Three questions

ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 17(1) 2012 ISSN: 1085-6633 ©Indiana University Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. Direct all correspondence to: Journals Manager, Indiana University Press, 601 N. Morton St., Bloomington, IN 47404 USA [email protected]

AN ECOlOgICAl CONCEpT Of WIldERNESS

CRAIg delANCEy

Many share the conviction that wilderness should play a special role in any environmental ethic, even though the concept of wilderness remains contentious. Ever since it has been recognized that the traditional con- cept of a wilderness as a region “untrammeled” by human beings has a number of intractable difficulties, there has been no consensus on how we should understand wilderness, and most definitions or descriptions of wilderness remain negative (defining wilderness in terms of what it is not). I propose a new ecological concept of wilderness, and show that this concept escapes the difficulties of the traditional concept and its recent alternatives, while being a useful ancillary to some of the leading contemporary theories in environmental ethics.

Actually, the entire ascent of life can be presented as an adaptive radiation in the time dimension. From the beginning

of replicating molecules to the formation of membrane- bounded cells, the formation of chromosomes, the origin of

nucleated eukaryotes, the formation of multicellular organisms, the rise of endothermy, and the evolution of a large and

highly complex nervous system, each of these steps permitted the utilization of a different set of environmental resources,

that is, the occupation of a different adaptive zone. Ernest Mayr (2001: 208–09)

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I. IntroductIon

Many share the conviction that wilderness should play a special role in any environmental ethic. The difficulty for this conviction, and the source of vibrant debate within environmental ethics, is how we are to make sense of the notion of “wilderness.” There has been some fierce critique, most of it aimed at the concept of wilderness (e.g., Cronon 1995, Cal- licott 1991) but some aimed at wilderness preservation (e.g., Guha 1989, Michael 1995). The traditional concept of wilderness, and the dominant definition, of an ecosystem little touched by human beings—or, as the U.S. Wilderness Act of 1964 puts it, “an area where the earth and its commu- nity of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”—falls prey to a number of challenges.1 But so also do many of the alternative proposals for a definition. The five most important such challenges are:

1. The concept may be inapplicable. The traditional concept of wilderness appears to apply to nearly no ecosystem on Earth; every ecosystem has been significantly affected by humans, often for many centuries.

2. The concept is negative. The traditional concept tells us what wilderness lacks, but does nothing to tell us what posi- tive features wildernesses share.

3. The concept is a cultural construct that serves narrow in- terests. Some have argued that some notions of wilderness are inimical to the interests of aboriginal or non-Western peoples, or to the very act of living on the land.

4. The concept lacks a clear relation to value theory. Even granting that there is a thing such as wilderness, the tradi- tional concept gives no indication of why wilderness should matter.

5. Competitive notions appear superior. The purposes served by the traditional concept of wilderness would seem best, albeit differently, served with a notion like sustainable de- velopment, which focuses not on the lack of something but rather specifically on how our activities affect the organisms or ecosystem of a region.

In this discussion, I will introduce a new ecological concept of wilder-

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ness. This will both provide a clear definition of wilderness, and also an- swer each of the challenges above. Perhaps most important, this concept can be shown to be compatible with the some of the leading forms of en- vironmental value theories that characterize contemporary environmental ethics; thus, the ecological concept of wilderness should find applicability across diverse normative theories, potentially serving as a common coin for debate and progress in relevant policy.

II. the ecologIcal concept of WIlderness

Even setting aside the five challenges enumerated above, the criterion of wilderness as a region uninhabited and unaltered by human beings is clearly not sufficient: it would, for example, make the surface of moon or the depths of the Earth’s crust a wilderness. Yet, it is not a sterile expanse of dust nor crushing depths of stone that environmentalists intend to be ex- amples of wilderness. Instead, what makes wilderness appealing is not the lack of humans, but the relative richness of these ecosystems. The interested observer cannot be but struck by the difference in the number and variety of organisms that one finds in a mature rain forest, in contrast to, say, a city or giant corporate farm. The kind of place that we typically call a “wilder- ness” generally has more kinds and more quantity of organisms, in a vast range of complex relationships, than do the alternatives. We may then as a first approximation understand one important feature of a wilderness to be that it tends to be a complex and rich ecosystem. This also gives us a first understanding of why the traditional notion of wilderness as a region with minimal human intervention is often useful: historically, ecosystems that have been significantly altered by human beings are less complex.

