There are many everyday language tools (metaphors, similes, memes and so on) we take for granted, barely noticing them as we use or hear them. That they scarcely register doesn’t detract from their value, though, as these efficient shortcuts aid understanding, add liveliness to prose, and signal group identity within cliques, cultures and countries. One of the oldest is the humble definition, a simple device used to establish the exact meaning – or meanings – of a given word, allowing the listener and the speaker to understand that word in the same way. Definitions are doubtless as old as language itself, existing ever since some ancient child first posed the question, “What does that word mean?” .

While definitions may seem simple, they beome powerful when used as instruments of public policy. In the legislative game, she who controls a definition has already won the first battle, and sometimes the war as well.

Here’s an example: what does (or should) the word “wilderness” mean?

Most of us would likely nod affirmatively at what the lexicographers at McGraw-Hill settled onwhen they added this entry to their dictionary:

Wilderness: An area of undeveloped land affected primarily by the forces of nature; an area where humans are visitors who do not remain. 

This is a contemporary definition, though, reflecting a modern appreciation of nature and a belief that such wilds as remain need protection if they are to continue to exist. A thousand years ago, perceptions were very different. Back then, wolves and bears roamed the breadth of Europe, and almost everyone there or anywhere else you might have in mind lived in isolated communities. In between were dark, forbidding forests. A wilderness then was a place of danger and fear, an area to be avoided if possible and passed through swiftly if not. In those times, the definition would look something like this:

Wilderness: An area between towns, usually uninhabited; a region devoid of humans and inhabited by wild beasts. Also called the Wilds.

As I write this, I am on a hiking and camping vacation in northwestern Nevada, one of the emptiest parts of the United States. Here the land is wide, windy and starkly beautiful, with much wildlife, no cultivation, and on any given day, only a handful of people present across hundreds of thousands of acres. The silence is enduring, unmarred even by the sound of a plane. But does that make it wilderness?

The answer depends, of course, on the definition. There may be precious few human beings here, but over a hundred years of white settler interventions, from overgrazing by sheep and cattle to the near eradication of the buffalo, have profoundly altered the terrain. Today this is as much a controlled landscape as is any farmland on the other side of the Mississippi. And, to be fair, Native Americans managed their environment as well, using fire to clear terrain and maintain it in ways favoring and attracting the game they relied on to survive.

Are these almost entirely empty lands then necessarily not wilderness? Again, it depends on who decides what that word means. I found a more accommodating definition that predates our modern usage of the word by more than two millennia:

Wilderness: (1.) Heb. midhbar, denoting not a barren desert but a district or region suitable for pasturing sheep and cattle (Psalms 65:12; Isaiah 42:11; Jeremiah. 23:10; Joel 1:19; 2:22)

For some, that definition might represent revealed truth. Bring on the herds!

But there are many other opinions, and gradations and distinctions within those opinions. This was brought home to me when I happened on one of the few ranchers that live here, the enlightened owner of twenty thousand acres of high, rugged mountains and broad, empty valleys. We had quite an interesting conversation and touched on several things that might be relevant to “wilderness-ness,” depending upon your point of view. I learned, for example, that sixteen of his bulls were shot dead this year and left where they fell, presumably by ecoterrorists bent on returning the land to its original state. Clearly, their definition would run something more like this:

Wilderness: Land that, together with its plant and animal communities, is in a state that has not been substantially modified by, and is remote from, the influences of European settlement or is capable of being restored to such a state, and is of sufficient size to make its maintenance in such a state feasible.

Whoever wantonly slaughtered those bulls had targeted their wrath inefficiently, though, as the rancher also informed me that he intends to spray his entire ranch with an herbicide to kill off the sage brush, after which he will burn his land every five years to keep that underbrush at bay. The goal? To revert his holdings to as close to their original state as possible. Further to the same end, he plans to fence in a large area of his ranch to keep his cattle out rather than in.

Even before this intervention, state wildlife officials estimate his land supports about seventy-five antelope, twenty-five mountain sheep and several mountain lions (all animals with little tolerance for human presence, and ones we normally associate with wild, isolated, natural habitats), not to mention lots of deer and many other types of wildlife as well. Most unusually for these parts, he hopes to share his land with more people, inviting them in as visitors. Clearly, to him, “wilderness” (assuming that’s a word he would use at all) has a more nuanced meaning, perhaps as follows:

Wilderness: An area of land that has been least modified by modern technological society; the most intact and undisturbed expanses of our remaining natural landscapes. 

Later I moved on to the Charles Sheldon Antelope Range, which has been closed to grazing for many decades. There I hoped to see something closer to the land as the first Mountain Men found it when they spread out across the west on the heels of Lewis and Clark. Instead, I saw more sage brush than ever, as well as countless juniper trees cut down and left to decay.

I learned the reason for these anomalies from the only people I met during the several days I hiked and camped in the Range: a fire marshal parked with his rig and crew on a bluff overlooking a wide valley, pre-positioned above the area an approaching thunderstorm was most likely to ignite with its lightning strikes. He told me that sagebrush provides excellent cover for sage grouse, deer and antelope (he was right – I repeatedly flushed deer and grouse as I hiked), as do felled trees, which also open up more area for the grasses that antelope graze upon. The Range, you see, is managed to maximize game production for hunters, as its name – not “Refuge” but “Range” – suggests with more than usual candor. As a result, the fires that would otherwise maintain a mix of plant (and therefore animal) life native to this location are suppressed so that only a more limited variety of (literally) targeted species can flourish.

