As a child, I spent summers with my dad in Arizona. We often went hiking, and it was during these visits that he took me on my first backpacking trips, to an enchanted place called Aravaipa Canyon. There was no established trail, so we hiked mostly in and alongside the creek. After I complained too much about my heavy pack, I was given the official duty of carrying just the apples and oranges. The canyon walls were steep. We camped near the creek, and it was there that I memorably befriended a frog. The creek and its namesake canyon were not yet an established wilderness area, but it was certainly a place apart. From the perspective of a little girl, it was a wonderland.
The Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness was officially designated in 1984, with passage of the Arizona Wilderness Act, and so many more people visit it now that you must obtain a permit from the Bureau of Land Management to hike and camp there. Limiting the number of people who can explore and enjoy the canyon is one way that land-management agencies fulfill their charge to preserve the “wilderness characteristics” of places like Aravaipa. Granting ecosystems this kind of protection was a visionary idea, hatched by a visionary man named Aldo Leopold. One hundred years ago this month, he helped establish the world’s first wilderness area, the Gila Wilderness. In a river valley in New Mexico, four decades before the passage of the Wilderness Act, the idea of legally protecting a place for its intrinsic value was born (see “Untrammeled” ).
In the years since, the need to set aside and protect places from development and extractive industries has only grown as the harmful consequences of the growth-is-god mentality wreak havoc across the West. We may not be able to stop growth entirely, but we can draw boundaries. And, in some cases, we can un-develop formerly developed places and let them return to being governed by natural laws, or by their original Indigenous inhabitants. We can turn back the growth clock, as Ruxandra Guidi writes in “Can the future be the past?” This is a revelation on par with the idea of wilderness, because we definitely need more places, whether in remote areas or in the hearts of cities, where a little girl can strike up a friendship with a frog.
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