Department of Politics
AUGUST 31, 2006
When Europeans first arrived in North America, they viewed it as a continental wilderness populated by wild men (Native Americans) and wild beasts. By the late 19th century the continent had been tamed, and Americans were increasingly interested in preserving vestiges of their wilderness past. The purest expression of that impulse has been the political movement to preserve and protect large tracts of undeveloped federal lands in a National Wilderness Preservation System. Today there are 680 designated wilderness areas totaling more than 106 million acres. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is one of the oldest, one of the most heavily used, and probably the most famous of them all. As such, it is the ideal venue for an exploration of the politics and policy of wilderness preservation in America.
Our course will explore the wilderness concept, the history of wilderness preservation in the United States, the impact of wilderness designation on national parks, national forests, and other public lands, and the host of controversies that inevitably arise when government agencies are directed to "preserve natural conditions." What is wilderness? Is preserving wilderness possible? Does wilderness preservation waste resources? To what extent should land managers interfere with natural forces? Should forest fires be allowed to burn? Should predatory animals be reintroduced? What is the appropriate place of people in wilderness areas? To what degree should we try to make the wilderness safe for visitors? To what extent should visitors be regulated to protect wilderness? Should concessions be made to Native Americans whose ancestors once called these "wilderness areas" home? Science is indispensable to thinking seriously about many of these questions, but ultimately the choices to be made are political choices. We will try to understand who is making these choices, how and why.
: Portions of this syllabus and some of your reading assignments are available in the portable document format (PDF). PDF files have advantages that might appeal to you: (a) You can save a PDF file to your hard drive and view it without being connected to the Internet; (b) PDF files have page breaks, so you can print selected pages if you like. PDF is also the dominant file type used for delivering facsimiles of paper documents, like court opinions and legislative reports, over the Internet. To read PDF files on your personal computer you need the Adobe Acrobat Reader, which you can download without charge from the publisher's web site. This software is already loaded on most college-owned computers.
Feedback: Whether or not you are asked to complete a standardized course evaluation, I am interested in your comments and suggestions for improvement of the course, the readings, the assignments and this course description. Feel free to send comments as you think of them. E-mail: email@example.com.
Instructor: Craig W. Allin, Room 307, South Hall. Telephone: Office, (895-) 4278; Home, 895-8103. Phone messages may be left with faculty secretary Cheryl Dake (895-) 4283 or in her voice mail box or on the answering machine at my home. I do not check my office voice mail. If I do not answer the phone, I recommend contacting me by e-mail.
Office Hours on Campus: If I'm not in class with you, you can probably find me in my office. Feel free to make an appointment or just show up. To help you find me, the most current version of my schedule is available for your electronic inspection over the campus network if you are using Microsoft Outlook (not Outlook Express). From 8:00 a.m. to noon and 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., Cheryl Dake, faculty secretary for South Hall (ext. 4283) can consult my calendar and make appointments for you.
Office Hours off Campus: Sunrise to one hour past sunset.
E-Mail Attachments: Please deliver
your paper by means of e-mail attachment. Please
save your paper in WordPerfect (versions 6 and above)
or Word (Word 97 and above) or Rich Text Format
(RTF, supported by virtually all word processing
programs). Attach your file to an e-mail addressed
. If you are unfamiliar with e-mail attachments,
Class Meetings: South Hall, Room 300, when on campus. Consult Course Calendar & Assignments for times.
Focus & Approach: My intention is to
expose you to the politics of wilderness preservation while
allowing you to experience first-hand the Boundary Waters
Canoe Area Wilderness, which in terms of history, law and
politics is probably most important wilderness area in the
United States. In order to do that, we will, for the most
part, abandon the classroom, our computers, and our Internet
connections. You and I will read, think, present and discuss.
For a week we will live and travel together in the wilderness,
sharing the intellectual responsibilities of students, the
management responsibilities of federal officials, and the
domestic responsibilities associated with cooking, cleaning
and camp life generally.
READING. We will work from one text book and a number of scholarly articles and primary documents. Some of the materials listed below will be assigned to everybody, and some to an individual. Many are relevant to your policy paper assignment, and some are general references which will be available to be borrowed from Craig. Remember there will be no opportunity to print these documents once we leave campus.
Readings for Discussion & Policy Paper
PRE-TRIP EXAM: There will be one exam in the course, sometime before we begin our wilderness trip. It will test your mastery of the assigned readings.