Naturally, the wild horses that roam this state in their thousands are also unwelcome competitors for grass that could otherwise increase the antelope count. More than a third of the herd in the Range, some eight hundred sixty animals, are culled each year.

Doubtless, the wide and empty Range looks and feels very much like a wilderness to hunters, as in their lifetimes they will have witnessed nothing different in these parts. In other words, a place to make you feel like a good steward of our common natural heritage, provided you define a wilderness a bit more like this:

Wilderness: Land remaining in basically wild (i.e., undisturbed) condition, with few if any traces of human activities.

True, I expect you could count the structures on one hand that interrupt the five hundred seventy thousand haunting, empty acres of the Range. But the reality is still that this vast tract of land is being managed as deliberately as any pasture, albeit one almost as big as the State of Rhode Island.

So much for definitions of preference. On now to a definition with teeth and consequences.

In the United States there has been a legal definition of wilderness since 1964, and this formulation controls what types of most-wild landscapes will survive for us and our children to enjoy. It is with this statutory usage that the exact definition of “wilderness” becomes truly critical. And, inevitably, contentious as well. Sometimes bitterly so.

Definitions created for statutory and regulatory purposes rightly reflect the public goals they serve. For example, if preservation of natural species is the desired goal, criteria like sustainability become important, since islands of habitat must be of sufficient size to support the full complement of species that are historically native to the locale. Make a preserve too small, and the very plants and animals you most wish to protect may go locally extinct, no matter how scrupulously you protect that habitat. Here is one non-government definition that incorporates this concern in at least a general way (general, in that many species – such as panthers in Florida or jaguars in Arizona – may require a refuge orders of magnitude larger):

Wilderness: An area of land generally greater than 1000 hectares that predominantly retains its natural character and on which the impact of man is transitory and, in the long run, substantially unnoticeable.

On the other hand, if human enjoyment of wilderness is a goal, or if making critical decisions about what terrain is preserved and what is not, then these criteria must be included as well. Here is an example:

Wilderness: A part of our natural landscape that is sufficiently large and varied to constitute a more or less self-regulatory ecological unit, where human interference with the land, plants and animals is minimal, and where the beauty and character of the landscape has aesthetic, cultural or scientific significance.

What Congress adopted as a definition of wilderness, as with any other piece of legislation, represented a balancing of the demands of competing interest groups. Most difficult to reconcile was the ongoing struggle between those that wish to make economic use of public lands (typically people that live in proximity to the lands in question, but also global corporations) and those who wish to enjoy the same lands first-hand while on vacation, or who simply take comfort in knowing they are there, or vicariously appreciate them through books and documentaries (in the same way fans of space exploration follow missions avidly, but do not expect ever to board a space ship). As fate would have it, most public lands, and therefore the people who live near them, are mostly located in “Red” states, while the majority of the nature voyeurs and occasional visitors inhabit “Blue” ones, making the debate even more difficult and spirited than might otherwise be the case.

One source summarizes the definition eventually included in the Wilderness Act of 1964 as follows:

Wilderness: Areas designated by Congressional action under the 1964 Wilderness Act. Wilderness is defined as undeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence without permanent improvements or human habitation. Wilderness areas are protected and managed to preserve their natural conditions, which generally appear to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature with the imprint of human activity substantially unnoticeable; have outstanding opportunities for solitude or for a primitive and confined type of recreation; including at least 5,000 acres or are of sufficient size to make practical their preservation, enjoyment, and use in an unimpaired condition; and may contain features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historic value as well as an ecological and geologic interest.

The Wilderness Act was indeed a great accomplishment, leading to the preservation of many priceless landscapes. But one (to me) regrettable result of the compromises required to achieve its passage is that federally protected wilderness land is very frequently leased for grazing purposes. Of all categories of public land, only national parks and monuments are off limits for leasing – national forests and all other types of federal land are fair game (with a few specific exceptions made for particular pieces of land) for grazing, logging and mining, subject to compliance with other relevant laws and regulations. As administrations change, wilderness areas and the extractive rights in them are added and subtracted, depending on the goals of the then-current administration. The Clinton administration, for example, barred construction of new access roads for logging and other purposes on certain lands. The George W. Bush reversed that rule, and the see-saw process of preservation and withdrawal of preservation continues unabated.

Given the profound effect grazing can have on ecosystems (and especially so in the dry areas where most federal land is found), this means even areas designated as wilderness will never look as they did in their original state, nor will they ever sustain the full richness of biodiversity that once existed but could otherwise often be restored today. Only in a national park or national monument may you see that type of landscape beginning to reemerge (Sequoia National Park is a splendid example).

But solitude is harder to achieve in many national parks, given the heavy usage most of these preserves receive and the non-wilderness infrastructure of roads, campgrounds and interpretive facilities constructed to support such heavy visitation. In other words, much of the landscape may be more faithful to the original ecosystem, but it is in other ways less truly wild.

So how much do definitions matter? At times, a great deal, because definitions are the essential and dispositive foundations upon which laws and regulations are based, determining (in this case) which precious resources will be preserved, and how, and what we and our children will be able to experience and enjoy throughout our lives.

August 23, 2005

You can find the first post in this series here

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