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Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied.
Henry Thoreau

Thoreau began talking about wildness as the preservation of the world in a lecture he gave at the Concord Lyceum on April 23, 1851, entitled "The Wild." In June of the following year he combined it with another lecture on walking and published the two as the essay "Walking, or the Wild" in the Atlantic Monthly. This essay remains the most radical document in the history of our conservation ethic, and as the distinguished Thoreau scholar Robert Richardson has so aptly put it, "how we understand that ethic depends on what we think Thoreau meant by 'wildness.'";

Thoreau understood wildness as a quality: wild nature, wild men, wild friends, wild dreams, wild house cats, and wild literature. He associated it with other qualities: the good, the holy, the free. Indeed, he equated it with life itself. By freedom he meant not rights and liberties, but the autonomous and self-willed; and by life, not mere existence, but vitality and life-force. These connotations are not restricted to our culture. Gary Nabhan has noted that "the O'odham term for wildness, doajkam, is etymologically tied to terms for health, wholeness, and liveliness."2

Thoreau's famous saying "in Wildness is the preservation of the World" asserts that wildness preserves, not that we must preserve wildness. For Thoreau, wildness was a given; his task was to touch it and express it, and he believed myth expressed it best. His success was due not to political action or scientific study, but personal effort. As much as anything, the wild was a project of the self.

After Thoreau, the focus of our conservation ethic mutated from wildness to the preservation of wilderness, to habitat and species, and, recently, to biodiversity. This shift was broadly materialist, a move from quality to quantity, to acreage, species, and physical relations. The privileged status in our culture of classical science and its technologies virtually entailed this materialism, for classical science and its mathematics could not describe qualities like wildness, and what cannot be described is ignored. Wildness as quality, and its relation to other qualities, are now rarely discussed, the notable exception being Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild.

The shift was also reductive. By preserving things-acreage, species, and natural processes-we believed we could preserve a quality. Alas, collections of acreage, species, and processes, however large or diverse, no more preserve wildness than large and diverse collections of sacred objects preserve the sacred. The wild and the sacred are simply not the kinds of things that can be collected. Historical forms of access and expression can be preserved, but one cannot put a quality in a museum. At the same time, wildness cannot disappear. It can be diminished, in nature and in human experience, but it cannot cease to exist. The world contains many things that exist but cannot be collected and put someplace-the set of complex numbers, gravity, dreams. Wildness is similar and we are not very clear about how to preserve it.

There are excellent reasons to preserve wilderness, biotic communities, and biodiversity apart from any relation to wildness, reasons that are thoroughly covered in our environmental literature, but these materialist and reductive shifts in our conservation ethic have diminished the wildness of the places, species, and processes we have managed to preserve by diminishing their autonomy and vitality. Unfortunately, our conservation ethic tends to ignore this loss.

This diminution will continue because our efforts at preservation-parks, wilderness, zoos, botanical gardens-are conceived in terms of modern institutions, primarily the laboratory and museum, institutions that oppose autonomy and vitality. In the past, political and aesthetic criteria selected the samples; in the future (one hopes) biological and ecological criteria will be foremost. But no matter how large the selection, the processes of selection and implementation render the samples artificial. The environments (and their occupants) are selected and managed according to human goals-the preservation of scenery, of resources, of wilderness, of biodiversity. Our artifice fundamentally alters their order, extracting them from the larger context of interconnectedness that created that order. As Anthony Giddens says in discussing the consequences of modernity, "The 'end of nature' means that the natural world has become in large part a 'created environment' consisting of humanly structured systems whose motive power and dynamics derive from socially organized knowledge-claims rather than from influences exogenous to human activity." This is just as true of national parks and designer wilderness as it is of Disneyland.

Created environments have that aura of hyper-reality so common in modern life. They "are all updated forms of Cain's desire to return home by remaking the original creation. The tragedy is that in attempting to recover paradise we accelerate the murder of nature." Nature "ends" because it loses its own self-ordering structure, hence its autonomy, hence its wildness.

