Episode 19 : Managing Wilderness is an Oxymoron : an interview with Warren Miller [transcript]

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:28:29 Debbie Lee or Jane Holman: Welcome to the Subway Bitterroot Wilderness History Project, which is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The University of Idaho, and Washington State University. Part of the project’s mission is to collect, preserve, and make public oral histories documenting the history and people of the Solway Bitterroot Wilderness. For more information, please visit our website at SPW lib argue idaho.edu.

00:00:29:02 - 00:00:53:29 Debbie Lee or Jane Holman: And then I think people, I think people get so much out of being in a wilderness setting once you take away cars and money and telephone, these people are different and they are different to each other, I think. And, and, and then they draw on things in themselves that maybe are a little rusty from our crazy life out here.

00:00:53:29 - 00:01:25:02 Debbie Lee or Jane Holman: Now, I think the ways that people get along when they’re isolated in a place like that, that they place that they want to be. I really it’s a wonderful thing.

00:01:25:04 - 00:01:50:25 Debbie Lee or Jane Holman: Thank you for joining us for the 19th episode of the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness History Project. In this episode titled Managing Wilderness Is an Oxymoron, Warren Miller explains how the Wilderness Rangers helped to interpret the Wilderness Act in a practical, tangible way by educating backcountry recreational users and promoting primitive tool use, among other things. Warren Miller was born in Salt Lake City.

00:01:50:27 - 00:02:12:27 Debbie Lee or Jane Holman: Lived there until he was 11, and then his family moved to Phenix, Arizona. He attended Reed College in Portland, where he majored in physics. After graduating and spending some time traveling in Europe, he and his brother took a work trip with the Sierra Club, which took them into the Subway Bitterroot off of Elk Summit. While on that trip, he was impressed with the country and its surroundings.

00:02:12:27 - 00:02:24:26 Debbie Lee or Jane Holman: He also met Dick Walker, who encouraged him to apply for a job as a wilderness ranger. In his words, I figured, well, I’ll try this for a year or for a season. And I stayed there 20 years.

00:02:24:28 - 00:02:38:13 Debbie Lee or Jane Holman: So you went to, you went to be a wilderness ranger in 1971, and you said you were there for 20 years. Did you change positions or were you in that position?

00:02:38:15 - 00:02:41:06 Warren Miller: I was orders Ranger for 17 years.

00:02:41:08 - 00:02:42:18 Debbie Lee or Jane Holman: At Moose Creek.

00:02:42:20 - 00:03:07:25 Warren Miller: well, I, I was working for the missionary district, but we. So the way the the the way the district was organized changed quite a bit after I’d been there a couple of years. So when I first, started working at Moose Creek, everything worked out in Moose Creek Ranger Station itself, which was right in the little seven bedroom.

00:03:07:27 - 00:03:28:24 Warren Miller: so I was, you know, the first couple years was, When you’re Moose Creek, your Moose Creek, there wasn’t essentially there wasn’t outside. It was very much of a, of a, of a community and a lifestyle that, really didn’t, didn’t connect to the outside.

00:03:28:26 - 00:03:40:02 Debbie Lee or Jane Holman: Can you go into more detail about what that entails, the community and the lifestyle?

00:03:40:04 - 00:04:10:13 Warren Miller: Well, it was like any community. I mean, you end up helping each other, working with each other. And you, you, somebody, needed you ended up cooperating with other people if you needed, some supplies taken down. So you did share. You’d end up, you were cooperating with somebody else who was going in that direction rather than making special trips.

00:04:10:16 - 00:04:39:18 Warren Miller: it, was the sense of community, you know, often during the four days off, from our, you know, we’d work, ten, four hours. We’d have ten days out in the field or ten days, ten paid days or official paid days. And then for, four days off during during the two week hitch and the cruise, you did come back into the station.

00:04:39:21 - 00:05:07:23 Warren Miller: often we’d end up having, a, a barbecue or an ice cream feed or something like that on the, on the porch of the Rangers house. You know, Bill would have us come over and we’d end up, for the the station people would have prior to that, they ice cubes in the in the freezers in the refrigerators and, so we’d, have a the old fashioned crank ice cream maker.

00:05:07:23 - 00:05:34:10 Warren Miller: We make ice cream on the rangers porch and, have hamburgers and that kind of stuff. there was just there was a in a lot of ways, it was very close community. And, developed the interactions and the relationships that small, close communities like that do, do end up, developing.