In contrast to the problematic traditional, and negative, concept of wilderness, an ecological concept is possible that captures the basic insight that ecosystems that have not been heavily exploited by humans in recent time tend to be more populous and diverse, but which does not take this lack of human intervention as essential. This view can find a clear founda- tion in the following highly plausible hypothesis regarding evolution and ecology:

The Wilderness Hypothesis: The process of evolution creates ecosys- tems which, given the available genotypes, tends to maximize both the quantity of kinds of organisms (species or other relevant kinds of populations), and the quantity of individual organisms, in that environment.

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On this view, evolution can be interpreted as an optimization process. Natural selection tends to result in each genotype becoming more fit. Fit- ness, for contemporary biology, is the ability of an organism to produce more offspring. Thus, each genotype tends to maximize its population (that is, to breed until hitting carrying capacity), given the existing envi- ronment. This is the optimization or maximization of numbers of individ- ual organisms. Evolution, through the pressures of natural selection, also results in speciation and adaptive radiation. Changes in the pressures and opportunities in an environment can ultimately result in speciation. This process is the optimization or maximization of the kinds of organisms. Over millions of years, evolution has succeeded in creating vast numbers of organisms, and vast ranges of types of organisms, inhabiting many dif- ferent ecological niches, and interacting in complex ways. Populations grow to the maximum size the environment will allow for their genotype; new kinds of species arise whenever stress or separation cause appropriate selective pressures, and these species exploit new niches, sometimes cap- turing resources that were previously unexploited, and sometimes creat- ing new resources for other kinds of organisms. Thus, evolution tends to maximize the number and kinds of organisms in a region; we can think of this as a process that optimizes the number and kinds of organisms given available resources. (There is, of course, a question about how to weigh these two different dimensions, but I will delay until section V below my discussion of this question.) This optimization technique is awesomely successful, creating many diverse species, huge populations, and fostering life in extremely diverse environments.2

Each environment has two important constraints against which this optimization occurs. The first is the available resources, such as: sunlight; mineral nutrients of utility to organisms; other organisms, their waste and their corpses; space; favorable temperature regions; and so on. The kinds and quantities of resources available differ as a result of a number of vari- ables, including geography and also biological heritage (the organisms in the ecosystem can alter resources for themselves and other organisms). A second constraint is the starting population of organisms and the popula- tions of organisms migrating from other ecosystems. Each genotype must evolve from some prior genotype, and this means that a resource may go unutilized if there is no organism that can, or which is able to have progeny that can, exploit that resource. That is, the wilderness hypothesis

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is not a claim that evolution results in a perfectly optimal and diverse re- source use. Rather, given what an ecosystem starts with, it tends towards more individuals and kinds, which because of their diversity may well exploit more resources and more diverse kinds of resources.

The wilderness hypothesis can be used to formulate a powerful, intui- tively satisfying definition of “wilderness”:

The Ecological Concept of Wilderness: a wilderness is an enduring ecosystem that, for the available genotypes and resources, is highly optimal in terms of maximizing both the quantity of flourishing indi- vidual organisms and the quantity of kinds of organisms, relative to past historical conditions of that ecosystem.

The last clause is important for at least two reasons. First, a denuded ecosystem may be maximally optimal given the few genotypes left in it, but we would traditionally judge it as failing to be a wilderness if in the past this ecosystem was once much richer in life. Second, although I would agree that an ecosystem that is diverse and has many organisms is highly morally valuable, this does not mean that we should only respect biodi- versity hot spots. There are sparse ecosystems that are optimal for their history and available resources. Very cold ecosystems, for example, with little soil, may have much fewer kinds and numbers of organisms than a tropical rainforest. However, such ecosystems can still be wilderness—the comparison to be made is not to other ecosystems, but rather the history and resources of the existing ecosystem. (I have not yet made any norma- tive claim. Some may want to disagree with any normative moral theory that sees biodiversity hot spots as somehow more valuable than other kinds of ecosystems. This ecological conception of wilderness does not entail such a normative claim.3)

This formulation requires that we take ecosystems as recognizable individuals. This is especially important when we talk about history. The stone under the Antarctic was once the foundation of a tropical forest, but it is not the very soil that matters in our comparison but the kind of ecosystem. That is, we do not want to say that Antarctica is not a wilder- ness because the soil underneath was once the soil of a rainforest, and the current Antarctic ecosystem is denuded in comparison. Ecosystems are likely a rather vague kind, with fuzzy edges (one cannot say precisely where one ecosystem ends and another one begins, nor where one ecosys- tems transforms over time into another kind of ecosystem). However, the

