I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. And see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. - Henry David Thoreau

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. - Aldo Leopold

There are worlds on which life has never arisen. There are worlds that have been charred and ruined by cosmic catastrophes. We are fortunate: we are alive; we are powerful; the welfare of our civilization and our species is in our hands. If we do not speak for Earth, who will? If we are not committed to our own survival, who will be? - Carl Sagan, "Cosmos"

Pictured at left: El Capitan, Yosemite National Park.
Copyright 1990 by Jeffrey Wood.

Northwest Forest | Northwest Salmon | Realities 1989

What is the Value of Our Wilderness?
by Tim Hermach
Special to The Seattle Times
Friday, June 12, 1998

When evaluating wilderness protection, a useful axiom to remember is:  What you focus on determines what you get, and what you miss.  We agree, as the recent Seattle Times editorial ("Protecting wilderness in the next millennium," May 29) suggests, that "it's just too easy to say nothing of significance has happened since the mid-1980s."  Indeed, a lot has happened, but most of it has been bad.   Therefore, we believe that calling solely for an "honest accounting of wilderness and conservation gains" profoundly obscures the larger picture.

The issue, with all due respect, is not what modest "gains" have been made, but how much wilderness has been lost during that period.  Along with an accounting of what was "saved", let's have an honest accounting of our irreplaceable losses.

No one bothers to calculate how much an ancient forest - a millennium in the making - was really worth.  Or, what value the totemic salmon has to the Northwest?   We don't put a price on the value of clean drinking water, except perhaps when we have to buy it in bottles.  How foolish to wait until these things are all but gone before realizing they were important and irreplaceable.

To determine how much wilderness is enough, answering a series of simple questions - using our own experience and intuition - can be illuminating.  Do we now have more salmon, or less?  Do we have more native and ancient forest, or less?   Were more acres of forest saved or cut?  Are we experiencing more flooding, or less?  More landslides, or fewer?  Are municipal water supplies more silted, or less?  Are there more giant redwoods today, or fewer?  How many roadless areas were opened to logging?  How many species have we lost in the past decade?  And how many more are closer to extinction now?  Are outdoor recreation sites becoming more or less crowded?  Is more of the landscape paved, or less?  Are there more strip malls, or fewer?

The point is that, on balance, we are losing on every front.  And what we lose, we never recover.  It's arguable that we have slowed the rate of destruction, but so what?  It continues as inexorably as night follows day.  And in the process, the systems that support life - our own as well as that of other species - are increasingly out of balance.

We can't create wilderness; in more lucid moments, we can choose to leave it inviolate.  More often, we push back its shrinking boundaries to satisfy some momentary want.  And, what a ruckus we make about deferring our boundless search for gratification and simply leaving alone something that already serves us.  Like evolutionary children who recognize only want, we profess our entitlement to transform every scrap of usable earth.

What is wilderness worth?  A recent book, "Nature's Services," brought together 32 respected scientists and economists from around the world to quantify the value of environmental protection using the tools of economic-utility assessment and cost-benefit analysis.  They determined that the aggregate value of ecosystem services - the price we would pay if we had to duplicate them - was conservatively worth "many trillions of dollars annually."

Because we take so much of nature for granted, it doesn't mean it has no value.   Yes, let's save every bit of wilderness we can.  There is too little left as it is, and it's the best deal we'll ever make.

Tim Hermach is executive director of the Native Forest Council, a Eugene, Oregon based organization dedicated to protection and preservation of the nation's national forests.