Created environments also reek of the "museal" quality made famous by Theodor Adorno's essay "Valery Proust Museum": "The German word 'museal' [museumlike] has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying" (175). Just as cultural museums "testify to the neutralization of culture" (175), so I believe museums of land types, however diverse in habitat and species, testify to the neutralization of nature.

A created environment is a neutered wild, and a wild to which we no longer live in vital relationship. Museum objects may be useful, entertaining, and informative, and nature as laboratory may produce whole disciplines of new knowledge, but their subjects have lost their own organizing principles and are accurately described as relics-things left behind after destruction or decay of the original and preserved as objects of veneration.

In this sense it is possible to see the Earth as increasingly museal - in the process of becoming a relic; a once autonomous order transformed by a single species for its own use, a species that out of a combination of mourning and respect preserves bits and pieces for worship, study, and entertainment. The few pieces of remaining wilderness have long been valued as a laboratory-hence the title of Aldo Leopold's seminal essay "Wilderness as a Land Laboratory." Stressed nature becomes another interesting scientific experiment, a problem to be solved, not unlike a sick patient, the chronically unemployed, a broken machine. Instead of a collection of gods (as for the Greeks), or the source of the Sublime (as for Kant and the Romantics), or a wellspring of moral instruction (as for Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir), nature turns subordinate to humans-dependent. A patient. Then, its philanthropic sensibilities aroused by crisis, Lord Man rushes to help the poor thing recover with GPS systems, computer databases, refuges, gene banks, and radio collars.

Recently we have discovered that our museums of land types are too small, disconnected, and artificial to allow species to maintain their own structure and order. Our remedy for these island ecosystems and relic populations is to create bigger and better created environments according to new theories, more data, and better management practices. This may lead to more complete ecosystems, and may sustain some species, but the increased human influence and the control mechanisms required for selection and preservation simultaneously diminish the ecosystem's self-organization and wildness. The relic "wilderness" becomes less and less natural as it submits to the management necessary for its survival, and, ironically, becomes less and less capable of fulfilling its purported scientific purpose-to serve as a benchmark for natural processes against which the health of man's trammeled world might be measured.

An example of this process can be found in the Wildlands Project proposed by Wild Earth: "a wilderness recovery program for North America" (which makes it sound like AA for the planet). If successful, it would become the world's largest created environment. Its order and structure-the cores, corridors, buffers, and dense-population areas-would undoubtedly be visible from space. I think of it as North America designed by Foreman, Noss, and Associates.

Many feel the pervasive Disneyesque and museumlike quality of wilderness areas, national parks, and wildlife preserves, but they continue to believe these places provide a sanctuary from human artifice. This has always been an illusion. The national parks process millions of humans at the cost of natural processes. The "wilderness" of the Wilderness Act permits the state to control fire, insects, diseases, and animal populations; build trails for human use; graze livestock; and mine ore. These environments are not wild-they are too known, designed, administered, managed, and controlled to be wild.

All this suggests we need to imagine a new conservation ethic based on wildness. What we would come to mean by "wildness" could evolve from current interdisciplinary efforts by feminists, mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists to understand control, prediction, dominance, and their opposites: autonomy, self-organization, self-ordering, and autopoiesis.

In his "Fact-Book," Thoreau noted that "wild" is the past participle of "to will": self-willed. A new wilderness ethic would highlight Thoreau's reference and confirm recent scholarship that interprets "wilderness" in its original sense of "self-willed land." It would give teeth to the most important word in the most important passage in the Wilderness Act: "untrammeled." And finally, it would promote Thoreau's project of understanding the wild within us and within nature as fundamentally the same by their association, conceptually, with vitality and freedom.

To construct a new conservation ethic, we need first to understand why we impose a human order on nonhuman orders. We do so for gain, the gain being in prediction, efficiency, and, hence, control. Faced with the accelerating destruction of ecosystems and the extinction of species, we believe our only option lies in increased prediction, efficiency, and control. So we fight to preserve ecosystems and species, and we accept their diminished wildness. This wins the fight but loses the war, and in the process we simply stop talking about wildness.