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concept works well enough in the science of ecology, and is sufficiently clear that it should allow for the kind of precision we need for any rel- evant application of the ecological concept of wilderness. This also solves a problem about the scope of historical considerations. When we think of the history of a place as the history of that particular bedrock, the scope of history stretches back hundreds of millions, even billions, of years. But ecosystems do not themselves last so long, and this reduces the period of time that one might consider for historical comparison.

The concept of enduring might best be left vague. We could interpret it as meaning at least that the system endures over many generations for the majority of fauna, or we could mean that were external conditions not to change significantly, the system would remain a wilderness. The purpose of the condition is to recognize that an ecosystem is not a wilder- ness if it is in the process of being destroyed, or is otherwise some kind of unsustainable collection of organisms.

The ecological concept of wilderness does not require that an ecosys- tem remain the same. Ecosystems change, as the available resources and the dynamics of competition change. The wilderness hypothesis asserts that the change will, over the long term, tend towards an optimal ecosys- tem in terms of the number of individuals and number of kinds of organ- ism. In this regard alone there may often be a tendency toward a kind of stasis (with different kinds of organisms evolving but the overall numbers of kinds and individuals remaining relatively steady or increasing). But there can also be instances where populations or even ecosystems collapse from internal competition having nothing to do with human intervention. A tendency is not a law without exceptions. This is also fully consistent with different kinds of organisms coming and going from a location.

Finally, the recognition that the individuals must be flourishing opens the door to very complex issues, but the purpose of the clause here should be uncontroversial. It is to draw a contrast with a kind of situation one could imagine of, for example, a managed system which had huge num- bers of organisms which were in very poor conditions—such as an in- dustrial pig or chicken farm. If we needed to specify in decisive terms general conditions for flourishing, this would be a difficult undertaking, in part perhaps requiring a good understanding of biology. However, such a specification is not needed, since we can settle with the observations both that there is a fact of the matter about whether an organism is flourish-

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ing or not; and that naturally evolved wildernesses tend to include lots of flourishing organisms, and in fact tend to do better for more individuals of more kinds than do alternative (e.g., highly human-utilized, non-wilder- ness) ecosystems.

III. applyIng the defInItIon

The wilderness hypothesis and the ecological concept of wilderness provide clear answers to the five challenges to the traditional wilderness concept and other wilderness concepts. First, we noted that the traditional concept, of a realm untouched by humans, appears to apply to nearly no ecosystem in the world—every terrestrial ecosystem has been affected by humans, often for many centuries. At first glance, the ecological notion of wilderness may seem to encourage a similar kind of difficulty. However, it is possible and even likely, that some ecosystems would be wilderness even with humans as some of the organisms in the ecosystem. In fact, it remains possible that some ecosystems will have more individual organisms, and more kinds of organisms, if there were humans in that landscape (and therefore might not be a wilderness without the humans). Furthermore, if our understanding of ecology grew to the point that we could better understand and describe the dynamics that affect numbers and kinds of organisms, then even if we were to determine that there are no true wil- dernesses because human interference has resulted in historically subop- timal ecosystems throughout the Earth, this would still be no substantial objection to the ecological concept of wilderness. Wilderness would be a historical reference point to more diverse and populous, earlier states of ecosystems. This would act as an idealization of a form that is com- mon in all sciences (physicists never get to work with frictionless surfaces, after all), and the ecological concept of wilderness would remain valuable as a measure. That is, even if there were no remaining wildernesses, the ecological concept can have practical import: we might want to set aside some ecosystems to let them recover to a wilderness; we might want to in- habit other ecosystems with a vigilant attention to what they were like or would be like as wilderness, trying to minimize our harm, and maximize our benefit, in order to make them more like that; and so on.

