When Henry David Thoreau wrote “Walden” in 1854, recounting his “life in the woods,” his cabin on that eponymous pond was a half-hour walk from the center of Concord, Massachusetts. The forests must have seemed endless then, the entire continent still far more wild than developed. Today, that ratio has flipped. An ever-growing population, myriad economic pressures, and scarcity of land and resources all make what wild spaces remain more precious than ever. Some believe they should be protected at all costs. Others see that idea as a cautionary tale of government overreach and industrial tourism. Who are the wild spaces for, anyway?
Best untouched
Whatever is still wild in America can’t survive this modern age unless society protects it, and that can help us to preserve our national identity. This land’s raw and difficult terrain helped our forefathers to prevail in the war for independence. Our unique character and values like freedom and self-reliance took shape in the crucible of an untamed land that demanded risk, hard work and sacrifice but rewarded us with beauty and abundance. “The preservation of parks, wilderness and wildlife has aided liberty,” said then-President Ronald Reagan, “by keeping alive the 19th-century sense of adventure and awe with which our forefathers greeted the American West.”
Along the way, we have often retreated into the wild to find serenity, seclusion and even spiritual communion. From Indigenous tribes to ranchers and cowboys, from writers like John Muir to explorers like John Wesley Powell, many have found something sacred in our natural environment. Being in nature is good for the human psyche, connecting us with our past and offering respite from modern stresses. One Stanford study found “quantifiable evidence” that simply walking in nature can reduce the risk of depression. And Israeli researchers found that the solitude and silence of wild spaces “are linked to profound personal outcomes including the discovery of new and expansive ways of knowing the self and the world.”
Keeping certain spaces untouched by development is key to our environmental stewardship. Whatever label they bear, areas without fences, paved roads, bathrooms or utility lines offer vital corridors where plants and animals can grow and move freely, safe from humanity’s nearly ubiquitous impact. This can preserve biodiversity and help endangered species to thrive. More broadly, forests and grasslands help to mitigate climate change by storing carbon. And scientists can use wild spaces to take baseline measurements, helping us to understand our impact on other landscapes.
The government must act to keep these spaces wild and expand the areas under its protection. That can mean wilderness — land “where man himself is a visitor,” per the Wilderness Act — or other designations that limit human encroachment. Anything less risks their degradation and eventual disappearance.
Free range
The idea of untouched nature is a myth, and that is no foundation for good policy. Long before Europeans arrived on this continent, Native American tribes not only called these “wild” lands home but were known to husband its resources to their own benefit. Early photographers left out Indigenous people when they captured the images of places like Yosemite that shaped our notion of wild spaces as empty. “It was the beginning of a myth, a fiction that would gradually spread around the world,” writes Mark Dowie for the MIT Press Reader, “and for a century or more drive the conservation agenda of mankind.” It’s time for us to get over that.
Another myth tells us that government intervention can protect the land, when it’s easy to see that the opposite is true. First of all, no place can be “wild” when it’s trapped behind a glass case of bureaucracy. Popular designations like “wilderness” or “national monument” may offer legal protections, but land doesn’t tend to appear in court. Meanwhile, these labels often attract industrial-scale tourism, which may be the greatest threat to natural spaces. A more holistic view of our relationship with the land understands instead that nature is never static.
Some of the more extreme protections are inherently discriminatory. Land without roads, bathrooms and other basic services is effectively closed off to many disabled folks, the elderly and families with young children. Access to our most pristine wild lands needs to be prioritized for the sake of our most vulnerable people. The same infrastructure that makes natural beauty accessible to them also enables fire mitigation and other safety measures.
Conservation doesn’t mean keeping wild spaces from changing or growing. The land is a bounty that exists for all our benefit — which means the people should decide, from generation to generation, how best to use it. Even Teddy Roosevelt, a pioneer of public lands, understood this essential balance. “Conservation means development as much as it does protection,” he said. “I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them.”
This story appears in the March 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.