There are many ways we do this. For instance, we begin to substitute "wilderness" for "wildness," as in Thoreau's commonly misquoted saying "In wilderness is the preservation of the world."9 But most (all?) of our designated Wilderness Act-wilderness is not wild. Take, for example, the Gila Wilderness, which is a pasture, not self-willed land. Thoreau did not claim that in ranching is the preservation of the world.

We also tend to equate wildness with biodiversity. For example, chapter 2 of Roger DiSilvestro's Reclaiming the Last Wild Places: A New Agenda for Biodiversity is entitled "Biodiversity: Saving Wildness," and there are phrases like "wildness in nature, which is what we preserve when we protect biodiversity" and "protection of biodiversity, of wildness" (25). But wildness is not biodiversity. Indeed, wildness may be inversely correlated with biodiversity. In The Desert Smells Like Rain, Gary Nabhan describes two oases.

The oasis occupied by the Papagos had twice as many bird species as the "wild" one preserved in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.10 Neither oasis is wild in any meaningful sense of the term, and more remote and wilder desert oases might very well con¬tain even fewer species. If so, so what? Is wildness less important than biodiversity? Should we preserve the latter at the cost of the former? What criteria would we use to decide the issue?

For many conservation biologists (though not, of course, for Nabhan) the important distinction is between "in the wild" and "in captivity," with "in the wild" now meaning a managed ecosystem. But if grizzlies are controlled in wilderness with radio collars and relocation policies, then what was for Thoreau the central question -freedom-simply drops out of the discourse on preservation.

We also ignore wildness when we define wilderness in terms of human absence. In "Aldo Leopold's Metaphor," J. Baird Callicott points out that with the exception of Antarctica, there has been no land mass without human presence, and therefore the wilderness of the Wilderness Act is an "incoherent" idea (45). Other people deny the existence of wildness on the grounds that any human influence on a species or an ecosystem destroys wildness, and since human influence has been around a long time ... again, no wildness. This is absurd, and one wonders what Lewis and dark, standing on the banks of the Missouri, would have thought of such talk. "This isn't wilderness. Why, there are millions of humans out there. And it isn't wild, either. Human influence has been mucking up this place for 10,000 years."

Something is wrong here, and I believe it can be traced to the fact that most people writing and thinking about wilderness issues know only Wilderness Act-wilderness. A week in the Amazon, the high Arctic, or the northern side of the western Himalayas would suggest that what counts as wildness and wilderness is determined not by the absence of people, but by the relationship between people and place. A place is wild when its order is created according to its own principles of organization-when it is self-willed land. Native peoples usually (though definitely not always) "fit" that order, influencing it but not controlling it, though proably not from a superior set of values but because they lack the technical means. Control increases with civilization, and modern civilization, being largely about control-an ideology of control projected onto the entire world-must control or deny wildness. This prospect is most clearly represented by the dystopian novels, beginning with Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.

Although autonomy is often confused with radical separation and complete independence, the autonomy of systems (and, I would argue, human freedom) is strengthened by interconnected-ness, elaborate iteration, and feedback-that is, influence. Indeed, these processes create that possibility of change without which there is no freedom. Determinism and autonomy are as inseparable as the multiple aspects of a gestalt drawing.

The important point is that whatever kind of autonomy is in question-human freedom, self-willed land, self-ordering systems, self-organizing systems, autopoiesis- all are incompatible with external control. To take wildness seriously is to take the issue of control seriously, and because the disciplines of applied biology do not take the issue of control seriously, they are littered with paradoxes-"wildlife management," "wilderness management," "managing for change," "managing natural systems," "mimicking natural disturbance"-what we might call the paradoxes of autonomy. Collections of paradoxes are usually bad news for scientific paradigms, and I think the biological sciences face a major revolution."

The biological sciences have played an increasingly imperial role in the conservation ethic since the days of Aldo Leopold. If the goal is to preserve ecosystems and species, then one goes to the experts: ecologists and biologists. During the past twenty years it has become obvious that the individual disciplines of applied bi¬ology were insufficiently comprehensive to achieve preservationist goals, especially biodiversity, and that they needed to be integrated with the newer disciplines of population biology and ecology- thus conservation biology. Conservation biology is an increasingly dominant voice for preservation in this country, if not the world, and the large environmental organizations that once led the fight for preservation often follow its agenda.

