Subj: ENVIRO: Wilderness preservation

Date: 08/05/95

To: extropians@extropy.org

I spent last week backpacking in the Pecos Wilderness Area in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Santa Fe. I try to take at least two backpacking trips a year, usually in federal wilderness areas. This was the first trip I had taken since subscribing to the list and, naturally, I did a lot of thinking about the application of ideas I have encountered here to the passion I have for wilderness travel. Of course, I wasn't alone, and a lot of the thinking I was doing turned into the subject of conversations around the campfire.

[An aside: Nanotechnology will be appreciated by no one more than the backpacker. Lots of good ideas here, not least of which was the belt-pouch-sized "backpack" that "grows" all of your gear each night. I _will_ pay for this, as attests my aching and aging muscles ...]

First, some simple facts:

(1) If we are to have "wilderness", we have to be willing to devote a lot of land to this value. With the exception of some uncommon ecosystems, wilderness areas must be large to encompass whole ecosystems. Using the "top predator" bellwether approach, for instance, in the U.S. west the mountain lion's natural range is pretty large. In the last ten years I have spent upwards of 75 days in the mountainous areas of the west and have never seen this shy animal; I have heard him once and seen his tracks twice. I have been in his natural habitat a lot, and can only conclude that his natural range is so large and he has become so rare (in the wild) that I have simply not had the good (?) fortune to encounter him. Unless the "top predators" are in place, the balance of the food chain becomes upset from the top down, with prey animals proliferating, requiring human culling. (Note: While I am no longer an avid hunter, this is only because I don't relish carrying a large animal's carcass out of the place where I get it. For those who don't mind the additional exercise, more (fire)power to you ...) Even with a good game management program, unless you have a complete "top-down" ecosystem, have you really preserved a wilderness?

(2) Preservation of large land areas in the form of wilderness is expensive. Unless we only "preserve" those areas that have no or little economic value in a "developed" state, we have to be willing to "put our money where our aesthetics are", so to speak, by taking land and other resources that would otherwise be "consumed" in other ways out of the market for exploitative uses.

(3) Preservation of wilderness is a relatively elitist value. In some of the areas I have traversed, I have traveled for days without seeing a human other than my own grimy group. It takes somewhat specialized gear and training to get more than "two days in" and relatively few people have the money and/or inclination to do this.

These three facts come together to challenge some of the ideas I have encountered in extropian literature. I do not consider myself to be a "tree hugger", but I call myself an environmentalist for two reasons: (1) I value wilderness for its own sake (this is probably ethical "shorthand": The value is likely derivative of others ...) and (2) I think that failure to value the basic resources of the environment (e.g. relatively unpolluted air and water) ends up costing a lot.

A "privatist" approach to wilderness is to ask those who value it to "put their money where their mouths are", i.e. simply _buy_ the wilderness to protect it from exploitation in other ways. Here I lack data, as I imagine all others who would consider this also do. What are the large wilderness areas of the west "worth"? Even the remoter areas I enjoy (e.g. the Gila Wilderness in western New Mexico, the Chiracahua range in southeastern Arizona, etc.) would cost a _lot_ to buy outright. Presumably a purely private approach to wilderness preservation would require very large consortia of folks like myself, who would pool their resources, set up rules for use and try to recoup some of their expense through licensing use to others who did not make the original investment.

I certainly do not have any fundamental objection to a purely private approach to wilderness preservation and know of at least one "existence proof" for such projects. When I was there a couple of years ago, I learned that in Costa Rica as much as 7% of the land area of the country is in the hands of private ecologically-oriented organizations. This appears to be working well there, but the land is relatively cheap for "first worlders" to buy. I have heard of experimentation in rare game preservation in Africa in which local villagers are being given title to the land and animals (black rhino and elephants among them) that seems to be yielding positive results: Animal populations have stabilized, licensing the rare hunting expedition is generating some much needed cash as a balance against short-sighted agricultural development and the animals' new owners are much better at defending their property from poachers than the under-motivated game patrols run by the government (the fate of the poacher caught by a Masai whose black rhino has been killed for a few ounces of powdered horn doesn't bear too much thought...).

