This personal experience started during my employment with the Bureau of Land Management. Although examples of foolish government policies are manifold within this organization (a fact not confined merely to the BLM), Leave No Trace has always seemed notably ludicrous to me. In short, the practice promotes doing exactly what its name suggests: leaving no trace of human visitation in wild areas. No refuse, no sign of habitation, no scatological matter, and even, when possible, no footprints. On the surface this policy seems sound and desirable (a trait it shares with most government practices). After all, if each visitor to Yellowstone left one piece of garbage next to Old Faithful, it would take about one day for the site to be a trash heap rather than a natural wonder. Don't mind, of course, the over 250 miles of paved road in the park, the eight hotels alongside them, or any of the other vestments of human civilization in the park. But I digress (and am bested on that topic, anyway, by Edward Abbey and his "Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks", found in Desert Solitaire). Indeed, it seems to make good sense to keep human waste out of national parks, especially if we hope to have any further generations enjoy them.
Unfortunately, though, Leave No Trace does not restrict itself to the suggestion that all parks should be liberally sprinkled with garbage cans. Its reach endeavors to be far more encompassing, going so far as to suggest that mankind should refrain from the time honored, hunter/gatherer tradition of shitting in the woods. This is no joke; under Leave No Trace policy (to which every park ranger is expected to adhere), all campers who are compelled to defecate in the woods must either 1) bury their crap in a hole, or 2) collect, bag, and pack out said matter to be disposed of in a more civilized manner. This has given rise to an industry dedicated to container manufacturing since, as we all surely know, you'll want a damn sturdy bag to put your shit in if you are going to lug it around with you for the rest of the day.
 Thank goodness it is both more secure and has larger capacity. |
Again, on the surface, this policy seems well placed. I don't really want to navigate a trail laden with human turd piles if I don't have to. The heart of the philosophy that engenders such a practice, though, is worth examination. What can be made of a policy that suggests that hikers walk on rock, when possible, to avoid leaving footprints or causing erosion? To my mind the suggestion is that mankind is merely a visitor to nature and not a participant in its cycles. This idea is not limited to ecological think-tanks. Many other groups, civilian and federal, espouse the notion that wild areas should be utterly devoid of human activity. The problem with this is not, at least at this juncture, the practice that stems from the Leave No Trace idea. Doubtless, the ever burgeoning global population risks causing the elimination of wild places entirely; to preserve what remains is important if we ever hope to have more natural jungles and fewer concrete ones. Nonetheless, the practice of following Leave No Trace policies often leads to altering the way in which the practitioners view themselves in relation to the natural environment. This view, as already stated, is that human beings belong on a platform that exists ON the planetary ecosystems rather than IN them.
Nothing, of course, could be more fallacious. Not only do humans exist very much IN this world's drama, they are oftentimes one of the more influential actors on its stage. From our humble beginnings as a species, onward, this has been true. Many anthropologists attribute the extinction of most of the planet's megafauna to the voracious appetite of early, tribal man. As an agriculturalist, too, man's influence has been immense. In his history New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles Mann suggests that the ecological state of America's generally treeless prairie lands was largely wrought by human hand.
Indian fire had its greatest impact in the middle of the continent, which Native Americans transformed into a prodigious game farm. Native Americans burned the Great Plains and Midwest prairies so much and so often that they increased their extent; in all probability, a substantial portion of the giant grassland celebrated by cowboys was established and maintained by the people who arrived there first. 'When Lewis and Clark headed west from [St. Louis],' wrote ethologist Dale Lott, 'they were exploring not a wilderness but a vast pasture managed by and for Native Americans.'
Do you enjoy having your domesticated dog around the house? Well, you have man's "footprint" to thank for that, unless, of course, you'd prefer a wolf or dingo to snap at you when you get home in the evening. How about that tasty, Cavendish banana? Do you think that it just "happened" like that and is not the result of generation after generation of selective breeding choices? (Then again, maybe that wasn't the best selective breeding choice to make...) These are a small selection of the seemingly infinite examples of man's meddling in the natural world, and if that toll was fully tallied I imagine there would be few who would declare it all a big mistake. After all, you DO like being here, don't you, and would any of us be here if our species and our planet hadn't evolved the way it did, human traces and all?
The point is that humans, like every other organism on the planet, DO leave traces. Evolution wouldn't occur if they - we - didn't. Moles dig tunnels, ants build anthills, geese leave putrid crap all over nice lawns, and people, well, for better or worse, people build civilization. Now I am not suggesting that Howard Roark and Ayn Rand had it right when they envisioned a world utterly dominated and crafted by man's self-righteous and ordained hand (I wish she was alive today to defend her obnoxious hypothesis that free markets would create a utopian, steel and stem paradise), but I am advocating the idea that maybe, just maybe, its ok to shit in the woods.
I think it is worth remembering that, much as our systematic and delineating brains would like it to be, the planet Earth is not merely the sum of its ecological parts. It is, rather, something greater. The Earth is a Gaia-sphere, a giant and massively complex single entity within which we are but one busy and active constituent part. Like the moles, ants, and geese, our activities help shape the current state of that entity, and thank goodness! How boring would existence be if, from our supposed glass cage, we could learn all about our universe and its inner workings but be prevented from participating in any portion of it? And yet, that is the philosophical ideal that Leave No Trace aspires to.
Back here in the less philosophical, real world, I do realize that I am making a mountain out of an, *ahem*, molehill. It would be nice, though, if a transformative philosophical change could spread through humanity and it could be realized that the plastic bottle shouldn't just be kept out of the wild areas; it should be kept out of everywhere. Once it is made, after all, its here, and whether it finds its way to a landfill, a recycling center, or the back country of Yellowstone, it still is stuck here on Earth and isn't going anywhere. If Gaia had a face I doubt it would be smiling more broadly at the "conscientious" individual who drops the Cliff bar wrapper in the garbage can instead of on the hiking trail. I think that smile would probably be reserved for the one who never purchases a plastic-wrapped snack bar in the first place.
Despite all of the government training I was subjected to I never was able to integrate Leave No Trace ideals into my understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes. As I worked on trails and rivers in Montana, I knew perfectly well that the 100% biodegradable apple core I was tossing over my shoulder was non-native to the area. I knew that I, like countless organisms before me, was possibly contributing to what BLM officials considered the dangerous practice of ecosystem cross-pollination. But I also recalled that the common New England earthworm was introduced to that area by English colonists who brought potted fruit trees with them, and that despite radically changing New England's ecosystems, all somehow, magically, seemed to be well on that habitat's evolutionary front. The Gaia-sphere evolves over time, and as a part of that system it is natural and proper that we, too, should play a role in that evolution. That thought should make us all feel a little bit better about leaving a trace of last night's dinner behind us, in the woods.
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
-Stephen Jay Gould