CAMPFIRE TALK: Out in the wilderness, we will have limited opportunity for reading and discussion. Your only formal "academic" responsibility during our wilderness trip is one "campfire talk." You will be assigned an article or book chapter, which you will read, contemplate, and discuss with the group one evening after dinner. Each of you will need a photocopy of your assignment (in a ziploc bag). You will not need your textbook or any other official course reading on the canoe trip. Your job at the campfire talk is (a) to report what you read and to summarize its major points, (b) to relate your selection to the assigned readings we have all done, to the specific circumstances of the BWCAW, and/or to our field experiences, (c) to share the lessons you learned from the selection, and (d) to answer questions from the other participants in the seminar. You should plan on talking for 15 to 20 minutes excluding the time you spend answering questions.
POST-TRIP POLICY PAPER: The final policy paper addresses management of flammable materials in that portion of the BWCA Wilderness that suffered the massive blowdown on July 4, 1999. The assignment is described in detail below.
Assignment: This is a public policy course, so you should not be surprised that you will be writing a short public policy paper: 1500-2500 words. This paper, however, will be unlike any public policy paper you have previously written for me. You will still need to read, think, write and persuade, but the assignment is shortened and streamlined in a variety of ways. There will be no need to to do research in the conventional sense or to submit a topic and bibliography. The topic has been chosen for you, and I have done the initial research, located your sources and prepared your bibliography. I will not ask you to submit an outline of contentions, but you should study carefully the material and links provided below to be sure that the paper you write is in good form. You should be thinking about the paper from the first day of class, as you read your assignments and experience the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Mark your texts, take notes, and jot down your ideas throughout the course. You will write the paper after we return to Cornell, and it will be due on the final day of class.
Introduction: "Heavy rain and straight-line winds in excess of 90 miles per hour hit north central and northeastern Minnesota on July 4, 1999, blowing down trees and causing severe flooding. On the the Superior National Forest, 477,000 acres (more than 600 square miles) were impacted by the blowdown, including one-third of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW)" [www.superiornationalforest.org]. Read all about it in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
With literally millions of trees blown down, there was and is a significantly increased risk of a major forest fire in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Such a fire would be very expensive to fight, and it might be difficult or impossible to extinguish. When giant fires broke out in Yellowstone National Park in 1988, they were not extinguished until the first snows fell despite the efforts of more than 10,000 firefighters and the expenditure of more than $100 million. On the other hand, the BWCA Wilderness is supposed to be managed as a wilderness, an area where nature is allowed to take its course. The July 4 storm was certainly a natural event, and so are many forest fires.
Topic: Your topic is the management of flammable materials in that portion of the BWCA Wilderness that suffered the massive blowdown on July 4, 1999. The question to be addressed is, "what, if anything, should the Forest Service do to reduce the fuel load -- and thus the probability of catastrophic fire -- in that portion of the BWCA Wilderness most impacted by the July 4th storm?" In answering this question I expect you to take into account the nature of the BWCA ecosystem; the philosophy of wilderness preservation; the variety of measures that might be utilized; and the various laws, policies and management guidelines applicable to the BWCAW.
Bibliography: Your bibliography is the list of sources printed above. Feel free to cut and paste it into your paper. Since it is in Turabian format, your citations should use the same format. In Turabian format a citation to a general idea or to an entire work must include the last name(s) of the author(s) and the year of publication. For more specific facts and all quotations, the page number must be included. Information contained in the body of the sentence is not repeated in the citation. Consult the examples below.
Policy Recommendation & Outline of Contentions: Your policy recommendation must answer the question posed above: "what, if anything, should the Forest Service do to reduce the fuel load -- and thus the probability of catastrophic fire -- in that portion of the BWCA Wilderness most impacted by the July 4th storm?" Please note that articulating a good policy recommendation will require you to have already completed your reading and thinking. The policy recommendation is the paper's thesis. Your paper should present your policy recommendation followed by supporting arguments. The best way to think about the supporting arguments is as a hierarchy of contentions. Before you organize your contentions into an outline, consult A Good Argument Is a Hierarchy of Contentions.
Policy Paper: Your recommendation and supporting arguments will be presented in a formal paper with appropriate manuscript format, proper citations, etc. Remember, you are being asked to take a position and make a case for it. Papers that take a position and argue a case are very common at all levels in law, business, journalism, and government. They may be called briefs (law), decision memoranda (business), editorials (journalism), or policy papers (government). Whatever they are called, good ones have certain characteristics. They are:
Please deliver your policy paper in the form of a single e-mail attachment. Consult POLICY PAPERS: How to Succeed for more detailed instructions. To view a sample policy paper written for another course click here.