Noss,+Reed+F.

Reed F. Noss
Humans now inhabits or owns nearly all of the land-based area on earth. With six billion people and counting, this reality is hardly unbelievable. But with so many people, and with much of the earth owned by some entity or another, where does nature reside? Reed F. Noss addresses this question in a response to Callicott entitled “Wilderness-Now more Than Ever: A Response to Callicott.” In this essay, Noss addresses Callicott’s arguments in favor of a more integrative human existence with nature, pointing to the degradation resulting from human cultural activities as reason to be cautious in taking such a course of action.

Noss’s main contention is with Callicott’s claim that human beings should put less emphasis on fencing nature into ‘wilderness reserves” and more onto a cooperative living environment between human beings and the rest of nature. In response to this, Noss contends that some sort of wilderness reserves should be kept and maintained as human beings no longer act in such a way as to warrant real co-habitation. In what I thought to be one of the more profound statements in the whole of this anthology, Noss here comments on human behavior; that “it is not exclusion from these reserves that separates us from nature; it is our culture and our lifestyles, which had separated us long before we began designing wilderness areas” (pg.445 2nd column). Thus, it becomes apparent that human elaboration on cultural activities with negative affects on the environment is cause for need of such a separation. Further, he notes in passing that, “…we have created a situation where our short-term survival is much more assured than that of less adaptable species” (pg.445, 2nd column). If we were to co-habit in a wilderness environment, then it is more than likely that we drastically change that environment to suit cultural activities harmful to local species.

As an alternative to Callicott’s plan for human-nature co-habitation, Noss proposes one in which concentric circles (or something like them) move out from a wilderness center. Given the activities of human culture as well as the needs for many species in an environment absent of human intervention, “Without a wilderness core, a biosphere reserve could not fulfill its function of maintaining the full suite of native species and natural processes” (pg.447, 1st column). Thus, Noss’ plan stands as a sort of compromise with Callicott and his proposal of doing away with wilderness reserves altogether and a system in which they are preserved for the sake of the wilderness itself.

(Joseph Homer)