The ecological concept of wilderness is not a negative concept, and not specified in terms of human beings, thus escaping the second objec- tion. Wilderness is a comparative and historical feature of ecosystems. It

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is not defined as a lack of a kind of organism, a lack of a kind of inter- vention, or any other kind of lack. It may well be, however, a contingent fact that human-inhabited wildernesses are rarities in the post-industrial age. We see that there are better and worse off ecosystems, and that those which are left alone tend to be better off—in areas where there has been no major human industrial and technological intervention, or where it has been a long time since there has been such intervention (such as the recov- ered rainforests of Central America, in regions where the ancient Mayans once cleared huge portions of the forest for agriculture), we see more indi- vidual organisms and kinds of organisms. We can suggest several plausible hypotheses to explain this tendency. Part of this is simple competition. As humans are interested in their ends primarily, they have tended to pursue these ends to the detriment of all other organisms and kinds of organ- isms. It would be naïve to expect that unrestrained natural resource use by humans will be favorable to existing populations of organisms, with a few rare exceptions. Such activity is by definition the exploitation (and typically the removal) of resources, and most often these will be resources used by other kinds of organisms or their use or extraction will destroy resources used by other organisms. If a wilderness tends towards an effi- cient use of the available resources, then the organisms in a wilderness will likely compete with any human use of those resources. To increase their own utilization of resources, humans will find it instrumentally useful to eliminate, or at least disregard, competitors. This is true of all organisms and their competitive relationships with each other. But while the compe- tition that non-human organisms face from other non-human organisms is a kind of arms race, there is a common clock: the rate of evolutionary change is constrained by the rate of normal population turnover. With human technology, vast changes can be wrought at rates of change much faster than the rates that evolution allows for most or all species. Thus, human technology makes competition possible in a way that is orders of magnitude more powerful than any other kind of competition, and as a result human utilization of an ecosystem is, in a sense, a qualitatively different kind of use (this is a point well made by Rolston 1991).4 Since human technology can change far more quickly than most evolutionary adaptation, a species harmed by that technology may go extinct before it has the opportunity to adapt to a change; and if it does adapt, another change soon may be the end of it. Thus, many human instrumental uses of an ecosystem tend to result in lower overall populations of other kinds

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of organisms and lower numbers of kinds of species than we see in the ecosystem when not used for human instrumental uses. This will typically make a wilderness into a less optimal ecosystem, which at some point we should stop calling a “wilderness.” Since these technological changes are not part of what we mean by biological evolution, then this denuding is no exception to the wilderness hypothesis.

An important additional point is relevant here. The motivation for a concept of wilderness that is inapplicable and negatively defined (as a lack of human beings) seems to be closely related to a view that wilderness restoration, or active management of a wilderness, are impossible or at least problematic. The ecological conception of wilderness is neutral with respect to the question of whether wilderness management or restoration are possible or beneficial. There is no a priori reason (no reason implicit in the ecological conception of wilderness) why an ecosystem that was restored or managed could not be a wilderness.5

Thus, debates about whether humans are part of the wild or not, whether technology is natural, whether wilderness is really “other” or not (e.g. Callicott 1991; Birch 1990), and so on, are moot with respect the questions about wilderness, if we adopt the ecological concept of wilder- ness. It is simply a fact that we can change a landscape—cut the trees, plow the Earth, irrigate it, drain it, poison it, mine it, invert it—many times faster than most genotypes can adapt to such changes. We need not settle whether these kinds of changes are “natural” events; the answer is of no relevance to the question of the status of wilderness, understood in this way.

Third, the ecological conception of wilderness is minimally invested in normative cultural conceptions. Thus, for example, William Cronon trenchantly criticized traditional conceptions of wilderness as a place un- inhabited by humans, sublime, sacred, and available as a frontier. These conceptions hide (often embarrassing) historical facts and are often impractical:

This, then, is the central paradox: wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature is not. If this is so—if by definition wilderness leaves no place for human beings, save perhaps as con- templative sojourners enjoying their leisurely reverie in God’s natural

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cathedral—then also by definition it can offer no solution to the envi- ronmental and other problems that confront us. To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like. (1995, 80–81)

