Edward Abbey was undoubtedly right about industrial tourism. It deadens us to the world, and it disconnects us from the sublime. But does that mean that all national parks should ban cars? Protecting wild areas where human influence is minimal is undoubtedly important, and Abbey is right that cars trailers “tend to separate [us] from the world around [us].” But cars also provide access to parts of the world that some people would never see without them. Cars and wildness are incompatible. How do we choose between them?
The answer can’t be that every national park must completely exclude cars, if only because we’d have many fewer and much smaller national parks than we do now. The answer also can’t be to allow cars anywhere we can build a road, because that tramples on the interests of many people, like me, who value wildness. The answer must be that we balance the need for wildness with the need for access. But how do we do that?
The first step must be for those of us who value wildness to understand that there are those who value access as much as we value wildness and that their interests deserve respect from us in the same way that our values deserve respect from them. That is very hard. I shudder when I see a hillside covered with ATV or dirt bike tracks, but the people who made those tracks are people—human beings who deserve to be treated with the same respect and dignity that expect from them. Given enough time I might be able to persuade them that their interests would be better served by enjoying the outdoors on foot or on horseback. But until I succeed, I have to respect their interests and seek a way to accommodate them without doing unreasonable damage to my own. Of course, they must do the same with me—respect my interests and find a way to pursue theirs that leaves wild spaces for me.
That first step is big. It requires trust on both sides. It requires me to trust that ATV riders will respect my interests because if I don’t trust them, I can’t trust any agreement we reach. If I don’t trust them, I will believe that they are taking advantage of me even if I can’t see how they’re doing it. And they, of course, have to trust me for the same reason. If you think about it a bit more, that first step I proposed is really the second or third step (and there are more steps to come).
The first step is to recognize that the problem isn’t to choose between cars and wildness. It is to find the balance between cars and wildness. Or to say it differently, it is to realize that cars and wildness are only partially incompatible.
The second step is to build trust among those with different interests. In taking the second step, we’ll cycle back and forth between building trust and building understanding. We may even circle back to the original conflict and find a new way to describe it that makes our interests more compatible than we originally thought.