Unfortunately, conservation biology is also about control. It integrates the controls already available in the biological, physical, and social sciences, which leads to what we might describe as meta-management. Since biodiversity is understood on the model of a scarce resource, the preservation of biodiversity becomes a problem like resource management. In the face of biodiversity loss (and there surely is such a crisis), conservation biology demands that we do something, now, in the only way that counts as doing something-more money, more research, more technology, more information, more acreage. Trust science, trust technology, trust experts; they know best. In short, the prescription for the malady is even more control.

This mirrors the mode of crisis response familiar from Michel Foucault's studies of insanity, crime, and disease. Like psychiatry, criminology, and clinical medicine, conservation biology is a theoretical discipline that seeks control in pursuit of a morally pure mission: to end a crisis. Although the maladies addressed by these disciplines have always been with us (and have been handled by other cultures in more imaginative ways), they are exacerbated by the conditions of modernity-overpopulation, urbanization, and pathological social structures-and by the globalization of these conditions.

Unfortunately, instead of striking at causes, modern theoretical disciplines such as conservation biology strive to control symptoms. Their controls are directed at the Other, not at our own social pathologies. This mirrors the distinction between preventive medicine and intrusive medicine: instead of remaking ourselves and our societies, modern theoretical disciplines set about remaking the nonhuman world and diminishing its autonomy. Over the long term, this tends toward failure as the world resists and adapts to our intrusions, and as we, in turn, discover the true cost of our attempts at control.

These controls are always disciplinary or protodisciplinary in nature, and the multiple meanings of "discipline" here are not accidental. They involve capturing (shooting, darting, netting, trapping, apprehending, arresting), isolating in special areas (wards, prisons, refuges, wilderness), numerical identification (tattooing and tagging everything from inmates and soldiers to swans and grizzlies); technological representation (photography, X-rays. GPS mapping); chemical manipulation (of germs, of the brain, of fertility); surgery (lobotomies for the mad, and for predators, the implantation of radio transmitters or radioactive plaques to make their feces visible from satellites); monitoring (radio collars on animals, ankle monitors on prisoners, heart monitors for cardiac patients) - and constant surveillance to accumulate ever more information. Having severely intruded upon the human body and mind, we now intend to intrude upon the rest of creation, thus confirming the forecast in Ecclesiastes: "For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts."

Justified in the name of normality and equilibrium-just as wars are justified by "peace in our time"-disciplinary technologies tend to develop into grand schemes of salvation: economics wars against poverty, criminology wars against crime. Despite pockets of success, these wars fail. Prisons create more criminals, and poverty and hunger increase under modern economies. Unfortunately, these failures neither debase the disciplines nor halt their wars. Like Avis, disciplinary technologies just try harder, that is, they try to control more and control better.

Conservation biology is in this tradition of grand salvation. It wants to conduct a war for biodiversity, thus its missions and strategies (from the Greek word for army- stratos) to remake the natural world according to its own vision. I predict it will fail for the same reason other disciplines fail: it does not strike at the causes of its chosen malady but remains therapeutic. Its fondest hope is to arrest symptoms, and it presumes, desperately, that the malady is acute, not chronic.

True change comes from alteration of structure, not the treatment of symptoms. The structure that a radical ("root") environmental position must change is the positive-feedback system comprising overpopulation, urbanization, outrageously high standards of living, outrageously unjust distribution of basic goods; the conjunction of classical science, technology, the state, and market economics that supports the high standard of living; the endless presumptions concerning our rights, liberties, and privileges; and the utter absence of a spiritual life that might mitigate against these forms of greed. In short, the preservation of wild-ness, wilderness, and biodiversity requires a revolution against social pathology, a transformation of Western civilization-and let's face it, most of us turn chicken in the face of the challenge. We prefer to control nature.

