From Woodcraft to ‘Leave No Trace’: Wilderness, Consumerism, and Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America

Abstract

In 1983, Outside magazine noted a growing number of cognoscenti known as notrace or low-impact campers backpacking into the wilderness. As their nicknames indicate, [these people] keep the woods cleaner than they keep their [own] homes. The most devoted backpackers fluffed the grass on which they slept, gave up toilet paper rather than burying it, and preferred drinking their dishwater to pouring it on the ground. No measure seemed too extreme in their efforts to protect the wilderness. Carrying packs loaded with modern gear, backpackers prided themselves on traveling through wilderness as mere visitors. In 1991, Leave No Trace became the official ethic for environmentally-conscious outdoor recreation on the nation's public lands.' That announcement brought to a close a long transition in the place of recreation in the American wilderness. In the 1920S, Aldo Leopold first described wilderness areas as a means for allowing the more virile and primitive forms of outdoor recreation to survive. His vision evoked an early-twentieth-century tradition of woodcraft. Unlike today's backpacker, the skilled woodsman prided himself on living off of the land: building lean-tos, cooking over an open fire, and hunting for food. Woodcraft was steeped in self-reliance, masculine rhetoric, and discomfort with the modern consumer economy. Leopold envisioned wilderness as a refuge from modernity, where a working-knowledge of nature would reconnect people and the land.2 For environmental historians, this transition from woodcraft to Leave No Trace offers a tool to pry apart the modern wilderness ideal. Opening up the backpacks, leafing through the guidebooks, and revisiting the campsites reveals more than just changes in the ways people have returned to nature. Indeed, it reveals the historical pliability of the very ideals to which wilderness travelers have aspired. Within the environmental historiography, the intellectual paths in and out of wilderness are well traveled. Since the mid 198os, this traffic has been particularly heavy, as sharp over the cultural and scientific roots of wilderness engaged both the academic and scientific communities. The so-called great new wilderness debate emerged from conflicting approaches to wilderness. Conservation