Rhetorical Traction: Definitions and Institutional Arguments in Judicial Opinions About Wilderness Access

Almost every spring for the past eight years, I made a phone call to Maryland in order to get into Minnesota. An office in Maryland houses the reservation system for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a one-million acre preserve in the northeastern tip of Minnesota that is the most visited unit of the National Wilderness Preservation System. This office acts as a medium of and barrier to my access to the Wilderness; it issues permits to groups of people wishing to enter the Boundary Waters, and it limits the number of parties that may enter at a given point on a particular day. Although the Wilderness is public land, I must first gain permission from a state institution to enter the Boundary Waters. That permit is only one of the keys needed to unlock the door to the Boundary Waters. I also must pass through a ranger station on the day I enter to confirm my permit and ensure that I view a short video about the wilderness ethic of "Leave No Trace." Going into the wilderness does not mean merely entering a supposedly untainted, uninhabited area; it requires that people interact with the environment in ways that the Forest Service has deemed appropriate. Indeed, my yearly trips to the Boundary Waters involve more than just packing up my gear and heading north; more than catching fish and making campfires; more than escaping the sights and sounds of the city and relaxing in solitude. These trips require me to play by the rules set by the state. The rules and regulations, the permits and videos, all affect my sheer physical presence in the wilderness. Passing through the wilderness means passing through the state. Wilderness, as it has come to be articulated in the United States, is neither an inherent quality of the natural world, nor a state of mind. Nor is it the cultural commonsense about wilderness, the dominant mode of speaking and writing about wilderness. For better or worse, wilderness is a construction of state institutions. Although environmentalists, philosophers and ethicists have written prolifically about the meaning of wilderness and its contradictions, (1) scholars have given far less attention to the question of how these meanings and contradictions get resolved by governing institutions for the practical purpose of managing wilderness areas. (2) This essay addresses that question by examining arguments produced by governing institutions that have a direct impact on the management and human experience of established wilderness areas. I take as my case studies the controversies concerning wilderness management in two areas: the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota and the wilderness port ion of Denali National Park in Alaska. Specifically, I focus my attention on judicial opinions that address the issue of motorized access to the Boundary Waters and Denali. I examine judicial opinions because they are texts by which state institutions provide temporary resolutions of ongoing public controversies. Especially, in the last decade, individuals and interest groups have engaged in several controversies in order to influence public policy regarding the use of trucks, off-road vehicles and snowmobiles as modes of access and recreation on federal lands, including wilderness areas. Advocates of motorized use have exploited ambiguity in wilderness legislation and management plans to gain rhetorical traction for arguments about motorized use in certain areas of desiguated wilderness. These arguments often get lodged in the courts, where ambiguities in policy get resolved by judicial opinions. This essay demonstrates that judicial opinions rely on two related types of argument to resolve ambiguities in wilderness policy: definitional arguments and institutional arguments. Judicial opinions surrounding motorized use employ definitional arguments in order to clarify ambiguous policy prescriptions regarding wilderness management. …