For the birds: challenging wilderness in the Everglades

Abstract

This paper examines the wilderness of the Everglades National Park (ENP). This wilderness challenges both the concept and history of wilderness in the United States. While the modern concept of wilderness formed in the 1920s revolved around wilderness as a recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual resource, the Everglades was protected for biocentric reasons, a rationale for preservation typically thought of as a product of modern environmentalism. This new ecological rationale for wilderness was necessary largely due to the nature of the Everglades itself. Conservationists traditionally saw little anthropocentric value in wetlands; therefore, activists seeking to protect the Everglades had to utilize new biocentric rationales to argue for its preservation. Because this wilderness is composed of wetlands and aquatic areas, traditional definitions of wilderness have little application in the Everglades. Modern definitions of wilderness revolve around roadlessness and the absence of human-built constructs, but these definitions, particularly roadlessness, have little application in the Everglades. This wilderness yet also illustrates the flexibility of wilderness and shows that ecological values, rather than just romantic notions of unspoilt nature, need to be considered when defining and delineating wilderness. Finally, this paper examines how the human/nature dichotomy that lies at the foundation of wilderness is an obvious fiction in the Everglades.