Our Changing Concept of Wilderness and an Interesting Thought Experiment

     Virtually everyone reading this newsletter believes passionately in wilderness.  We think of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall and the Murie brothers whenever we hear that word.  The concept is easy for us in this country to grasp because we can envision a time when this land was a true wilderness as portrayed by the first European visitors.  The latest thinking has been modified to realize that Native Americans had been manipulating the landscape well before European settlers arrived.  This certainly must have involved fire and at least some conversion to cropland.  For example, the historic Black Hawk War (or massacre if you want to be more precise) was fought over a landscape previously modified by prehistoric inhabitants.   When the Sac leaders reluctantly agreed to restrict themselves to land west of the Mississippi, the tribal labor forces (women) were confronted with the daunting task of creating new fields from undeveloped woodland with simple hoes and hatchets.  They naturally began to infiltrate back to their old haunts where earlier years of their hard work had rendered the soil easily worked.   Pioneers were incensed by this egregious treaty violation and that meant war!  The fully-developed crop system using maize and beans had only arrived to much of North America by about 1000 CE, so landscape transformation into cropland had just begun.  LIDAR surveys of Central American and Amazonian rainforests show those seemingly wild places were once pervasively manipulated by inhabitants wiped out by the great pandemic brought from across the seas.  As enlightened conservationists such as those of in the Ozark Society work towards preservation of our limited wild and scenic places it is important for us to consider how human activity – past and future – fits into this effort.

     Ongoing human alteration (some might say degradation) of our Ozark landscape raises practical questions about how to preserve our remaining wild areas with the limited resources and the remaining undeveloped tracts we have on hand.  There is a fundamental conflict between our concept of a static pristine wilderness and the relentless cycle of change associated with natural ecosystems.     

  Change – both natural and man-made – needs to be factored into our conservation efforts.  One useful thought exercise is to consider a region with similar climate and geological history to the Ozarks, but with a much deeper and more pronounced history of human manipulation.  Does such a place exist and what lessons might we learn from that history?  Southern Britain surprisingly fills the bill.  The bedrock and climate history are eerily parallel.  Both have bedrock developed on sediments derived from the Appalachian orogen.   If you compare the Missouri River with Britain’s Thames, both represent drainages deflected by the margin of former continental ice sheets.  Although there are fossil footprints of pre-Neanderthal humans revealed on the coast of Britain, the barren tundra condition of the full glacial landscape would have made both southern Britain and the Ozarks virtually uninhabitable by 20,000 years ago.  Thus, both locations started as effectively blank slates when climate warmed enough to make the land inhabitable by humans about 15,000 years ago.  Both locations were probably visited by seasonal tundra hunters in those early years until closed coniferous and then deciduous forests became established.

     By about 9000 BC both Britain and the Ozarks were inhabited by hunter-gatherers, likely producing a similar, hardly detectable footprint on the landscape.  But then Britain received the expanding front of farming culture that had been moving westward on pathways along the Mediterranean shore and across lowland north of the Alps, arriving about 5000 BC.  These farmers quickly began to clear land, raising crops and livestock.  By the time Stonehenge was becoming active at 3000 BC it is estimated that woodland had been reduced to about the same extent as seen today – maybe 15% of the landscape.

  These changes are identified using palynology and other forensic methods as presented in the classic 1986 review of British landscape history by Oliver Rackham.

One especially dramatic observation is the abrupt disappearance of elm pollen from sediments in prehistoric times.  This was likely the arrival of the Dutch elm disease, which probably came in the same way it would much later to the USA – by unintended human transport.  A second wave of human arrival came with Indo-European culture of the Iron Age.   

     That brought evidence of an elite class arriving from the mainland as indicated by the isotope signature of elaborate burials such as the famed Amesbury Acher.  Along with this came new levels of landscape manipulation such as the long communal fields suited for the heavy ox plow.  Hedgerows were established to mark the edges of fields and as livestock barriers.  The scarcity of wood products produced practices such as coppicing and pollarding to enhance production of usable poles.  This encouraged the dominance of tree species most suited for that kind of forestry.   As a result of these events, the character of the landscape was already completely altered well before the dawn of recorded history such as that entailed in the famous Domesday Book.

     With this history, two major changes stand out.  First, the almost complete loss of the original forest ecosystem, which was composed of two linden species (comparable to our basswood).   Modern woodland is composed of a mixture of native and introduced oak species, European ash, birch and trees from the continent such as beech, chestnut and maple.     

     Ecologists use the presence of linden in hedgerows to indicate the age of those that have persisted since the very first establishment of fields at a time when linden seed sources were still present.  Second, much of the open landscape in Britain and Scotland is described as moor.  If you have read some of the popular Victorian novels you will be familiar with the extent of the wild and sometimes sinister nature of the “wilderness” moor.  Ecologists largely believe that the British moor is an artifact of landscape use.  Prime evidence of this is that trees can be seen invading moors wherever grazing has ceased, and the trees have a chance to become established.   We might even suggest that if Native Americans were left on their own for a much longer time, they might have produced a similar profound transformation of their land – but perhaps not unless they somehow had access to plow animals and iron technology.  On the other hand, more advanced farming technology arrived here the same way it did in Britain – by inbound migration.  Let us hope we can avoid such a near complete eradication of nature by the same chain of unfortunate events.

       To add a positive note, I have seen wooded areas such as the forest adjacent to Windsor Castle that are natural-looking stands of old-growth trees dominated by introduced chestnut and beech with a little native oak and ash.  Not natural forest but providing a soul-satisfying woodland experience.  Nearby preserve lands include what were once medieval “forests” such as the famed Sherwood.  These were actually savanna-like deer parks once reserved for the hunting elite that had isolated native oaks maintained today as giant old trees full of branch stubs and broken tops indicating their age and providing real scenic character.  Preservationists in Britain thus provide natural looking stands of trees for the outdoor experience along with a celebration of the historic features of landscapes of the past to augment what tiny fragments of pristine woodland that remain in places like the whitethorn thickets of Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, or the ancient, gnarled oaks of Wistman’s Wood in Dartmoor.   You can get a taste of public controversy that can arise by witnessing the outrage of prominent Lake District landowners like Beatrix Potter resisting all attempts to create natural public landscapes out of their beloved (but ecologically sterile) sheep pastures.  Irish rewilding advocate Eoghan Daltun likens this to permanently fixing the position of the hands on an ecological clock otherwise meant to document the changing cycles of the natural world.  Perhaps our focus on restoring pristine wilderness could be expanded to accommodate the inevitable cycles of change – including those unavoidably produced by the history of our own presence.

Reference: The History of the Countryside – the Classic History of Britain’s Landscape Flora and Fauna, Oliver Rackham, 1986.