The Conservation Revolution. Bram Büscher

      Second, neoprotectionists contest claims concerning the number of people displaced to create wilderness protected areas and the extent to which this occurred. Environmental historian Emily Wakild asserts that ‘history in many cases shows that people were not kicked out; national parks were designed with them in mind’.⁴² Environmental sociologist Eileen Crist adds that ‘recent research has revealed that systematic data about the impact protected areas have had on local communities worldwide (and under what conditions that impact has been beneficial or detrimental) is “seriously lacking.” What’s more, the overwhelming majority of the world’s rural and urban poor do not live near wilderness areas’.⁴³

      Third, in a different yet related vein, neoprotectionists hold that an area need not be entirely ‘pristine’ to be considered wilderness. Wilson points out that ‘Nowhere in the U.S. Wilderness Act do words like “pristine” appear’. Foreman agrees: ‘Places do not have to be pristine to be designated as wilderness; the Wilderness Act never required pristine conditions’. Wuerthner goes further than this insisting that ‘no serious supporters of parks believe these places are “pristine” in the sense of being totally untouched or unaffected by humans’. And in responding directly to Kareiva et al., Kierán Suckling, the Executive Director of the Center for Biological Diversity retorts:

      Do Kareiva et al. expect readers to believe that conservation groups are unaware that American Indians and native Alaskans lived in huge swaths of what are now designated wilderness areas? Or that they mysteriously failed to see the cows, sheep, bridges, fences, fire towers, fire suppression and/or mining claims within the majority of the proposed wilderness areas they have so painstakingly walked, mapped, camped in, photographed, and advocated for? It is not environmentalists who are naïve about wilderness; it is Kareiva et al. who are naïve about environmentalists. Environmental groups have little interest in the ‘wilderness ideal’ because it has no legal, political or biological relevance when it comes to creating or managing wilderness areas. They simply want to bring the greatest protections possible to the lands which have been the least degraded.⁴⁴