In ecology, the most powerful statement of a conservation ethic of controlling nature is Daniel B. Botkin's Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology/or the Twenty-First Century. Botkin presents graphic evidence of the devastation caused by unmanaged elephants in Tsavo, one of Kenya's largest national parks. He argues trenchantly that our current ideas about nature are outmoded, he calls for more management, more information, more monitoring, more research, more funding for education on the environment. He argues for the preservation of wilderness primarily as a baseline for scientific measurement. It is a powerful book. He concludes that "Nature in the twenty-first century will be a nature that we make; the question is the degree to which this molding will be intentional or unintentional, desirable or undesirable" (193).

Botkin is not alone. In an essay entitled "The Social Siege of Nature," Michael Soule, one of the founders of conservation biology, says,


Stewards of the cosmos? A nature that we make? This is the reductio ad absurdum of the American conservation movement. What used to be the goal of conservation-the preservation of the natural world and its own order-has been reduced to neglect, indeed, benign neglect, a term loaded with overtones of not caring. And the good side? Affirmative action-the usual liberal dodge. Disagree with conservation biology and you find yourself in the corner of those who don't care about nature because the debate has been framed in anthropocentric terms: what's the best medicine we can give to the poor old sick world? Soule's Manichean management policy simply replays easy sixties rhetoric.

What does this mean for Thoreau's seemingly old-fashioned idea of wildness? The actual consequences of this management paradigm are clearly stated by David M. Graber, a research scientist with the National Biological Survey, in a discussion of management in national parks:

Parks are increasingly becoming ecological islands as the landscapes that surround them are converted to agriculture or development. Thus while climate change can be expected to lead to the local extirpation of species in parks, the invasions of many native "replacement" species-those adapted to the new climate-will be blocked by isolation. The intentional introduction or maintenance of native species could in some cases be used to facilitate the introduction of species that would have arrived on their own before habitat fragmentation, as well as to preserve the survival of other species that would no longer be sufficiently adapted to persist under the new climatic and ecological conditions. Such intensive management is in fact likely to be needed to preserve species of plants and animals that already are local in distribution.

To manage parks in this way emphatically abandons the contemporary ecologically based notion of wildness. We indeed become trapped into caring for the rest of life in a transformed world.

This is indeed a dilemma. We wish to protect and preserve wild nature, but it appears that to do so we must accommodate a rather hard-nosed scientific positivism which in the biological sciences takes the form of an equally hard-nosed management style. The result of this management style is that we can save natural diversity only by destroying nature's own wild order. The alternative, "letting nature sort things out," is not seriously considered. Indeed it has become anathema, for even our pathetic attempts at control would be better than letting natural order rule the natural world.

These attitudes are about to become public policy. A recent volume of essays on ecosystem health suggests that "there exists considerable basis for expanding consensus if the concept of health is given its primary identity as a policy concept." This removes the "health of nature" as a property of the world, reduces it to human policy, and, in turn, virtually insures that biologists and ecologists will go about fixing the world with treatments and remedial actions. That is the irony of Soule's essay: he rues the social siege of nature but fails to see that the biological sciences are leading the charge, as though, somehow, biology and ecology are not part of the matrix of social construction.

Ecological management is Foucault's normalization and disciplinary control projected from social institutions onto ecosystems. The Otherness of the natural world is consumed by current social policy, and the new doctors of nature go about their mission-evangelists laboring once more amongst wild populations (now plants and animals instead of peoples) bringing the gift of modern order and our current version of salvation-the preservation of biodiversity.

This salvation implies trust in abstract systems, and since the lay person has neither the knowledge or ability to evaluate the foundations of these abstract systems, our trust is less a matter of knowledge than of faith. Those who are old-fashioned will place their trust in themselves and those they know instead of in abstract systems. Some will, of course, claim they are quite compatible, but in the last analysis they are not compatible: when push comes to shove, you must decide where to place your trust. Trust in abstract systems and experts disembeds our relations to nature from their proper context. This is precisely why so many of us will no longer place our trust in science: it ignores individual places, people, flora, and fauna.

I, for one, do not want to know about grizzlies in general, nor can I in any practical way care about grizzlies in general. I want to know and care about the grizzly that lives in the canyon above me. And I have more trust in myself, my friends, and that grizzly than I do in the managers sitting in universities a thousand miles away who have never seen this place or this grizzly and want all of it subsumed by a mathematical model.