Similar worries have been expressed by others. Kevin DeLuca and Anne Demo argue, for example, that influential photography of Yosemite, in portraying wilderness as uninhabited, reinforced a pernicious con- ception of wilderness that hides the American genocide: “Representing Yosemite as Edenic…constitutes a form of imagistic genocide. Yosemite was not pristine, but cleansed” (2000, 256). Additional concerns that the concept is ethnocentric or put to ethnocentric uses are raised in Nelson (1996) and O’Neill (2002). There are two problems that these scholars are identifying. One is the conception of wilderness as lacking humans (which then includes aboriginal peoples). As noted above, the ecological concep- tion of wilderness does not define wilderness in this way. Another problem is that the concepts used to fix and describe the traditional notion of wil- derness are often thick concepts, laden with normative judgments. These include conceptions like “Edenic” and “sacred.” Other examples of such conceptions in other domains of discourse are easy to identify: the idea that “men” are the “pinnacle of evolution” may be an influential case. But the ecological concept of wilderness is not laden with normative claims or metaphors like “beautiful,” “sacred,” “frontier,” “sublime,” “pristine,” “untrammeled,” “virgin,” or “untouched.” If any concepts are minimally culturally specific and normative, it would seem that quantity, individual organism, and species are such concepts. And, even on radical critiques of scientific concepts, for which these concepts might be accused of carrying normative ideological freight, it surely is the case that these concepts are carrying as little such weight as any alternatives that we can expect from other definitions of “wilderness,” and so these concepts are not compa- rably objectionable. Thus, the objection that there are normative biases built into the conception of wilderness may indeed apply to the traditional notion of wilderness, but do not apply to the ecological conception of wilderness.

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IV. ValuIng WIlderness

The traditional concept of wilderness had nothing to say about why wilderness should matter. The concept I have proposed is meant to be a definition, not a value theory, but it would be a practically beneficial defi- nition if it were useful for the normative theories of environmental ethi- cists, and if it seemed to match some of their intuitions that wildernesses do have a special importance.

I know of no value theory that entails fewer humans in a region is per se a better thing. However, in answer to the fourth challenge to the traditional notion of wilderness, the ecological concept of wilderness has a very significant corollary. The concept should be useful because it is con- sistent with either of the leading forms of intrinsic value theory in contem- porary environmental ethics. Since there have been extensive arguments made that wilderness will be valuable for instrumental reasons,6 here I want to focus on the intrinsic value theories. We can sort these roughly into two groups: holistic and individualistic. This distinction is relevant both because many intrinsic value theories fall into one or the other of these two camps, but also because it would seem at first consideration that the ecological concept of wilderness would be of interest only to the holistic value theories.

Holistic value theories—a group into which I am placing ecological and land ethic value theories—share a common assertion that it is ecosys- tems, the interrelationships between organisms, or regions as wholes that have primary value, and not the individual organisms in these ecosystems. J. Baird Callicott has been a leading defender of this view, taking Aldo Leopold’s land ethic as his inspiration (Leopold 1949; Callicott 1987). On this view, the insights of ecology should revolutionize our ethics, helping us to see that an ecosystem is an interdependent whole:

Ecology makes it possible to see land…as a unified system of inte- grally related parts, as so to speak, a third-order whole…. The land ethic…calls our attention to the recently discovered integrity—in other words, the unity—of the biota and posits duties binding upon moral agents in relation to that whole. (Callicott 1980, 319)

According to the ecological concept of wilderness, a wilderness is a com- plex ecosystem, rich in both numbers of kinds and numbers of individual organisms. The important ecological insights trumpeted by the land ethic are that such richness tends to be built upon highly interdependent sub-

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systems. But then, on the land ethic, a wilderness will be precisely the kind of highly-integrated whole that the theory says should be valued. Wil- derness in fact stands as an ideal for a highly integrated ecosystem, and therefore is the most valuable kind of whole. The ecological concept of wilderness should be an important part of a land ethic or related holistic environmental ethic.

But many alternative environmental value theories are individualist; they posit that it is individual organisms that have moral value. An indi- vidualist value theory is one that holds that the things of primary value are individual organisms (see Taylor 1986, Varner 1998), and it is the flour- ishing of these individuals that is the principal good. Wilderness would not then be a matter of moral concern per se for a purely individualistic value theory. However, indirectly wilderness should be of very great im- portance. This is because a wilderness is by definition a place where there tend to be maximal numbers of individual organisms. Furthermore, basic ecological insight tells us that wilderness is the place where organisms of most kinds are most likely to flourish. Most organisms need other kinds of organisms, and so an ecosystem rich in kinds (which, because a wilder- ness is an enduring system, have the appropriate interdependencies and services) will tend to be one where the relevant individuals are more likely to flourish (at least at the scale of viable populations). Thus, a wilderness will be a place where there are many individuals, and where individuals are most likely to flourish, so that a wilderness will express a great deal of good by such standards. The preservation, or restoration, of wilder- ness should then be one of the most important goals of the individualist. Furthermore, some individualists have argued that there is compatibility between valuing individual organisms and valuing some communities of organisms or even species of organisms (e.g., DeLancey 2004). On such a view, a wilderness could also be of direct value or have indirect value of another kind.

