The following is a speech, presented by Eugenie Bostrom at the National Wilderness Conference; celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act, in Albuquerque, New Mexico on October 16th, 2014. It has since been adapted for use in National Geographic's 'National Parks: An Illustrated History - 100 Year Anniversary Book by Kim Heacox.
"I was born to a single mother, she was sick and we were poor. Living just outside Los Angeles, with a constant mountain backdrop in the inconceivable distance; the only camping my family ever did was in shelters, or in living out of our car from time to time. We were modern nomads. People without place. With my mother’s health failing her, and our unstable living conditions, she was forced to give up custody. My brother and I were placed in a group-home outside of Chicago. I can’t assume how familiar you are with residential child care facilities, but for the most part, I can tell you, they are islands of individuals. Our group-home was certainly not a part of the surrounding community, and in the group-home you will find individuals, unknowingly seeking identity, but certainly not wanting to tie their identity to that place. Again, a people without place. As the staff of such places are typically overworked, and underprepared for the parenting roles they need to play, there was not much time for hiking or for outdoor exploration for the youth in the group-home. Wilderness was a word I can honestly say that I don’t think I ever heard until the summer that I turned 16. That summer, I applied to be a member of the Yellowstone Youth Conservation Corps. It wasn’t Yellowstone that had intrigued me, I honestly didn’t even know what Yellowstone was, I had never heard of the National Park Service. My sole understanding of government had been through interactions with the Department of Children and Family Services. What interested me was that someone who had previously participated in the Conservation Corps from my group-home had gone to college. Now, I had been led to believe that the only way out of the cycle of poverty and exclusion that I had been born into was to go to college. I thought this was a ticket to college, and the only thing I knew, was that I wanted to break the cycle.
That summer was 1998, the 3rd summer of the Wolf in Yellowstone National Park.
Now l want to digress for a minute to discuss another disenfranchised species: the Grey Wolf...
It’s generally accepted that the Grey Wolf was exterminated from Yellowstone in 1926. Without wolves, elk populations rose, as did coyote populations, which had a direct negative impact on the plant-life of the park, and the antelope population — and every other thing connected to the web of that ecosystem, as we now know. In 1995, the congressionally mandated, Yellowstone Wolf Re-Introduction plan went into effect. The wolves, who had been transported from Canada, were placed in one of 3 large acclimation pens strewn about Yellowstone’s backcountry. The wolves lived in those pens for one month, before the gates were opened and they were free to roam about the park.
Three years later the Youth Conservation Corps contingency was the first group to set out dismantling the pens and removing them from the backcountry.
I feel like you can see where this is going: a disconnected youth, finds a love for nature and her life is changed forever. Now while that is true, it’s not the whole truth - We need to actually dissect this a little more.
Going back, as you’ll recall. I was a person without place, I belonged to myself, I had learned to take care of myself; the same as my comrades. We shared commonalities of our situations, but we did not share the burden. We had never been taught how to do so. Though the staff at the group home tried diligently to teach us about the world, they tried to teach us that we mattered, that if we set our minds to it, we could do anything, it fell on deaf ears. Actually, I think it is children in the child welfare system who probably hear the words “you matter” from authority figures the most. But those words are white noise within a system and a rearing that is telling you the opposite.
My first project in Yellowstone, the dismantling of the Crystal Creek wolf pen, was the first time that I saw how I mattered. It was the first time I understood what community was.
This is not because I had meaningful work, though it was meaningful, it was not because I had a wonderful and supportive crew, though I did.
It was because the only other species that I could relate to, had just exemplified to me the meaning of community, the wolf had found its way home. The wolf mattered so much that an act of congress brought him back. In Yellowstone’s backcountry, within it’s intact ecosystem, I learned how species interact and rely upon each other. I learned about symbiotic relationships, and it cut right through the white noise. Through my understanding of ecosystem, I couldn’t help but translate that understanding to my entire existence. I now knew that what I did, affected those around me, either positively or negatively. Just as the Wolf’s existence in Yellowstone affected everything around it.
This is where the crucial difference lies, this is the alternate lens. There is a vast difference between exposure to nature, and experience in it. And when trying to reach a disenfranchised young person - though taking them into the woods may be good, it may also unfortunately be more white noise if not accompanied with meaningful experience that shifts their perspective. This is the tricky part, it has to be organic in the truest sense. When taking down that wolf-pen in the backcountry, we did not have a facilitator calling out the comparisons, asking if I see the correlation between an ecosystem and an urban community. Had there been, I would have tuned them out. I needed to learn from the land itself, I needed not to seek solitude and reflection, but to seek connectedness and exploration.
I’ve heard several times at the conference here that Wilderness is for all, and that its not a privileged experience - but it is. And we here are speaking from a privileged platform. We can’t tell people that public lands belong to them, when those people don’t feel they belong to it, to us, to place. We can’t tell them. We have to provide pathways for them to find it.
Aldo Leopold, the man of the week, famously said "We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us, when we begin to view the land as a community to which we belong we may begin to treat it with love and respect."
Now, This is my favorite quote of all time, but, all due respect to Mr. Leopold, I think it comes from a place of privilege. It certainly is correct when the "we" refers to a population in power. However there is a whole sect of society that do not regard the land as belonging to them. Nothing belongs to them. They don't abuse the land; they don't know the land, and if they do abuse the land it's because abuse is the only currency of connectedness that they have. I challenge us to take Leopold's powerful sentiment and flip it for a different and vital audience: "When we begin to view the land as a community to which we belong, we may regard previous abuses and commodities with a new love and respect."
When working with communities, I ask you to view wilderness differently. I ask you to, as Terry Tempest Williams charged us last night, 'recompose our position'. Help people see wilderness not as a place to challenge and renew themselves, not simply as a place separate from their worlds that they can escape to, but rather as a mirror to themselves, and to their world, give them a sense of belonging that doesn’t just reside in the Gila, or the Selway Bitterroot, though it may be born there, let them take that sense of belonging with them."
Learn more:
To see an adaptation of this speech in print, along with other amazing stories pick up this National Geographic Book.
To learn more about the Yellowstone Wolves - hear from Doug Smith, project leader for the Yellowstone Wolf Reintroduction.
To learn more about the group-home that I was fortunate enough to grow-up in visit www.mooseheart.org.
To learn more about my story - keep following this blog.