Personal and Societal Values, and
Wilderness Stewardship
Perry Brown
Abstract—Wilderness values have always been of critical importance to guide questions of wilderness policy, allocation, and stewardship. The Pinchot Institute report, Ensuring the Stewardship of
the National Wilderness Preservation System, is driven by these
wilderness values and will, hopefully, become a catalyst for action
in the United States.
Values of Wilderness ____________
Over the years, researchers and essayists have identified
a long list of values that people hold toward wilderness. I
have tried to put them into a manageable list of 10.
1. Historical Value. Some of this value is embodied in our
vision of untrammeled space that looks and feels like it did
in times past. Some value also is embodied in historical uses
that were made of wilderness.
2. Recreational Value. That people value wilderness for
cherished forms of recreation is well known and observed.
Primitive and unconfined forms of recreation are often
associated with wilderness.
3. Ecosystem Integrity Value. It has been observed that
people often envision wilderness as the place where ecosystems are least disturbed by humans and where natural
physical and biological processes operate.
4. Environmental Value. In this value set, we have those
environmental services and functions that wilderness provides so well, such as clean air and water, and diverse and
naturally occurring wildlife populations.
5. Landscape Value. Wilderness is often a place of undisturbed landscapes and the backdrop of scenery for human
observation from more developed and disturbed places. It is
valued for its scenic and aesthetic qualities.
6. Scientific Value. Wilderness is valued as a place where
baseline understanding of physical and biological processes
can be obtained, and as a place where scientific experimentation and observation can be conducted without the confounding nature of other human activities.
7. Spiritual Value. Given its vastness of scale and its
untrammeled nature, wilderness often is viewed as a place
where one can feel close to a creator or to the abstract called
nature. For many, wilderness provides opportunity for selfreflection, meditation, and communion with spiritual things.
Perry Brown is the Dean, School of Forestry, the University of Montana,
Missoula, MT 59812, U.S.A. E-mail: pbrown@forestry.umt.edu
In: Watson, Alan; Sproull, Janet, comps. 2003. Science and stewardship
to protect and sustain wilderness values: Seventh World Wilderness Congress symposium; 2001 November 2–8; Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Proc.
RMRS-P-27. Ogden, UT: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service,
Rocky Mountain Research Station.
USDA Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-27. 2003
8. Traditional Use Value. For some people wilderness
provides the setting for playing out traditional uses of
hunting, fishing, camping, and woodsman skills.
9. Intellectual Value. The intellectual value of wilderness
is expressed in writings about it, in song and art, and in
many forms of discourse among people. It often is valued for
the freedom of intellect that it permits and fosters.
10. Economic Value. While most of the values ascribed to
wilderness seem toward the anti-economic, wilderness also
provides opportunity for employment and economic development. It generates economic value in that it attracts the
interests of people for both on- and offsite use and consideration.
These values of wilderness are the fundamental factors
that drive us to want to ensure that there is wilderness and
that it is sustained over time. They are the values that
should drive our consideration of principles used to guide
wilderness stewardship, and they should drive our stewardship choices.
Pinchot Institute Report on
Wilderness Stewardship in the
United States ___________________
With these ideas about values of wilderness as background, I will turn my attention to the Pinchot Institute
report, Ensuring the Stewardship of the National Wilderness Preservation System. While this report is specific to the
U.S.A., much of its content is relevant to other locales
because it is based on an understanding of many of the
values of wilderness.
The Blue Ribbon panel that prepared the report was
composed of 10 individuals from conservation organizations
and academic institutions, and selected individuals retired
from Federal agencies, including a former U.S. Secretary of
the Interior who was in office when the U.S. Wilderness Act
was passed. I had the pleasure of serving as the chair of the
panel. It had two tasks:
1. Assessing the management of the National Wilderness
Preservation System in contemporary society.
2. Making recommendations regarding the future of wilderness stewardship and the sustainability of the system.
Some of the questions asked by the panel were:
• Is wilderness taken seriously by land management
agencies?
• Is the organizational location and level of wilderness
stewardship positioned for real success?
• Are sufficient funding and staffing resources allocated
to wilderness stewardship?
• Is stewardship clearly defined, and what kinds of stewardship are appropriate?
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• Is there collaboration, cooperation, and consistency in
wilderness stewardship across management agencies?
• Are wilderness clients being well served?
• Can wilderness training and research be improved and
better focused?
The panel focused on stewardship of a resource that has
been growing in importance as a land use in the United
States. The U.S. Wilderness Act passed Congress and was
signed by the President in September 1964, 37 years ago.
Since the passage of the Act, the system has grown from over
10 million acres (4 million ha) in 54 units, to over 105 million
acres (43 million ha) in over 600 units. From surveys,
literature, music, behavior, and experience, we know that
wilderness is more important to the American people than
ever before.
While the panel found that there were some very good
examples of wilderness stewardship, it also found areas of
major and minor concern. Some significant and serious
contemporary dilemmas of wilderness stewardship were
identified:
• Ensuring both naturalness and wildness.
• That wilderness is not isolated from its surrounding
landscape.
• Manipulating wilderness conditions is philosophically
and practically problematic.
• That the place of recreational use in wilderness has not
been made very clear.
