the thousands had many industries which they depended upon, whether that be apples - like they were grown at Milam Gap or at Sneed Farm; whether it be grains - like grown in the Fox Family Farm; or even mining minerals as copper was harvested - from areas like Stony Man or Rose River. These processes also brought with them a certain kind of change. For instance, the mining operations would sometimes start fires. Those fires would burn the land that would become the park, and the land had been burned different species of plants would thrive over what had been previously consumed by fire. All of this reflected, not only the humans intentional changes, but there was also some unintended changes throughout the 19th, and uh, century.

Different animals, 08:20 - like the woolly adelgid and the gypsy moth, were introduced to the United States and after they got away from whatever reason they were brought here, they would come to places like Shenandoah and would leave behind their mark. Others would just be plant species like the tree of heaven brought in the 1780s, which had taken over large swaths of land throughout the North America and is present even here in Shenandoah National Park. And, so the people, the National Park Service was faced with a challenge, and so they decided that this would be landscape where nature would reclaim the land, but would do so with the help of humanity when they were brought in they wanted to construct the Skyline Drive. Now, the Skyline Drive of course would be over land that wasn’t naturally level, and so thousands of cubic feet of earth were moved to help create the Drive we now take for granted, but the planners also wanted to make sure that the Drive offered a very beautiful experience. They were worried that if the tree line got too close it would create a tunnel effect, and it would lead to a dark rather monotonous drive, and so they did two things: 1.

They tried to vary the plants that along the Drive, the ones that were closer to the forest 09:45 - were allowed to grow up higher, but as you got closer the trees, the plants were shortened a little bit. This created a wide open and rather bright experience. They also not only kept some areas that had been clear-cut, but expanded and added others. So as you drive the Skyline Drive you can enjoy the views of the pastoral land at the foot of the mountain as well of the mountain mountaintops to come. Now of course the park isn’t just the Drive, and for the remaining landscape they needed to replenish the forest. This meant thousands of trees being planted.

10:23 - For instance, over a period of two years they planted over 3,000 black walnut, fraser fir, and black locust trees. The black locust, and black walnut of course, being native to the area, but they were very much enviable for their uh quality of wood for making things like furniture, and the fraser fir of course being used for things like Christmas trees. All of these species need to be replenished, and in the end the Civilian Conservation Corps, the organization FDR brought to this area, would plant over 300,000 trees to try and replenish the land that had been depleted over the, uh, decades previously. They also had to, uh, alter the landscape in other ways. For instance, almost immediately white pine rust and other problematic areas or problematic diseases would spread up on–spread throughout the new forest.

11:22 - It was estimated that over a thousand acres of land were treated by the Civilian Conservation Corps trying to battle these diseases. They would also go through and clear out the underbrush trying to make the area less prone to fire. Over the first six years of the CCC’s presence here, they would spend thousands and thousands of hours trying to fight fires and making the place less prone to fire. Especially in problematic areas, they would also install fire towers which were used for years afterwards to try and combat this problem. There were several projects that the CCC would use that ultimately didn’t come to fruition, which would even have further substantially altered landscape.

For instance, it was proposed that they would create artificial 12:10 - pools where people could swim by damming up creeks and rivers. Though they did create several large reservoirs of water upon which people would use for generations to be able to fill up, get a drink, all of these changes of course violated the wilderness characteristic of the park, but would prove useful for the rewilding and reclamation land that would take place in successive decades. In the 1960s, attitudes about conservation and wilderness management began to shift humans. Humanity’s role was seen as not as necessary. In fact, some felt it should be diminished as nature was the primary mover for how wilderness would develop, and some of the more impactful ways the park service had changed the landscape were seen as not necessary.

In 1974, after years 13:10 - of, uh, being transformed and allowed to continue to re-wild the landscape and the wilderness of Shenandoah, was viewed as being ready for wilderness and 80,000 acres were set aside. Now, we of course don’t live in the ideal world I mentioned earlier, and so it is incumbent upon the National Park Service to continue to manage the land we have, and we do this in a variety of ways. At Big Meadows, we have an air station where we monitor the air quality and try and make sure that we’re not getting too much air pollution. If you visit Pinnacles, we have the Pinnacles Research Station which allows us to monitor how climate change is to start affecting the park. The United States Geologic Survey has a study here to see how climate change is affecting when species migrate, go into hibernation, and how their natural life cycles are affected by climate change.

14:12 - All of these programs are combined with things like trying to combat, uh, invasive species and other efforts the park does that they view as necessary to manage the resource, and everything we do we try to make sure does not impact the wilderness characteristic. So that begs a question: All of these things–projects–we have and a land that was so radically planned and shaped all coming from a place that had been radically altered by humans, can Shenandoah National Park truly be called “wilderness?” Well, according to the Wilderness Act, we can be, but if you ask different people they may give different answers saying maybe it isn’t pure wilderness. In the 1980s, two people–two very important people– moved to this area: My parents. I was raised in this park and I’ve seen, even in the last 30 years, how much it has changed and transformed and grown from what it once was, and to me that transformation tells me that it is in fact wilderness. Now wilderness is not something in today’s modern age that can just continue to exist. It has to be protected.

Believe it or not, you don’t have to become a 15:35 - National Park Ranger to be able to protect the landscape, but there are a few things that you can do to help us protect this resource. They can be as simple as following the principles of Leave No Trace as you’re hiking through the woods and trying to limit your impact. It can be trying to follow the rules and not allow mechanized tools, such as drones, into our landscape, and it can be trying to be responsible with things like fire, which unfortunately while can be natural can also have very unnatural impact when we start them. Shenandoah National Park is a landscape that was radically transformed when it was inherited in 1935. It didn’t really meet the criterion of wilderness. Now, throughout its history it’s gone through different visions of conservation–some more hands-on.

More recently, hands-off, it has created a landscape that is unique 16:35 - and one that by law and by many people’s visions meets the criterion of wilderness. So, I hope you’ll come out and join me and everyone else here at Shenandoah National Park. Enjoy the trails and perhaps a little bit of solitude and unconfined recreation. .