In this situation, one would like to believe that radical environmentalists can offer something different from what mainstream environmental organizations and conservation biology offer. Unfortunately, this is no longer obvious.

During the past five years conservation biology has extended its influence to radical environmentalism, inverting themes that once legitimized its radical content. The transformation of part of Earth First! into Wild Earth was a movement from personal trust and confrontation to trust in abstractions and conciliation with technology. In this transition it gained new followers (and much financial support), and lost others. It certainly lost me. Whereas science, technology, and modernity were once part of the problem, now they are a large part of the solution, and I fear that the Wildlands Project may reduce Wild Earth-certainly one of our best radical environmental organizations-to the political arm of a scientific discipline.

But, again, the key issue is control and autonomy, not science. Recent issues of Wild Earth and Conservation Biology have run debates about the management of wilderness and wild systems, but they haven't penetrated to the heart of the problem. Writing in Wild Earth, Mike Seidman concluded his exchange by saying, "It seems that the depth of my critique of management went unnoticed." Seidman was being a gentleman, since the other side of the "debate" was an extended non sequitur.

The autonomy of natural systems is the skeleton in the closet of our conservation ethic, and although it is recognized, no one is dealing honestly with the Issue. The problem appears in many forms. It explains the growing discontent with our control of predators, the elk hunts in Grand Teton National Park, the slaughter of elephants for management, and the trapping and training of the last condors. It explains the increasing discontent surrounding the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. For a decade, environmentalists fought for an experimental population; now, faced with the biological and political control on that experimental population, many people would have preferred natural recovery-no matter how long it takes.

Biological controls are now ubiquitous. Biologists control grizzlies, they trap and radio-collar cranes, they have cute little radio backpacks for frogs, they bolt brightly colored plastic buttons to the beaks of harlequin ducks, they even put radio transmitters on minnows. And always for the same reason: more information for a better, healthier ecosystem. Information and control are indivisible, a point made in great detail by James R. Benninger in The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. It is the main point, perhaps the only point, of surveillance.

The great need, now, is to begin to imagine an alternative. Perhaps we don't need more information; maybe the emphasis on biological inventories, species recovery, surveillance, and monitoring is a further step in the wrong direction. And what could possibly be radical about all this? The Nature Conservancy has been doing it for years, and the Department of the Interior is going to do it too. Trying to be radical about, say, biological inventories is like trying to be radical about laundromats: it just isn't big enough, conceptually, to reach the source of the problem.

The radical environmentalist's obsession with roads and dams betrays a crude, industrial idea of destroying nature and blinds us to less visible modern control technologies that imply even more potent modes of destruction. But instead of a general critique of control we have deep ecologists like George Sessions and Arne Naess supporting, in principle or in practice, genetic engineering.

Somehow the key issue is increasingly veiled by lesser issues. We need big wilderness, big natural habitat, not more technological information about big wilderness. Why not work to set aside vast areas where we limit all forms of human influence: no conservation strategies, no designer wilderness, no roads, no trails, no satellite surveillance, no over-flights with helicopters, no radio collars, no measuring devices, no photographs, no GPS data, no databases stuffed with the location of every draba of the summit of Mt. Moran, no guidebooks, no topographical maps. Let whatever habitat we can preserve go back to its own self-order as much as possible. Let wilderness again become a blank on our maps. Why don't the radical environmental organizations push for that? I suspect a large part of the answer is this: there is no money in it, and like all nonprofits, they need a lot of money just to survive, much less achieve a goal.

There are two senses of "preservation," and most preservationist efforts have followed the first: the preservation of things. Strawberry preserves epitomize this kind of preservation. The other sense is the preservation of process: leaving things be. Doug Peacock presents the second sense with great clarity, calling biology "Biofuck" and saying, "Leave the nicking bears alone." This echoes Abbey's "Let being be," a quote from Heidegger, who stole it from Lao Tzu:


Although most of the public believes this is the preservation ethic, leaving things alone is definitely the new minority tradition among preservationists. But consider carefully the admonition that "If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it. / If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it." This goes to the heart of what I call "the abstract wild"-wildness objectified and filtered through concepts, theories, institutions, and technology.

