Wilderness Values: How Thoreau Cursed the Allagash

"But the trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world. The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living -- urban folk for whom food comes from a supermarket or a restaurant instead of a field, and for whom the wooden houses in which they live and work apparently have no meaningful connection to the forests in which trees grow and die. Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land."
by William Cronon, The Trouble With Wilderness

If you’ve heard of the Allagash, you may know that the Maine’s Department of Conservation has been accused of poor management of the famous Wilderness Waterway. Critics of the state government include the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Council of Maine, Maine Audubon Society, Trout Unlimited, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, plus some Maine guides and other ad hoc parties, such as the Allagash Alliance.

The State of Maine owns and manages the Allagash River and its shoreline, essentially as a state park with certain political encumbrances. I will not discuss the history of how the Allagash became the state’s responsibility nor how the state’s “good cop” assumption of management staved off a federal “bad cop” expropriation that would have resulted in an Allagash National Park. I merely note that the Allagash is a fascinating laboratory for public-choice economics.

A signal controversy has been the rancorous debate over Department’s proposal for a canoe launch site at John’s Bridge, a proxy debate over the scope of overland access to the watershed. The long-term struggle for control of the waterway helps to explain the participation of national organizations like the Sierra Club, for whom an interest in one humble canoe launch would otherwise be unusual. In “Baxter and Friends” I discussed how the relationship between the management of a public resource and its interested constituency can lead to policies favoring an in-group to the exclusion – intended or not - of other users or potential users. The prospective emergence of a dominant interest group for the Allagash Wilderness Waterway helps to explain the often bitter competition over apparently prosaic matters like launching site for canoes.

The groups listed above comprise what I shall call the “wilderness values” interest. For the Allagash, the terms “wild” and “wilderness” sometimes have specific meanings. “Wild,” for example, describes the river’s legal status as part of the federal Wild and Scenic Rivers act. “Wilderness” is part of the official name of the park, as chosen by the Maine State Legislature. Besides legal meaning, more important is “wilderness” as the sentimental concept that serves to attract and unite the various interests that either prefer reduced access to the waterway or resist additional means of access.

In contrast to the wilderness faction opposing the John’s Bridge launch site are the “locals,” “traditionalists,” or “sportsmen.” Among these are camp owners, both private individuals, commercial camp operators and guides, whose proximity to John’s Bridge makes that spot most convenient for launching into Allagash waters. Others in the group are Aroostook and Penobscot county locals for whom John’s Bridge is a convenient launch site for a day’s fishing. Because the John’s Bridge controversy has broad implications for access to the Allagash by canoeists, fishermen, and hunters, the Sportman’s Alliance of Maine has taken a position on John’s Bridge, and against “wilderness values” regulations for Maine’s north woods.

What are the origins and principles of the “wilderness values” that many wish to apply to the Allagash watershed? Do these values translate into a system of wilderness management? I contend that the notion of “wilderness” as an ideal for managing the Allagash Wilderness Waterway simply doesn’t work, leading to dead-ends of contradiction and incoherence.

Thoreau’s Allagash

The spiritual founder the American “wilderness values” movement was Henry David Thoreau, whose proto-ecocentrism remains vastly influential. That the Allagash was one of his subjects lends creedence to the “wilderness values” faction at every juncture of Allagash management policy; if Thoreau had chosen some other river as his subject, his ideas and the Allagash would not be so closely associated. As I have written elsewhere, the difficulty in accepting Thoreau as the original authority on the Maine woods is his radically unbalanced approach. Thoreau was both naturalist and misanthrope, and the result is a book about the Maine Woods that exalts nature and slights society and culture, leaving the reader with an incomplete conception of the Maine woods as they existed in his era. Thoreau has little sympathy for the human subjects of his narrative, and even his attempts at filling in the characters of his Indian guides fail to make them little more than curiosities. In Thoreau’s view, all practical human activity in the forest is “coarse.”

“…how base and coarse are the motives which generally carry men into the wilderness,” Thoreau wrote,

The explorers and lumberers generally are all hirelings…they have no more love for wild nature than wood sawyers have for forests. Other white men and Indians who come here are for the most part hunters, whose object is to slay as many moose and other wild animals as possible. But pray, could one not spend some weeks or years in the solitude of this vast wilderness with other employments than these – employments perfectly sweet and innocent and ennobling? … What a coarse and imperfect use of nature Indians and hunters make of nature! No wonder that their race is so soon exterminated.

Thoreau cites a “higher law” governing our relationship with the natural world. Who understands nature and its “truest use”? he asks. “…it is the poet,” he answers: Thoreau himself. Recreational users and even native Indians lack the understanding of the “truest use” of the forest that Thoreau claims for himself. For Thoreau, all human interventions in nature are intrusions, all self-interested motives disreputable.

Sacred Stewards of Maximum Wilderness

We hear echoes of Thoreau in the pronouncements of the pro-wilderness faction.

