Down the road 20 years, the news is not good. This country is creating a class of people who will not only lack money and decent schooling, they will lack experience with the natural world. Even now they are proto-zombies, living in the realities of commodity that occupy the other sides of the screens they stare into.

Exactly what does this have to do with wilderness? In 20 years when it comes time to make policy for public wild lands, you’re going to have a massive group of voters for whom everything, even wilderness, is a commodity. Wilderness advocates have placed their faith in the 1964 Wilderness Act, without paying attention to how the Act’s meaning is changing in a world that increasingly resembles the set of Grand Theft Auto. The danger is that wilderness will be seen as a reserves of minerals or timber, or the view part of a doughnut of valuable view-lots, or the backdrop for aggressive games or a for-profit museum. It’s a short step from any of those visions to selling it all off to address national defense needs.

If you think I’m being alarmist, you haven’t been watching the transformations of the last 20 years. The Forest Service has gone from being a service agency to a police agency. Wilderness management, deliberately starved for funds, has come to depend on volunteer labor for basic maintenance. Public campgrounds are administered for private profit. The very concept of public land is under attack from the Bush Administration, as shown in its treatment of the atmospheric commons, National Parkland, the Arctic wildlife refuge and transfers of National Forest to private interests. The future—itself a commons—has been claimed and colonized by the architects of our staggering national debt.

Given such developments, lands already in the wilderness system should not be regarded with complacency. The Wilderness Act is not sacrosanct, and it can be changed either through additional amendment, through legal attenuation, or through further reduction in maintenance funds.

Long term, the only way that wilderness will survive in this country is if we get enough young people out in it so that they won’t elect people who would make it a commodity. It’s fashionable among wilderness advocates to scorn Boy Scouts, but a lot of Boy Scouts have grown up to become wilderness advocates. Funding programs to get people of limited means out in the woods—the children of WMDs in particular—is essential education in non-monetary values.

The current geriatric nature of the ski industry provides an example of what happens when you depend on people learning a difficult skill and then price them out of any arena where they can learn it. Understanding the wild is a far more difficult skill to acquire than learning how to ski, and people who value wild lands need to make it easy for the poor and fractured families of our communities to spend time in the woods.

Right now it’s cheaper to buy a PlayStation 2 than to pay for a week-long camping trip for even one person. Think of PlayStation as a cheap introduction to the way the world works, and a debased lesson on human motives and aspirations. Think about the result of ten or twelve years of video gaming on a kid’s world view.

Too often we miss the human dimension of wilderness. Wilderness is a human concept, and if you look at it closely you can see that it is more than just a legal one. It’s an educational concept that comes out of a matrix of belief that suggests that experience in the natural world will make better human beings. That’s not the matrix of belief that is generating any recognizable current social policy, whether it be toward our wild areas or our WMDs.