Although holistic and individualist instrinsic value theories explicitly disagree on some fundamental issues, for most practical considerations there is little conflict between these ethical theories. Nonetheless, there can be distinct and contradictory recommendations in some cases. This is most evident in cases where the needs of individuals are in conflict with some population or even the whole ecosystem. In such cases, a holistic ethic finds diversity of species a priority value:

What is especially note-worthy, and that to which attention should

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be directed in this proposition, is the idea that the good of the biotic community is the ultimate measure of the moral value, the rightness or wrongness, of actions. Thus, to hunt and kill a white-tailed deer in certain districts may not only be ethically permissible, it might actu- ally be a moral requirement, necessary to protect the local environ- ment, taken as a whole, from the disintegrating effects of a cervid population explosion. On the other hand, rare and endangered ani- mals like the lynx should be especially nurtured and preserved. (Cal- licott 1980, 314)

This is consistent with the ecological concept of wilderness, where a popu- lation explosion of a species, be it a human-caused event or not,7 may reduce the overall number of individuals and kinds of organisms in an ecosystem. Some individualists find this kind of claim unpalatable, espe- cially those who have defended what may be called a sentientist “ani- mal rights” value theory, which values above all organisms like mammals which are taken to be sentient (e.g., Singer 1975). However, it is important to note that most individualists would not disagree with the practical rec- ommendation of Callicott here, even if they would offer different reasons. An exploding population is a threat to other individual organisms, and, for those who value such things, to other kinds (species) of organisms. Even on an individualist calculus, invasive or exploding populations may rightly be culled.

Nonetheless, this points us at the unresolved tension in the ecologi- cal concept of wilderness: the definition refers to two different variables that tend to be maximized, both quantity of individuals and quantity of kinds. I address this in the next section. The ecological conception of wil- derness escapes then the fourth problem with the traditional notion, and proves itself a useful concept because it can act as a common schema for diverse value theories. It allows, and makes explicit, differences in value by framing them as specifications of how to rank individuals against vari- ous kinds. As such, further distinctions can best be left to those who have prior commitments to these issues. The benefit of having different value theories start with the ecological concept of wilderness is that they will share common ground, and can potentially then make explicit where they are in agreement and in disagreement.

In light of the power of the ecological concept of wilderness, and its practical compatibility with leading kinds of environmental value theo- ries, it is clear why notions like sustainable development are not competi- tors for the work we want to do with the notion of wilderness. In answer

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to the fifth challenge to the traditional notion of wilderness, we can note that the ecological concept of wilderness is a different kind of tool than is the concept of sustainability, and cannot be replaced by it. A wilderness is an ecosystem, and the ecological concept of wilderness provides us with a goal and a standard for such ecosystems. In contrast, sustainable devel- opment is (an aspiration for) a kind of economic practice. In fact, an es- sential guiding question for sustainable development might be (depending of course upon one’s value theory): “Are these human economic practices in this region consistent with a wilderness being maintained or restored here?” If not, do they at least use resources in a way that does not require the destruction or make impossible the restoration of other wildernesses, in other locations?

Finally, we can note that the ecological concept of wilderness is neutral regarding questions of restoration (or even the manufacture) of ecosystems in the following respect: a restored ecosystem would be a wil- derness if it were optimal by historical standards (contrast Elliot 1982).8 However, there may be contingent reasons why attempts at restoration will often tend to result in the near term in inferior ecosystems than will preservation. As noted, human understanding of ecology is at present, and will be for the foreseeable future, so limited that it cannot predict and manage the diversity and numbers of organisms in a way that is likely to allow the restoration of ecosystems to a state with equal or greater diver- sity and populations than would have resulted from evolution without human intervention. Hence, it is plausible that an ecosystem that has been left alone is likely to have more diversity and larger populations than an ecosystem that humans have “restored.” However, this is not to deny that restoration is possible, even though it is difficult and in some cases perhaps implausible—there are cases where there have been clear kinds of degradation and there are clear ways to fix these. That is, the claim that we cannot predict and well manage any arbitrary ecosystem does not entail that for some particular system we are incapable of finding ways to benefit it; management can in some cases be obviously appropriate. Furthermore, the kind of harm that we can do to ecosystems can and ob- viously should be reduced. For example, that we cannot predict particular effects of global warming on organism populations is no reason to not try to reduce or prevent it.