My concern is this: What if we simply couldn't raise enough money through private means to buy, say, the Pecos Wilderness? Mining and timber interests might simply outbid the environmentalists. The answer of a thoroughgoing libertarian would be, I suppose: "Tough. You soft-hearted hippies just couldn't come up with enough scratch. Get a job and better luck next time ... " (:-))

I know the irrationalities created by artificially placing an "infinite value" on the environment. Having spent some time among the logging communities of the Pacific Northwest, I know how unhappy those people are with "noneconomic" approaches to valuation of the environment. On the other hand, I worry about the permanent loss of wilderness areas due to the inability to raise sufficient funds in time to avoid destruction of the more or less pristine quality of a particular area.

Once again, I post inconclusive musings. Any thoughts?

Greg Burch (GBurch1@aol.com)

*** Having generated a lot of comments in that and subsequent threads, I wrote some more.***

I recall that the (regrettably) late G. O'Neil said that the surface of the Earth is no place for an expanding industrial society. Why? I can't recall the context of the statement, but its truth was always self-evident to me: For now, at least, this planet is the only one of which we are aware that has spontaneously generated a rich biosphere. This phenomenon is scarce. Raw materials for an industrial society that can be found elsewhere than on/in this planet, on the other hand, are not. Earth constitutes a tiny fraction of the mass of the solar system. Heavy metals _are_ concentrated here, but even with the primitive survey of the solar system we have already made, we know we can find _lots_ of them elsewhere, don't we?

Let me make an analogy. Let's say we have a great industrial/economic need/demand for marble. Isn't the marble contained in Michelangelo's sculptures the very _last_ of that resource we will use, because we value that particular marble for reasons completely separate from its nature as marble? It seems to me that the constituent elements forming the "naturally" generated biosphere of the Earth are much the same. Just as the value of the _pattern_ of the marble in Michelangelo's statues is much greater than the marble itself, so the _pattern_ of the carbon and other elements that make up climax forests, blue whales, etc., is more valuable than those elements alone.

Two points here, leading to two questions. First, I totally agree that no "bright line" can or should be drawn between "nature" and "man", as I believe Hara Ra and others have pointed out in other threads here. Humans, their technology and their effect on their environment are "natural" because consciousness developed as part of the spontaneous order of the terran biosphere. Thus the concept of a "natural" environment is probably untenable and is not helpful because, unless we advocate human genocide, it is hopelessly vague and confused. But does this realization justify any human act?

Second, it is possible to "reduce" the value of both Michelangelo's statues and the climax forests to their information content, thus allowing a separation of their "essence" from their "substance". Assuming a technology which could take that pattern and reproduce, atom for atom, the original, is there then no moral component to "deconstructing" the "original"?

Perhaps an extropian environmentalism would place a high value on the living wilderness simply because it is rare and options exist or will exist for the continued technological development of consciousness other than consuming those living wilderness zones. This does not place an unreasonably _absolute_ value on living wilderness, but simply makes preserving it as much as possible one value among many, albeit a great value. Preserving living terran wilderness zones is consistent with the value of spontaneous order simply because life on this planet is, so far, the most complex example of this phenomenon of which we are aware. If for no other reason, mere curiosity about spontaneous order should lead us to interact with at least some of these zones as little as possible, at least until we understand the processes that gave rise to them and by which they continue to operate.

Assuming a person's childhood was happy, it seems to me that one would want the home where she lived, the school where she learned, the park where she played, to persist, even after she has become an adult. I suppose it is nothing more than simple sentimentalism at this point, but I like to know that my old house is still standing, although its current owners have changed it. It is still a house. The school where I learned my earliest lessons is still there. I like to drive by it from time to time, like to see children playing in the parks where I romped when I was small. I wouldn't die or even quit growing and evolving if these things were destroyed, but I would look for other options if they could be preserved without hurting anyone.

Maybe the same holds true for the living environment of this planet. If post-human beings have the power to do so, why not allow the planet that was their cradle to continue to harbor biological life at least similar to that which originally gave rise to them? We don't tear down the Louvre to build apartment blocks, we build housing elsewhere. No one is poorer because of it and at least some people are richer because of it. Perhaps, along with buying wilderness zones for their value as such, a privatist environmental ethic would also look to develop technological alternatives to consuming these areas, as much as possible, so that the relative market value of other options will spontaneously support maximal preservation of living wilderness. This is not a suggestion of an absolutist ethic of "sustainable development", but rather simply attempting to explore what economic values free people might put on technological and economic developmental pathways that impact the terran biosphere _less_ rather than _more_.