What if the effect of scientific experts creating environments, treating ecosystems, and managing species is (sometimes, often, always?) as bad, or worse, than the effects of unmanaged nature? In short, leave aside the question of "Should we manage nature?" and ask "How well does (can) managing nature actually work?" Ecologists tend not to talk about this for fear of giving aid to the enemy, but the subject demands careful examination.

In an essay entitled "Down from the Pedestal: A New Role for Experts," David Ehrenfeld, for many years the editor of Conservation Biology, presents several examples of predictive failure in ecology and the unfortunate consequences for natural systems. Consider, for instance, the introduction of opossum shrimp into northwestern lakes with the purpose of increasing the production of kokanee salmon. "The story is complicated, involving nutrient loads, water levels, algae, various invertebrates, and lake trout, all interacting. But the bottom line is that the kokanee salmon population went way down rather than way up, and this in turn affected populations of bald eagles, various species of gulls and ducks, coyotes, minks, river otters, grizzly bears, and human visitors to Glacier National Park." Indeed, Ehrenfeld goes on to say that "biological complexity, with its myriad internal and external variables, with its open-endedness, pushes ecology and wildlife management a little closer to the economics ... end of the range of expert reliability" (148-150).

Economics? Really? This from one of the deans of conservation biology? We are to entrust the management of nature to experts whose reliability is akin to economists? This removes a bit of the glitter from the remaking nature agenda, doesn't it? I wouldn't let them manage my front yard.

Ecologists are compared with economists because of their prob¬lems with prediction. Prediction (some think) is the essence of science: No prediction, no science; lousy prediction, lousy science. Unless (according to this view) the biological sciences can generate accurate, testable, quantitative predictions, they are well on their way to joining the dismal science of, say, astrology. Well, if your idea of good science requires quantitative prediction, particularly long-term quantitative predictions, then all the sciences are looking a bit dismal, ecology especially so.

The historian of ecology Donald Worster, in his essay "The Ecology of Order and Chaos," notes that "Despite the obvious complexity of their subject matter, ecologists have been among the slowest to join the cross-disciplinary science of chaos" (168). This is not quite fair. Robert May, a mathematical ecologist at Oxford, is one of the pioneers of chaos theory, and his book Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems remains a classic. But Worster's point is still telling, and one suspects that the ecologists' lack' of openness on the subject probably has something to do with the unsettling consequences for the practical application of their discipline-and hence their paychecks. They keep hanging on to the hope of better computer models and more information, but as Brecht said in another context, "If you're still smiling, you don't understand the news."

Most of the rapidly growing literature on chaos and complexity is either journalistic or extremely technical. Of greater importance for radical thinking about the environment are the philosophical implications of chaos and complexity and their impact on those biological disciplines we depend on to guide environmental policy. An excellent examination of the former is in Stephen H. Kellert's In the Wake of Chaos: Unpredictable Order in Dynamical Systems, which suggests, as Ehrenfeld's examples suggest, that the problems facing the practical applications of ecology and biology are more formidable than the disciplines are willing to admit. For the impact of chaos theory on ecological theory, required reading is Stuart L. Pimm, "Nonlinear Dynamics, Strange Attractors, and Chaos," in The Balance of Nature? Ecological Issues in the Conservation of Species and Communities, a sobering book for anyone who believes the issues are either understood or that we have sufficient empirical data to make intelligent decisions about long-term ecosystem management.

Many biologists and ecologists believe the autonomy of nature is a naive ideal, and that we must now attempt to control the Earth. Ironically, this view is widespread despite recent work in nonlinear dynamics that demonstrates nature's talent for self-organization, indeed its talent for organizing itself to critical states that collapse unpredictably with avalanches of the very events that so disturb us-earthquakes, wildfires, extinctions, epidemics. Indeed, many natural systems seem attracted to disequilibrium (or, I would say, wildness). Some of the largest, most catastrophic events-like the Yellowstone fires in 1988- are precisely the unpredictable events that are the key to forming the vegetation architecture basic to the order of an ecosystem. And yet these are the events we most wish to manage.