00:05:34:13 - 00:05:38:06 Debbie Lee or Jane Holman: Yeah. Good memories.

00:05:38:09 - 00:06:14:26 Warren Miller: Oh, yeah. and so I end up going over Lost Horse in 1973. to man that station. And in a way, it made a lot of sense, because managing wilderness is, kind of an oxymoron. Wilderness, by definition, doesn’t need to be managed. Quotas manages itself. And what we were, what what wilderness managers really are doing is managing people and mitigating the impacts of people on the wilderness resource.

00:06:14:28 - 00:06:47:19 Warren Miller: And so most of that was education, some of its law enforcement for the recalcitrant people who refused to be educated. so it makes sense to talk to people before they go into the wilderness and try to encourage them into using, a low impact camping methods and try to instill in them a little bit of sense of what wilderness is, although, again, that’s a subjective sort of thing.

00:06:47:21 - 00:07:09:19 Warren Miller: So it made sense to move the Wilderness Rangers to the, to the external portals to contact the public. which is I think it’s good and makes people a little bit more sensitive and aware to what wilderness is.

00:07:09:21 - 00:07:42:05 Debbie Lee or Jane Holman: Yeah. So the wilderness acted in a specific in some ways. No roads, no machinery, but some of its the terminology is more vague and open to interpretation. Did you find yourself having to make rules or enforce things that you know, that had to do with, the word untrammeled or the word of solitude? that are more abstract?

00:07:42:08 - 00:08:09:22 Warren Miller: Well, the Governance act is pretty general, and there’s, there’s room for enormous amounts of interpretation. This is fine just going from region to region. I mean, you’re finding vastly different ways of interpreting the wilderness acts. Some, some, you know, regions, for example, take a lot more liberty with, with, administrative privileges using power equipment or, or having, administrative facilities and others.

00:08:09:22 - 00:08:41:20 Warren Miller: So there’s, there’s. There’s enormous room for interpretation. And of course, that very thing leads or led to enumerate more conversations amongst the discussions amongst the people working there. Well, what is what is how should we do this? How should we do that? Well, what’s the moral? What’s the I mean, just that it’s all very subjective. Yeah.

00:08:41:23 - 00:09:13:21 Warren Miller: and, you know, what is wilderness character, of a place and what is wilderness in the first place? How do you define those? I mean, there’s the Wilderness Act has certain definitions, but, you know, it’s, the lack of ceding of being a little bit, or what’s the word, vulgar. A good friend of mine says, you know, opinions are like assholes.

00:09:13:21 - 00:09:44:15 Warren Miller: Everybody’s got one kind of thing. that’s the same thing, you know, no two people are going to have the same opinion about how what it is and how it should be managed and what should be their what shouldn’t be there, anywhere from, from, from anymore. Who said, by golly, anybody who comes in here, I’d be just given a spear and a loincloth and let him do all his own to other people who say, you know, you really ought to have a road of the subway here.

00:09:44:15 - 00:09:51:11 Warren Miller: So people are going to enjoy this place. So, yeah, that’s true. Two extremes of of opinion about the same thing.

00:09:51:13 - 00:09:55:11 Debbie Lee or Jane Holman: Yeah.

00:09:55:14 - 00:10:33:29 Warren Miller: And one of the, one of the interesting things that I’ve found or, that I had to deal with or dealt with, in terms of wilderness and wilderness philosophy is, common place in wilderness. the, kind of there’s there’s there’s an overlying, impression that man really isn’t a part of wilderness. And I think man is very much a part of wilderness.

00:10:34:05 - 00:11:09:12 Warren Miller: And it’s sort of, you know, I think I think that attitude of man being apart from wilderness is kind of a, a byproduct of the Judeo-Christian attitude that that man has dominion over everything else, when in reality, man is part of everything else. I mean, it’s just an organism, just like everything else is. And that took me a while to figure out how to how that what how that works in wilderness, that, there we are, a part of this planet.

00:11:09:15 - 00:11:37:02 Warren Miller: we do have a part in wilderness, and we are not a part of wilderness or a part from wilderness, I should say. and that was kind of an interesting realization that, you know, we are we do belong here. but we also need to, take care of the place and make sure that we don’t make a mess out.

00:11:37:05 - 00:11:42:15 Warren Miller: which, of course, is true of the planet in general, but.

00:11:42:17 - 00:12:09:20 Debbie Lee or Jane Holman: Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness History Project, which has been made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Idaho, and Washington State University. The project coordinator is Debbie Lee, recorded and produced by Aaron Jepson.