“State and federal laws require that the Allagash be preserved in the wildest state possible,” said American Rivers President Rebecca R. Wodder.

“The petition, signed by 1,200 Mainers, says: ‘I believe the state should manage the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in a way that develops ‘the maximum wilderness character’ of the Waterway, as Maine citizens supported in the original referendum to create the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in 1966.’”

"The central issue before us is how we are going to manage the wilderness in the Allagash in the 21st century,” said Jym St. Pierre of RESTORE: The North Woods. “…Today it is more important than ever that we defend and restore the wilderness character of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. Our state should take pride in being sacred steward for our nation of the Allagash wilderness… "

“Let the Allagash live up to its name, Allagash Wilderness Waterway, so that travelers who go there will always come back more alive and at peace than when they arrived,” said Sally Stockwell, conservation director for Maine Audubon. “Let the Allagash be a place where nature lies undisturbed, where people travel as quietly as the animals who live there, where we learn about and revel in the wonders of the natural world.”

Wilderness values! The anti-recreation, anti-local faction triumphantly spreads the “wilderness” hand onto the green felt as if it trumped every other possible hand in the deck.

I confess that my “wilderness values” understanding of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway is compromised by many practical and, perhaps, selfish experiences along the Allagash River. A “truest use” advocate might argue that I have spent so many enjoyable days there that my competence to discuss the Allagash has been thoroughly damaged. Plus, I’ve read a bit about the area, especially lumbering history. I grew up in the region, where “day use for fishing” was unapologetically normal. I canoed on the Allagash before it became an official wilderness. I go there to catch a few brook trout, run Chase Rapids, cook substantial meat-and-potatoes meals, and generally bask in woodsy-style sybaritic luxury. I like the Allagash for lots of reasons – solitude and quiet, certainly, but also camaraderie, physical challenge, fishing, and campcraft. Perhaps that’s why I don’t feel “more alive” or more “at peace” than usual when I’m there. Here’s another strange thing about me: I enjoy similar canoe outings on the upper Saint John River, and that’s not designated as a wilderness. To my apparent discredit, I can see no essential difference between wilderness (Allagash) and the other thing (St. John). What to call the St. John? – “non-wilderness?” - “faux wilderness?” You can see that I lack fine discrimination in these matters.

Trying to restore wilderness sets up a sort of Heisenberg-uncertainty-principle. Wilderness can be only where you aren’t – like wilderness is darkness and humans are bright lights. Think you see a patch of wilderness across the lake? As soon as you paddle there, it’s gone -- gone because you’re there! Finding wilderness is tough for an old guy like me. My conception of the Allagash is cluttered with human artifacts and incidents. The inlet across the lake that looks like wilderness to you is probably where my grandfather caught a five-pound brook trout with a Parmacheene Belle in 1934. At least he claimed he did, and thus I remember it. Thanks to Gramp, I’ll never regard that particular spot as maximum wilderness. Everywhere I look, it seems, there’s a ghost to remind me that the Allagash has a human history. Where a newcomer might see an unbroken expanse of trees, I see the location of the old Forest Service Camps where the clearing was big enough for a baseball game or the site of a farm that faced the California Road. I’m doomed forever to regard the Allagash as a scene of human activity.

A Human Landscape

The difficulty with the Allagash as wilderness is simply that it isn’t. As I wrote in “The California Road” the northern Maine forest, Allagash included, is a human landscape where remoteness, quiet, and solitude exist. “Wilderness values” are not essential for the existence of these qualities.

The impulse to “restore” the Allagash begs the question – Restore to which time? Forward from the 1840’s the Allagash bustled with lumbering, and the damming, farming, swamping, and toting that accompanied it. When William O. Douglas visited the Allagash, he saw numerous human improvements – sporting camps, lumber camps, log landings, stables, schools, and depots – all antithetical to wilderness values.

Restore to the period of “coarse” aboriginal use? Does that mean no dams and no buildings? No motorized portage service at Chase Carry?

As we seek that previous condition of wilderness upon which to fix our imagined restoration effort, it fades from us like mist in morning sunlight. There is no lost era both acceptable and possible to restore. This is the problem with “wilderness” as the principle of managing a natural resource that is also to be used for recreation. Not only is wilderness, as Thoreau idealized it, unattainable in every region where humans travel, wilderness is inappropriate for a region with an extensive and interesting human history and traditional recreational usage like the Allagash.

In sum, Thoreau’s influence on Allagash management is a curse, a hindrance to practical discussion. Thoreau’s idealized notion of wilderness sets up an unattainable ideal of contemplative non-intervention that provides no guidance for what sort of human artifice is permitted.

It has been said that when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Similarly, when your sole reference for managing an extensive recreational area is wilderness values, every problem looks like desecration.

