Wilderness advocates need to tell their stories

Rick Potts recalled a journey in the Bob Marshall Wilderness a few years back with his trusty horse Sam. Potts was riding down a trail whistling a tune, and Sam was sort of dancing to it — as well as a horse can dance. Then Sam stopped and his ears laid back, and the hair on the back of Rick’s neck stood up.

Under a big fir tree was a wolf, its fierce green eyes glowering at Potts and his horse. The wolf glared at the two and then disappeared like smoke.

“There will never be a video game that will duplicate that experience,” Potts told about 100 wilderness enthusiasts last week during the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation’s annual wilderness speaker series.

Potts has worked in land management his entire career. He currently is the manager of the 1.1 million acre Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. He previously served as director of the National Park Service’s wilderness program and later as chief of conservation and outdoor recreation for the Park Service.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, the law that protects the Bob Marshall Wilderness from development. But the future of wilderness is in jeopardy if people can’t get the public to care about it, Potts warned.

In the course of a generation, the U.S. has gone from a population where 50 percent of the people grew up in a rural or farm setting to less than 19 percent. Eighty percent of the nation now lives in cities, tuned into their smartphones more than the natural world.

Potts calls people who’ve known wilderness and slept under the stars the “six percenters” because they represent the population that has actually experienced it.

“Our job is to get out there … and engage the rest in thoughtful discourse,” he said.

The role of a wilderness advocate, he said, shouldn’t be preachy. Wilderness advocates will get much farther by making people laugh and telling good stories about their own wilderness experiences, he advised.

“Remember to have fun and help others have fun,” he said. “That’s how it starts.”

Potts doesn’t subscribe to the theory that a place can be loved to death.

“The only way to kill a wilderness is through apathy,” he said.

He notes that backcountry use in the U.S. is down 26 percent nationwide.

“That scares me to death,” he said. “Wilderness is in danger of becoming irrelevant.”

While the wilderness experience far outweighs anything one can view on a video screen, Potts said, it would be a mistake to discourage the use of technology to share wilderness experiences. Wilderness advocates need Generation Y — the 85 million young Americans born in the 1980s and later — to embrace wilderness in their own way.

They’re going to share wilderness experiences in a different way, Potts noted — through smartphones and other devices. That’s OK, he said — the important thing is that they care about wide open spaces.

Potts recalled the story of a group of hunters who came to the Bob Marshall Wilderness in 2001 for a 10-day hunting trip. The men looked awful when they arrived — downtrodden, listless, apathetic.

It turned out they were emergency room physicians from New York City who had just experienced aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack. But they were different men once they got out in the wilderness.

“They were reborn in that 10 days,” Potts said.

And that is the true power of the woods.