• That agency organization and commitment to stewardship are needed for success, but they often seem lacking.
• That excelling in an information exchange environment
implemented through modern information technologies
is new and challenging.
In reviewing the values of wilderness, the questions that
emerged about wilderness stewardship, these contemporary dilemmas, and the track record of the wilderness
management agencies over the past 37 years, eight Principles for Wilderness Stewardship were formulated by the
Panel. We believe that these principles should guide all
wilderness stewardship in the United States, and that most
of them are applicable to wilderness stewardship anywhere
it occurs. These principles are:
1. Adhering to the Wilderness Act is a fundamental principle for stewardship in the United States.
2. United States wilderness areas are to be treated as a
system of wilderness.
3. Wilderness areas are special places and they are to be
treated as special.
4. Stewardship should be science-informed, logically
planned, and publicly transparent.
5. Nondegradation of wilderness should fundamentally
guide stewardship activities.
6. Preservation of wilderness character is a guiding idea
of the Wilderness Act.
7. Recognizing the wild in wilderness distinguishes wilderness from most other land classes.
8. Accountability is basic to sound stewardship.
These principles led the Panel to formulate a set of
recommendations that, if implemented, would shape the
future for success in wilderness stewardship. The six broad
recommendations are:
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Personal and Societal Values, and Wilderness Stewardship
1. Wilderness agencies and their leaders must make a
strong commitment to wilderness before the wilderness is
lost.
2. Wilderness agencies must organize to maximize stewardship effectiveness and to develop a fully integrated stewardship system.
3. Wilderness planning must be accelerated and plans
prepared for the guidance of stewardship activities.
4. Science, education, and training programs should be
enhanced to provide information, professional expertise,
and public support for wilderness stewardship.
5. Wilderness agencies should create wilderness stewardship positions and career opportunities from top to bottom and deploy financial resources for the explicit stewardship and support of wilderness.
6. Accountability for the maintenance and sustainability
of the wilderness system must be embraced by the wilderness agencies.
While we were critical of the state of the system and many
of the things that are being done, and the absence of things
that need to be done, we also found several activities ongoing
today that are helpful in leading us toward wilderness
stewardship. We need to accelerate them and more quickly
learn how to steward our wilderness resource.
The Wilderness Information Network (www.wilderness.
net) is one such activity. This Web site is a focal point for
information about wilderness, wilderness training, and wilderness research. It is multiagency in function and support,
and demonstrates how information can be managed and
shared to provide a repository of wilderness information for
everyone.
The Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center
and the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute are
interagency centers advancing understanding of wilderness
and the continuous training of wilderness professionals.
Their success as interagency cooperatives has varied over
time, but they demonstrate that it is possible to construct
interagency, collaborative units. There are also several
collaborating institutions in Alaska that provide examples
of information and policy bodies that are instructive for
collaborative work.
While there are good things happening today, the bottom
line of our report is the need to forge an integrated and
collaborative system across the four wilderness management
agencies. This is something that we have not done in our 37
years of wilderness stewardship, since the passage of the
Wilderness Act in 1964. Our agencies operate as if there were
four wilderness systems, not one, and it is high time that we
got on with developing one integrated system. To move in this
direction we proposed four specific recommendations for the
Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture, the ministers
who oversee the wilderness stewardship agencies.
1. The Secretaries should issue joint policies and regulations specifying common interpretations of law, and thus
provide broad guidelines for the stewardship of wilderness.
2. The Secretaries should devise an organizational structure to make stewardship happen across the agencies so that
a high quality wilderness system is continued in perpetuity.
3. The Secretaries should devise monitoring and evaluation systems to ensure that we know how well wilderness
areas are being stewarded, especially in the context of a
USDA Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-27. 2003
Personal and Societal Values, and Wilderness Stewardship
Brown
system of wildernesses, and they should reinstitute regular
reporting on the state of the system.
4. The Secretaries should develop a means of informing
the American people about the National Wilderness Preservation System and about their wilderness heritage.
shape the future for success, and work toward ensuring the
existence of a truly integrated National Wilderness Preservation System. That is our challenge, as the values of
wilderness become our stewardship responsibility.
The same general needs likely exist for wilderness everywhere. They are to build and steward a system of wildernesses focused on the values that wilderness brings to the
human condition, especially in the relations of humans to
their sustaining environment.
The framework for action prescribed in our report is one
that can lead to effective stewardship and development of a
National Wilderness Preservation System. Recognizing the
many good examples of wilderness stewardship that have
been implemented over the past 37 years, we can adopt a set
of principles for stewardship, implement actions that will
Reference ______________________
USDA Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-27. 2003
Pinchot Institute for Conservation. 2001. Ensuring the stewardship
of the National Wilderness Preservation System: a report to the
USDA Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and U.S. Geological
Survey. Washington, DC: Pinchot Institute for Conservation,
Publications, 1616 P Street NW, Suite 100, Washington, DC
20036, phone: (202) 797-6580, E-mail: publications@pinchot.
org.[Online]. Available: www.pinchot.org/pic/wilderness_
report.pdf
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4. Protection of Coastal/Marine and
River/Lake Wilderness
Storms River flows into the Indian
Ocean – Tsitsikamma National
Park (photo by Alan Watson).
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