The Allagash Waterway has many features which arguably diminish its wilderness qualities. These include improved campsites, boat landings, parking lots, roads and bridges, administration buildings, and trails. Even the signs warning canoeists of the proximity of Allagash Falls represent a man-made intrusion. Improvements essential for the Waterway’s use as a canoe trip are its three dams – Telos, Lock, and Churchill. If the dams were removed, the Allagash would become a springtime spate stream, intermittently navigable for perhaps a month or so each year.

Referring to Churchill Dam, the Natural Resources Council of Maine has complained “Poor management by the State of Maine threatens to rob the Allagash Wilderness Waterway of its wilderness, its reason for existence. The State has allowed the construction of a concrete dam…” and “After illegally replacing a dam on the river without proper consultation with its federal partners, the DOC must now repair the damage it has caused or allowed.”

In fact, the presence of the dams inside the Waterway makes it prima facie unsuitable for inclusion as a federal Wild and Scenic River. The act states

A wild, scenic or recreational river area eligible to be included in the system is a free-flowing stream and the related adjacent land area that possesses one or more of the values referred to in Section 1, subsection (b) of this Act. Every wild, scenic or recreational river in its free-flowing condition, or upon restoration to this condition, shall be considered eligible for inclusion in the national wild and scenic rivers system and, if included, shall be classified, designated, and administered as one of the following:

(1) Wild river areas -- Those rivers or sections of rivers that are free of impoundments and generally inaccessible except by trail, with watersheds or shorelines essentially primitive and waters unpolluted. These represent vestiges of primitive America.

(2) Scenic river areas -- Those rivers or sections of rivers that are free of impoundments, with shorelines or watersheds still largely primitive and shorelines largely undeveloped, but accessible in places by roads.

The Allagash waters have included numerous impoundments for well over a century-and-a-half; in truth, much of the history of the region is the story of its dams, which reversed the flow of the Allagash to enable log-driving into Penobscot waters. No person seeking to preserve the Allagash for recreational canoeing would advocate removal of the dams. This is perhaps the clearest example of the incompatibility of “wilderness values,” and the legal definition of “wild,” with the interests of the overwhelming proportion of those who love the Allagash. When various wilderness advocates claim that the people of Maine intended that the Allagash be managed as a “wilderness” they are engaging in a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, using “wilderness” as a cover for their designs on control of the river’s use. Anyone possessing even passing familiarity with the Allagash waterway recognizes that its existence as a recreational area depends upon the anti-wilderness artifice of impoundment. The interests of many who appear in the “wilderness values” camp – fishermen and guides, for example – diverge from the views of the doctrinaire wilderness advocates as the implications of maximum wilderness come into focus.

What are the designs of the wilderness interest? Commentator Joe Huber sums it up:

Further, public use data for the Allagash, considered one of the major primitive river courses in the United States, indicate an increase in the number of boaters and fishermen using the area for quick day trips (day trippers), thus denigrating the wilderness quality of the Allagash. In contrast, traditionalists (river guides, campers, and environmentalists) believe use of the area should be restricted to those engaging in week-long canoeing/ camping trips (through trippers) and are seeking the essence of the Allagash wilderness experience.

Got that? Through trip equals wilderness experience. Day trip equals denigration.

As an individual able to view this issue from several perspectives --Aroostook native, “day tripping” trout fisherman, canoe through tripper – I view the impulse toward limiting access to the Allagash in favor of through trippers as mean-spirited and selfish. An unwillingness to share ample space on the water with local fishermen because it offends one’s wilderness values strikes me as rarified snootiness.

And it’s not a problem that day fishermen are crowding the region. Recreational use of the entire north woods region is in decline. As Bangor Daily News reporter and Allagash native Shawn O’Leary has observed, the local fishermen and the wilderness crowd seldom bump into each other. The locals fish the river in the spring, the wilderness trippers canoe in late summer and fall.

The largest group of visitors to the Allagash – those who canoe the river between the Fourth of July and Labor Day – are generally unconcerned with management issues. These are the families who bring lawn chairs, tanning lotion, and bathing suits, introducing a beach ambience to canoe tripping when the sun’s out and the water’s warm. These are the waterway’s chief recreational users, blissfully innocent of Thoreau’s ghostly disapproval of their coarse enjoyments. Personally, I prefer a quieter Allagash in early June or September, but I’m not about to take my pitchfork to the barricades to restrict the access of those who choose to appreciate the Allagash in their own way.

Writes Peter Hilton, an Aroostook resident, refuting a wilderness advocate’s assertion that the “sportsman” interest wants the Waterway to become a place for everybody to easily drive in to at any point, “This is an emotionally loaded exaggeration which has absolutely no basis in history, present state policy or anyone's desires for the Allagash. Such scare tactics distort and undermine any discussion of the Allagash Waterway.”

Amen.

"In its flight from history, in its siren song of escape, in its reproduction of the dangerous dualism that sets human beings outside of nature--in all of these ways, wilderness poses a serious threat to responsible environmentalism at the end of the twentieth century."
-by William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness

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