Wild by Design
The failed design of wilderness and why designers need to fix it.
“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
- Howard Zahniser, The Wilderness Act of 1964
In America, wilderness is defined as everywhere that people are not. This idea that humanity is a separate entity to the natural world is baked into American culture. The 1964 Wilderness Act legally defined wilderness as a separate entity from “man and his works”. These words cemented a policy that provided a path to preserve wilderness and define what it was, and perhaps more importantly, what it was not. This act was part of a larger environmental movement designed to preserve and protect as much wild land as possible from human intervention. The Wilderness Act preserved some 9.1 million acres of land when it was implemented. It has since grown to protect around 110 million acres, which is roughly the size of California. This may sound like a large windfall, but in truth, federally protected wilderness areas represent only 5% of the entire United States. However, the idea of wilderness as nature occupies a much larger expanse in Americans’ collective imagination of what nature is and what it isn’t. Nature and wilderness go hand in hand.
A 2008 study about people’s feelings of connectedness to nature looked at words participants used to describe “natural environments” and “unnatural environments”. The top 5 most common words defining natural environments were: 1-Undisturbed by humans 2-Pure/clean, 3-Peaceful, 4-Beautiful, 5-Preserved land. The top 5 words describing unnatural environments are just as telling: 1-Human-made entities, 2-Pollution, 3-Industrial material, 4-Cities/urban areas, 5-Disharmony/altered Interestingly, 77% of the participants identified as being “part of the natural world” and yet in defining the “natural world” and “unnatural world”, participants used words that distanced humanity from the natural world. This image of the pristine wilderness has become the archetype of what most Americans associate as “nature” or the “natural world”. This study showed that even when we feel connected to the natural world, we still see ourselves as outside of it. Our built world is “unnatural” and divides us from the grown world. Design gives form to our built world, it therefore becomes a means to an unnatural environment.
Why do we put so much value on pristine nature? What does it have to do with our well-being? The fast rise of an industrialist economy co-created an environmentalist movement in order to combat the unchecked environmental degradation that results from heavy industry. A key strategy is to advocate for the preservation of these untrammeled lands for public recreation and scientific observation. Frederick Law Olmstead’s iconic design of New York City’s Central Park was one of the first major experiments in having “natural/wild” areas in close proximity to industrialized urban areas.
Olmstead’s revolutionary concept was that urbanites need close access to the natural environment. Contact with it can help heal the mental illnesses thought to be brought on by the harsh living and working conditions of the Industrial Revolution. In 1865 Olmstead would be asked to help design the National Park System as a signal to national unity by way of shared common grounds (Yosemite National Park, the first National Park, was established 2 years after the end of the Civil War). Olmstead’s driving vision was to create a system of parks that would serve as “great public grounds for the free enjoyment of the people,” forever guaranteeing its citizens ‘the pursuit of happiness.’” It is not then such a stretch to claim Frederick Law Olmstead as America’s first user experience designer, using the technology of the natural world as a collective balm for the harsh realities of a quickly industrializing nation.
These sorts of design decisions had lasting implications in the collective consciousness of a quickly developing world superpower. The idea of nature became split into raw resources for Industrialists and wild and scenic for Environmentalists. An example of this binary thinking is Hetch Hetchy Valley and Yosemite Valley in Northern California. The valleys not only look almost identical, they share many of the same bioregional characteristics. Hetch Hetchy would be dammed for drinking water for San Francisco, Yosemite Valley would be preserved for recreation. This example of this binary attitude shapes how we address our relationship with nature across the board, including civic, social, legal, economic, and scientific realms. What has become undeniably clear is that we are not separate from nature and that our collective impacts (particularly evinced in the atmosphere) are having massive impacts at a global scale.
Weather has become the connective tissue between people and the planet. It cannot be escaped. It holds us accountable and affects everyone directly. In cities it is the most tangible connection to the biorhythms of the planet. The weather’s increasing severity has long been associated as evidence of climate change and subsequent global warming. The frequency and damage of natural disasters is on the rise: floods, droughts, heat waves, cold fronts, ocean acidification, etc. The effects of the global change in temperature has the potential to completely restructure non-human and human life on this planet. A mass migration is beginning to take shape as many of the countries that will be hit hardest by climate change are some of the poorest ones.
