Remember “Inhabited Wilderness?” Now there’s “Peopled Wilderness”

Opinion by KAY MATTHEWS

Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. She’s also a rather celebrated, if controversial, philosopher and activist who’s been involved in various political causes including animal rights.

An essay called “A Peopled Wilderness,” from her forthcoming book, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility, was recently published in The New York Review of Books. I found the essay particularly interesting because the arguments she makes about the management of animals in the “wilderness” lend themselves to the arguments we’ve been having for decades in northern New Mexico about forest “management” versus “Nature’s course.”

She starts with this: “The fascination of an idea of ‘wild’ Nature lies deep in the thinking of the modern environmental movement. The idea is entrancing, but also, I believe, deeply confusing.” In our norteño debates we often refer to this idea of wild nature as “deep ecology.” She goes on to provide a history of the Romantic idea of Nature as opposed to human society as “stale, predictable, effete.” The Romantics’ idea of “the wild,” that which “beckons something truer, deeper, something uncorrupt and sublime, a type of vital energy that can restore us, because it is the analogue of our own deepest depths.” Today, I still hear some enviros describe humans as a “scourge” upon nature rather than a component of it. The Romantic writers and poets often presented peasants and other poor people as being closer to Nature than the industrialized urban resident, atomized and alien. Nussbaum doesn’t buy this: “My point is that this is an idea by and about human beings, not about Nature or animals or what they require of us. And the wonder involved in the Romantic sublime is similarly egocentric. It is not the sort of wonder that really turns us outward.”

The rest of her essay expounds on her argument that this kind of thinking is egocentric and doesn’t do much for nature and its animals: “Even the time honored idea of the ‘balance of nature ‘ has by now been decisively refuted by modern ecological thinking. When humans do not intervene Nature does not attain a stable or balanced condition, nor does it attain the condition that is best for other creatures or the environment.” This “modern ecological thinking” is employed by those of us who argue that without human management of our forests and watersheds, which for decades have been degraded by human mismanagement (primarily the Forest Service), nature is not well served.

As I reported in a previous La Jicarita article discussing the need to continue to use prescribed burning despite the tragedy of the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon Fire, on July 26, 2022 the Acting Santa Fe National Forest Supervisor James Duran (he’s the Carson Forest Supervisor as well) withdrew the Draft Decision Notice and Finding of No Significant Impact of the Santa Fe Mountain Landscape Resiliency Project (SFMLRP), four months after the decision was issued. This Project proposed to treat 50,000 acres surrounding the City of Santa Fe, Santa Fe County, the Pueblo of Tesuque, and the communities within and adjacent to its boundary “to increase the resilience of a priority landscape to future disturbances such as high-severity wildfire, drought, and insect and disease outbreaks.” The project was being developed in collaboration with the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed Coalition, comprised of 25 partners that represent Santa Fe local governments, Tesuque Pueblo, fire departments, state forestry, and numerous environmental and forest conservation groups such as The Nature Conservancy, Forest Stewards Guild, the Sierra Club, Ecotone Landscape Planning, and the Rio Grande Water Fund.

Why did the Forest Supervisor pull the Draft Decision without consulting his partners in the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed Coalition? Unfortunately, the “partner” the Forest Service appears to be listening to is the same “deep ecology” community of activists that rejects the science that supports thinning and prescribed burning as tools to make our forests more resilient. At a recent “listening session” sponsored by Santa Fe County Commissioner Anna Hansen, the author of a resolution passed by the commission asking the Forest Service to postpone the SFMLRP, the main voices heard were those of “scripted speakers” representing Forest Advocate, WildEarth Guardians, Wild Watershed, and the Santa Fe Forest Coalition. A featured speaker was Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at Wild Heritage, another forest ecologist who has worked with Chad Hansen, who, as I’ve reported on previously in La Jicarita, doesn’t support large-scale forest thinning and burning and speaks more to the idea of there being a “wild Nature” that will restore itself. To understand DellaSala’s position you can read his testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, “Exploring Solutions to Reduce Risks of Catastrophic Wildfire and Improve Resilience of National Forests,” on September 27, 2017.

The philosophy these activists espouse is reminiscent of what Nussbaum speaks of in her article—leaving all “wild” animals to do the best they can even though humans dominate everything, everywhere. This, she believes, “would be, it seems, a gross abnegation of responsibility: we have caused all these problems, and we turn our backs on them, saying, ‘Well, you are wild animals so live with it as best you can.’ It is not clear what would be accomplished by this pretense of a hands-off policy.” Matt Picarrello and Esme Cadiente of The Nature Conservancy argued in a Santa Fe New Mexican opinion piece, that pausing the release of the SFMLRP “will not achieve the desired effect of reducing the risk of escaped prescribed burns,” as in any forest resiliency project there will be a prescribed burn plan.

Nussbaum’s essay speaks specifically about human intervention to save endangered animal species, even questioning whether we should act to prevent certain kinds of predation, as dangerous as that might prove to be (and as farfetched as many may think). But we can substitute “forests” for “animals” and her arguments about what defines “wild” and our Romantic notions that sustain it make sense. “If humans try to renounce stewardship, in a world where they are ubiquitously on the scene, shaping every habitat in which every animal lives, this is not an ethically defensible choice or one that promotes good animal lives [substitute ‘resilient forests’].” The environmental activists who helped shut down community based forestry in the 1990s to mid 2000s, and who are now trying to shut down forest restoration projects, might want to give Nussbaum a read and maybe, just maybe, allow an animal loving intellectual point out some fallacies in their thinking.