Urban wilderness: A doorway to the real thing

BY DAVID LUKAS

I recently went looking for urban wilderness in Reno. Scott Slovic, an English professor and director of the new Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities at the University of Nevada, led me to a small ravine within walking distance of campus. We were looking for a place to show students and visitors wilderness close to home.

Standing on a small hillock contemplating the narrow riparian strip and the crush of new houses on the hillside across from us, I saw a scene that has stayed with me. Down among the bleached cottonwoods, two young friends sat on logs facing each other in the hush of winter barrenness. Tucked behind a screen of branches, covered by the sound of the creek, they conferred in a secret place outside the press of urban time.

Reno, like many other towns and cities of the West, is an urban enclave surrounded by wild lands. Although it is possible to walk from downtown into the realm of cougars, bears and wild horses - and for them to cross into our realm - these wild lands are not really wilderness, for virtually every inch of this terrain has been manipulated, grazed, altered by human presence. To an ecologist's eye the evidence glares as painfully as the neon lights on the darkening horizon. Even to a casual observer, the erosion and trash are hard to ignore.

But to dismiss the idea of wilderness, even in this suburban setting, is to miss the experience of the young friends in the cottonwoods, or the perspective of a rancher at work under the open sky. Wilderness is an ecological and experiential spectrum which, for human participants, begins and ends at our doorsteps, and ranges through a succession of places where natural processes dominate.

While lands that are grazed, or survive as narrow strips between rows of houses, are not and never can be, wilderness, they are trails which draw the curious into realms where the human presence diminishes with each step away from the familiar. Farther on we find the wildest places, seldom visited peaks and playas. It is these mysterious distant places which charge the nearby with meaning as we walk out to our line of courage and then return home to a warm hearth.

It is strange to contemplate this urban wilderness. It reminds me of losses and compromises. It is being choked by our growth.

This ragged creek and broken stand of cottonwoods is our doorway to something incomprehensibly precious. We must keep it open.

David Lukas is a naturalist and writer. He lives in North San Juan, Calif. A frequent visitor to the Great Basin, Lukas is naturalist in residence at the Art of the Wild Conference held in Squaw Valley, Calif., each summer.