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V. IndIVIduals and specIes

One feature of the wilderness hypothesis and of the ecological con- cept begs for clarification. I have described two variables that evolution tends to optimize: quantity of individual organisms, and quantity of kinds of organisms. Clarifying this has both an empirical and a normative di- mension. In terms of the wilderness hypothesis, there is an empirical ques- tion about how evolution tends to optimize these two factors, and what balances and trade-offs between them there are. This is an issue for sci- entific discovery, which ecology and evolutionary biology may ultimately articulate and settle.

If we were to pursue normative theories regarding how to best value these two properties—a pursuit that we do see motivated by the clash between holistic and individualistic value theories—then there is a con- sequent question of which of these two variables that one should try or encourage to maximize, or at least how the two variables are to be related and ranked, so that we can evaluate those situations where they are in conflict. One might accept that the solution of evolution is morally opti- mal (even not knowing fully what that solution is), or one might hold a value theory that results in a potentially different notion of what is mor- ally optimal. This issue could be a practical one, since for ethical applica- tions of the ecological concept of wilderness, it is possible that there could be situations where there was a forced choice between these variables, driving us to answer the question: how shall we weigh kinds of organisms in relation to the total number of individuals, in measuring how optimal an ecosystem is? I am proposing not a moral theory but rather a defini- tion—however, this still is of concern since the ultimate goal is a definition of use for moral theory, and it could be problematic if different moral theories ended up wanting to use “wilderness” in distinct normative ways (e.g., requiring it to satisfy something like ‘best kind of ecosystem accord- ing to my moral theory’), and as a result ended up proposing different notions of wilderness.

However, for both the empirical issue and the normative one, leav- ing these questions unsettled is unlikely to result in difficulties in the near term for most applications of the ecological concept of wilderness. This is because it is a likely hypothesis, supported by the most general of observa- tions, that evolution optimizes both of these variables much more success- fully than we find in ecosystems highly exploited by human beings. That

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is, any reasonable ranking of these two variables would still probably find ecosystems which were little utilized by humans were better off (in terms of whatever respective rankings of species versus individuals) than those ecosystems which were highly impacted by things like intensive agricul- ture, mining, or other industrial practices: a wilderness will likely both have more individuals, and more kinds of individuals, than any highly utilized human region. If this is right, there will typically be no practical consequence to leaving this issue unsettled. This also means that even if one were ultimately to adopt a ranking of individuals against kinds that diverged from the actual results of evolution, it may not have practical import for the kinds of environmental issues which are most pressing, and which will remain most pressing for the foreseeable future.

To illustrate this point, consider a highly idealized graph (figure 1). Here I have idealized to two dimensions: number of species, and number of individual organisms. The scale is left abstract and would surely not be the same for both axes. A mature science of ecology determines a curve through this space that describes how the two dimensions can be bal- anced against each other by different conditions of the ecosystem in ques- tion. This is obviously far too simple—the mixture of kinds of species and kinds of individual organisms surely matters, so no two-dimensional curve like this is plausible, more likely a space and not a curve would be more realistic. But the idealization serves to illustrate a simple point. A mature ecology might find that both the number of kinds and the number of individual organisms are balanced in a very narrow range, as illustrated by curve A (Fig. 1). Then, there is no practical question about how to balance individuals against species: their interests coincide so closely that there are no practical differences to be settled. The curve might also be a much broader one, as curve B illustrates. (In both cases, a wilderness on the ecological concept is an ecosystem that falls on the curve.) If some- thing like curve B were found to best describe the possible balance of the ecosystem, those who value number of species over number of individuals (perhaps many land ethicists) might argue that we should seek or encour- age a point like that marked a; those who value numbers of individuals over numbers of species (perhaps many biocentric individualists) might argue we should seek or encourage a point like that marked b.

However, my proposal is that most likely in any practical case where we must chose a course of action based on environmental principles, the ecosystem in question will be below the curve, and below both points a

craig delancey AN ECOlOgICAl CONCEpT Of WIldERNESS 41

and b on the relative dimensions; the point marked c illustrates such a case. In any such case, both kinds of value theories (holistic or individu- alistic) counsel an approach that will share many common goals with the other value theory—improving the number of appropriate species is likely to improve the numbers of appropriate individuals, and vice versa. Only in the more optimal cases would there be conflict.