What emerges from the recent work on chaos and complexity is the final dismemberment of the metaphor of the world as ma¬chine, and the emergence of a new metaphor-a view of a world that is characterized by vitality and autonomy, one which is close to Thoreau's sense of wildness, a view that, of course, goes well beyond him, but one he would no doubt find glorious. Instead of a vast machine, much of nature turns out to be a collection of dynamic systems, rather like the mean eddy lines in Lava Falls, where the description of the turbulence is a nonlinear differential equation containing complex functions with "free" variables that prevent a (closed form) solution. Such natural systems are unstable; they never settle into equilibrium. (Kayakers know this in their bodies.) They are aperiodic; like the weather, they never repeat themselves but forever generate new changes, one of the most important of which is evolution. Life evolves at the edge of chaos, the area of maximum vitality and change.

Dynamic systems marked by chaos and complexity do have an order, and the order can be described mathematically. They are deterministic, and we can (usually) calculate probabilities and make qualitative predictions-how the system will behave in general. But with chaos and complexity, scientific knowledge is again limited in ways similar to the limits of incompleteness, uncertainty, and relativity.

That does not end science; all that drops out, really, is long-term quantitative prediction, and that affects most science primarily in one way: control. But that's the nut of the problem. As John Ralston Saul has said, "The essence of rational leadership is control justified by expertise." Without control, there is no expertise. The biological sciences lose their leadership of the conservation ethic. The "preservation as management" tradition that began with Leopold is finished because there is little reason to trust the experts to make intelligent long-range decisions about nature.

What happens to the rationality of managing species and ecosystems without accurate prediction and control? If the microsystems of an ecosystem-from vascular flows to genetic drift to turbulence-plus all of the natural disturbances to ecosystems-weather, fire (the front of a wildfire is a fractal), wind, earthquakes, avalanches-if all these exhibit chaotic and/or complex behavior, and some organize themselves at a global level to critical states resulting in catastrophic events, and further, if such behavior does not allow long-term quantitative predictions, then isn't ecosystems management a bit of a sham? The management of grizzlies and wolves at best a travesty? If an ecosystem can't be known or con¬trolled with scientific data, then why don't we simply can all the talk of ecosystem health and integrity and admit, honestly, that it's just public policy, not science?

Much of the best intellectual labor of this century has led to the admission of various limits in science and mathematics-of axiom systems, observation, objectivity, measurement. This should have a humbling effect on all of us, and the limits of our knowledge should define the limits of our practice. The biological sciences should draw the line of their operations at wilderness-core wilderness, Wilderness Act wilderness, any wilderness-for the same reasons atomic scientists should accept limits on messing with the atom, and geneticists should accept limits on messing with the structure of DNA: We are not that wise, nor can we be.

The issue is not the legitimacy of science in general, nor the legitimacy of a particular scientific discipline, but the appropriate limits to be placed on any scientific discipline in light of limited knowledge. To ignore these limits is to refuse humility and undermine the foundations of the preservation movement. Accepting these limits and imagining a new conservation ethic based on wildness and humble, careful, non-intrusive practice would unite Thoreau's insight that "in Wildness is the preservation of the World" and the traditions of ancient wisdom with the intuitions of our most radical wilderness lovers, ecofeminists, and cutting-edge mathematicians and physicists. This is as consoling as it is charming.

All knowledge has its shadow. The advance of biological knowledge into what we call the natural world simultaneously advances the processes of normalization and control, forces that erode the wildness that arises from nature's own order, the very order that, presumably, is the point of preservation. At the core of the present conjunction of preservation and biological science-the heritage of Leopold- lies a contradiction. We face a choice, a choice that is fundamentally moral. To ignore it is mere cowardice. Shall we remake nature according to biological theory? Shall we accept the wild?

Wildness is out there. The most vital beings and systems hang out at the edge of wildness. The next time you howl in delight like a wolf, howl for unstable aperiodic behavior in deterministic nonlinear dynamical systems. Lao Tzu and Thoreau and Abbey will be pleased.

By CrazyHorse