In this time of dealing with the complexity of an interconnected system, it is time to get past the old binary of nature and people. To separate the two creates a false barrier in an interconnected system. Different ideologies are able to grow unchecked in these silos, positioning themselves as “for and against” rather than “with”. Binary thinking often ignores the holistic approach that systems demand. Our society is entangled in dichotomies: good vs evil, democrat vs republican, nature vs industry, etc. They provide the easiest way to distill information and form an opinion. These kinds of tangled problems don’t fit so well into a yes or no categorization. Ecological thinking needs to embrace a more inclusive theoretical framework. One that embraces complex systems and complex outcomes.
Postnaturalism is a theory that looks at the natural that has been intentionally and hereditarily altered by humans. It is an idea rooted in the domestication of plants and animals, Domestication is one of the most direct relationships we have with the non-human world. Humanity’s global success has largely been supported on the backs of the domesticated plants and animals. We selectively breed plants to have higher yields, be more resilient, to look a certain way, to taste a certain way. These plants and animals are genetically distinct from their wild ancestors.
Postnaturalism also looks at the record of the influence of human culture on evolution. Based on this second criteria, it should also encompass nature that has unintentionally been deeply altered. This broadens the focus of the postnatural and changes its scale to the entire system over the individual organism. This definition can zoom out to look at entire ecologies that have been hereditarily altered through human intervention. In this larger scale the postnatural condition starts to coincide as the biological component of the Anthropocene, or the geologic epoch of man.
The Anthropocene is a proposed geologic epoch where human impact is present in the geologic record. Evidence for the Anthropocene is taken from recordable changes in atmospheric conditions, to rapid declines in biodiversity. The implications of the Anthropocene have spurred a debate around if the planet is starting to experience its sixth major extinction, with humanity as the primary reason for a global systemic collapse.
There is general disagreement as to the start of the Anthropocene, but Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, two researchers from the University in London, have put forward evidence suggesting that the start of the Anthropocene began with the colonization of the New World in the 16th century. Colonialism and the Anthropocene are linked through observable data stored in ancient glaciers. During the colonization of the Americas, an estimated 50 million Native Americans in North, Central, and South America were killed, largely from European transmitted smallpox, typhoid, measles, flu, and many other pathogens that native Americans had no immunity towards. Within a few decades so many people had died that the subsistence farming in the Americas had mostly been wiped out. Forests returned to the land to the extent that they lowered the global levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This marks one of the first observable instances where a global change in the climate resulted from human action.
The colonization of the new world also established a new model of global trade. The researchers argue that the imports of potatoes and tomatoes in Europe, peppers and maize in China, and the infamous slavery trade triangle of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, bound the world up into a single global economic system. This early form of globalization started to have far reaching effects that continue to this day. The migration of plants and animals that have been a part of this global trade have had permanent effects on the ecology of the Americas. European earthworms are one of the oldest examples of invasive species brought to the Americas. In the US today, most earthworms you’ll find are European earthworms, which have been restructuring the ground of this country for over 400 years.
In light of this evidence, how could any habitat be “untrammeled” by man? It is clear that the idea of wilderness has its roots as a design gesture. Its definition was designed for the benefit of people over nature. We need a new definition of wilderness and nature that includes the complicated relationship between humans and the biosphere. Life centered design holds the key to a more mutualistic definition of wilderness that includes all of its contradictions: commodified nature, useless nature, genetically altered organisms, invasive plants and animals, urban ecologies, etc.
This recent pandemic has reduced our carbon emissions by 5%, which is the number we need to hit year after year. How will our society achieve this when the pandemic is over? Now is the opportunity to start re-imagining and re-organizing our ways of life in order to cement this downward trend as the norm. As designers there is an opportunity to swing the pendulum the other way and tell a new story through products, experiences, and systems, and services. We must position ourselves in places where we can tell this story in order to reshape the perception of wilderness not as a separate place, but as deeply connected to our daily lives. This healing must happen if there is to be a collective buy-in to commit to the drastic changes our society must make in order to avoid global environmental collapse and return to intentional cohabitants on this space ship Earth.