I conclude then that the ecological concept of wilderness should be useful to a diverse range of ethical theories, and they should have little practical reason to adopt an alternative definition to match some norma- tive notion regarding the balance of species versus individuals that they may have.

VI. conclusIon

The ecological concept of wilderness is sufficient both to answer the challenges to the traditional concept, and in doing so to provide a com- mon concept of wilderness that can be a powerful tool for theory and policy. However, although this concept is sufficient, there is much that it does not explain or capture. For example, further analysis of the notion of wilderness as a place where things are wild, or self-willed, may capture important insights into the nature of individual organisms flourishing, and in turn be of importance to environmental ethics and policy. It is my expectation that such analyses will prove consistent with the ecological concept of wilderness.

Figure 1

Number of individuals

Number of species

Curve B

Curve A

c

a

b

ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 17(1) 201242

acknoWledgement

I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments.

notes

1 Other examples of a similar formulation, which I am calling here the “tra- ditional notion of wilderness,” include William Godfrey-Smith: “By wilder- ness I understand any reasonably large tract of the Earth, together with its plant and animal communities, which is substantially unmodified by humans and in particular by human technology” (1979, 310); Hettinger and Troop: “something is wild in a certain respect to the extent that it is not human- ized in that respect” (1999, 12); Cafaro: “We may call such places wilderness areas: places where permanent human habitation and direct economic utiliza- tion are off-limits or seversely circumscribed” (2001, 5); etc.

2 With slightly more formality, we can restate The Wilderness Hypothesis as saying that evolution tends to maximize a function of the form F

e (I

e , S

e ),

where e is a kind of ecosystem in question, I e is the number of individuals in

that ecosystem, and S e is the number of species (or otherwise significant kinds

of populations) in that ecosystem. F e describes how individuals and species or

other kinds of populations tend to optimize in relation to each other in such ecosystems. The question being delayed here is how these two factors, I

e or S

e ,

are related in this process. 3 It would, however, entail this: defenders of the claim (that biodiversity

hotspots were not more valuable than other kinds of ecosystems) would adopt a conceptual usage of “wilderness” and related terms more in keeping with our best usage if they consider the claim it is not the case that biodiver- sity hot spots are more morally valuable to have as a consequence the claim that it is not the case that wildernesses are more morally valuable.

4 This is not to claim that human use of ecosystems is efficient, even in terms of satisfying human desires. On the contrary, it is typically grossly inefficient. Rather, exploitation of available resources can often be eased in the short term by the elimination of competition, even though in fact that may and often (per- haps even usually) does result in the reduction of overall available resources, including resources of human utility, in the long run. This is because many organisms create resources by transforming materials and energy that are only indirectly of use to humans. Why humans do this is a matter of human psy- chology, concerning in some cases profound selfishness, in other cases an in- ability to properly value or respect temporally distant costs or values.

5 Nor does the ecological conception of wilderness a priori entail that intensive management or restoration are possible. Rather, the concept leaves the ques- tion an empirical one.

6 Such instrumental value proposals include preserving human freedom (Swain 1983, Anderson 1998, Woods 2005); supporting kinds of play (Henberg

craig delancey AN ECOlOgICAl CONCEpT Of WIldERNESS 43

1984); and providing recreation, biodiversity for science to study, sources of potential pharmaceuticals, etc. A review of instrumental values for wilderness can be found in Godfrey-Smith (1979). A wilderness on the ecological con- ception will satisfy most of these instrumental uses as well as a wilderness on the traditional conception.

7 To reiterate: the claim that evolution tends to result in optimal ecosystems is not the claim that it always results in an optimal system, nor that each change wrought by evolution is a step towards optimality. The process depends upon a certain amount of randomness, and suboptimal outcomes are possible; and the shorter the time horizon, the more possible such outcomes are. Thus, there can be events that harm ecosystems which are not human-caused, and which humans would do well to prevent or mitigate.

8 In fact, the ecological conception of wilderness allows that it is possible to alter a wilderness and make it more optimal. An example might be the crea- tion of artificial reefs. Some may find this counter-intuitive but I consider it a virtuous consequence of the separation from the traditional human-focused concept of wilderness.

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