Tag: wild

Go to the Wildest Places

But even across this seemingly limitless expanse, very little land is untouched by civilization. There are more than 4 million miles of public roads in the United States, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and that doesn’t count private roads, utility roads or off-road vehicle trails. Add to that 2.5 million miles of oil and natural gas pipelines and approximately 160,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, and you’ve got a landscape diced into bite-sized bits.

So the question here is, where can you really get away from it all? Away from the sounds of distant highways, from air pollution, light pollution, pollution pollution?

A good place to start looking is a 2005 map by the U.S. Geological Survey that depicts the average distance to the nearest road for every point in the contiguous states. (A point, in this case, is a 30-meter by 30-meter square.) Although the map is now nine years old, the dark green patches, signifying roadless areas, are still, for the most part, dark green.

Clustered mostly in the sparsely populated mountain ranges and deserts of the West, there are also a few patches further east where the land is inhospitable to development or protected by law: the bayous of southern Louisiana, the north of Minnesota, and the Adirondacks, for example.

Much of the dark green overlaps with federally designated wilderness, as defined by the Wilderness Act of 1964: “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

There are currently more than 750 such areas in the National Wilderness Preservation System comprising over 109 million acres—roughly 5 percent of the United States by area.

Need a refresher from the other 95 percent? We picked 10 wild places in the lower 48 states that are truly wild. Not all are federally protected wilderness, but all are places where “man is a visitor”—you included.

What Nature Gives Us

There is no question that Earth has been a giving planet. Everything humans have needed to survive, and thrive, was provided by the natural world around us: food, water, medicine, materials for shelter, and even natural cycles such as climate and nutrients. Scientists have come to term such gifts ‘ecosystem services’, however the recognition of such services goes back thousands of years, and perhaps even farther if one accepts the caves paintings at Lascaux as evidence. Yet we have so disconnected ourselves from the natural world that it is easy—and often convenient—to forget that nature remains as giving as ever, even as it vanishes bit-by-bit. The rise of technology and industry may have distanced us superficially from nature, but it has not changed our reliance on the natural world: most of what we use and consume on a daily basis remains the product of multitudes of interactions within nature, and many of those interactions are imperiled. Beyond such physical goods, the natural world provides less tangible, but just as important, gifts in terms of beauty, art, and spirituality.

Earth Day seems as good a day as any to remind ourselves what nature gives us free-of-charge. Here then is a selective sampling of nature’s importance to our lives:

Tad lo waterfall in Laos. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler.
Tad lo waterfall in Laos. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Fresh water: There is no physical substance humans require more than freshwater: without water we can only survive a few hellish days. While pollution and overuse has threatened many of the world’s drinking water sources, nature has an old-fashioned solution, at least, to pollution. Healthy freshwater ecosystems—watersheds, wetlands, and forests—naturally clean pollution and toxins from water. Soils, microorganisms, and plant roots all play a role in filtering and recycling out pollutants with a price far cheaper than building a water filtration plant. According to research, the more biodiverse the ecosystem, the faster and more efficiently water is purified.

Pollination: Imagine trying to pollinate every apple blossom in an orchard: this is what nature does for us. Insects, birds, and even some mammals, pollinate the world’s plants, including much of human agriculture. Around 80% of the world’s plants require a different species to act as pollinator.

In agriculture, pollinators are required for everything from tomatoes to cocoa, and almonds to buckwheat, among hundreds of other crops. Globally, agricultural pollination has been estimated to be worth around $216 billion a year. However large such monetary estimates don’t include pollination for crops consumed by livestock, biofuels, ornamental flowers, or the massive importance of wild plant pollination.

Seed dispersal: Much like pollination, many of the world’s plants require other species to move their seeds from the parent plant to new sprouting ground. Seeds are dispersed by an incredibly wide-variety of players: birds, bats, rodents, megafauna like elephants and tapir, and even, researchers have recently discovered, fish. Seed dispersal is especially important for tropical forests where a majority of plants depend on animals to move.

Pest control: A recent study found that bats save US agriculture billions of dollars a year simply by doing what they do naturally: eating insects, many of which are potentially harmful to US crops.

Almost all agricultural pests have natural enemies, along with bats, these include birds, spiders, parasitic wasps and flies, fungi, and viral diseases. The loss, or even decline, of such pest-eating predators can have massive impacts on agriculture and ecosystems.