KIOSKS -

 We worked with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and Colorado Parks and Wildlife to create  2 wildlife kiosks  along the I-70 corridor west of Grand Junction. Our group received a grant from The Sierra Club to fund the purchase of the metal and plexiglass parts of the kiosks, and to pay the artist. BLM employees and WSSC members coordinated on creating the posters. Thank you very much, BLM employees! 

To see previews of 3 of the posters from the Prairie Dog Kiosk, go to our prairie dogs page. Here are the three posters for our Riparian Wildlife Kiosk:

First one is the left poster:

This is the Center Poster:

Here is the right poster:

The Prairie Dog kiosk is installed at North Pond, also called 6 & 50 Reservoir, west of Mack off of Highway 6&50. You can see it from the highway, and get to it by taking the dirt road south that passes under I70 to Rabbit Valley. Right after leaving highway 6&50, there is a large parking lot, and the kiosk is at its SW corner.

The second kiosk, with the above posters, is at the McDonald Creek trailhead. Take the main exit off I-70 to Rabbit Valley, and continue south on a fairly bumpy dirt road for a couple miles to the trailhead. Again, thanks to BLM employees for their help on these kiosks.

Here are some recent writings from our member Glenn Parton

Long-term Strategy for the Environmental Movement

Part 1

E.O. Wilson’s Half-Earth Proposal.

The Half-Earth ideal, as proposed by E. O. Wilson, is fundamentally flawed. Wilson calls for a global network of “inviolable reserves” under “strict protection,” meaning areas shielded from major human disturbances such as industrial extraction, logging, mining, and large-scale agriculture. At the same time, he allows for Indigenous-managed lands where human use—including livestock grazing—is compatible with biodiversity conservation. Because his central criterion is biological diversity and ecological integrity, the resulting global system tends to assume the form of a mosaic: core protected areas, buffer zones, ecological corridors, with human-inhabited landscapes functioning in conservation roles. The difficulty with this model of land protection is straightforward but profound: if managed

landscapes and human-influenced territories are counted as part of the protected system, then what, in the end, secures genuine wilderness in the spirit of the Wilderness Act of 1964?

This critique is offered with full recognition of the importance of E. O. Wilson’s “Half Earth,” which stands as one of the most influential and serious proposals for global conservation. The disagreement that follows concerns not its intention, but its underlying conceptual framework.

This is not merely a problem of implementation; it reveals a fatal flaw within the conceptual framework itself. Because the Half-Earth proposal is oriented primarily toward species survival at scale and the maintenance of evolutionary and ecological processes, it does not, by its own logic, guarantee the preservation of large areas of land free from human artifacts and activities. There is no principled commitment to real wilderness. Wilderness in the strong sense—as conceived by the 1964 Wilderness Act—can be displaced, diluted, or minimized by managed conservation landscapes that still count, on

paper, toward global protection targets. If Wilson’s proposal were widely adopted, it would quickly give rise to disputes over how much genuine wilderness is actually required. It is better to confront that question directly from the outset rather than allow it to remain implicit and unresolved.

It is true that the Wilderness Act itself contains compromises and ambiguities—for example, permitting activities such as livestock grazing under certain conditions. Nevertheless, its core conception of wilderness—as land retaining its “primeval character,” where human impacts are “substantially unnoticeable,” where the Earth is “untrammeled,” and where humans are “visitors”—provides a clear conceptual framework for a world wilderness preservation system (WWPS).

The ideal of wilderness defined in the 1964 Act is conceptually correct, even if the compromises required for its passage into law must ultimately be removed, whereas Wilson’s ideal is inadequate at the level of principle and theory, even if its global implementation may appear more politically feasible.

The question, then, is what a model of land protection would look like if it took wilderness, in the strong sense, as its starting point.

The Half Wild Earth Proposal

I propose a Half Wild Earth in place of Wilson’s Half-Earth. This can be achieved by identifying the last remaining places of wild land and water on the planet, protecting them, rewilding them where necessary, and linking them into continental-scale wilderness systems that eventually encompass half the Earth. This model of land protection extends the spirit of the 1964 Wilderness Act outward, transforming it into a planetary spatial order.

The World Wilderness Preservation System that is required cannot exist as something distant or abstract, cut off from human life. It must be readily accessible to human beings on a daily basis if it is to balance the different dimensions of our existence. The image that emerges is one of vast wilderness stretching across the planet as a continuous, self-

organizing natural world, existing alongside human civilization in such a way that people live along the Edge—free to move in one direction into towns and cities, and in the other into the wild. By “civilization,” I do not mean the existing global order, but a qualitatively different form of human life—one reorganized beyond the struggle for existence and capable of coexisting with a fully autonomous wilderness, a conception more fully developed in Part 2 of this essay.

The Half Wild Earth proposal begins from a fundamentally different spatial and conceptual standpoint. It understands wilderness and civilization as two autonomous forms of order. Each is internally coherent and self-contained, yet each encounters the other along a shared boundary. They are interlocked across the Earth’s surface, like complementary forms fitted together—not as fragments, but as wholes.

Neither realm is subordinate to the other. There is no hierarchy, no sense in which one is merely instrumental to the other, and no fragmentation into isolated patches. Instead, there are two complete and

continuous worlds of becoming, each maintaining its own integrity while fitting precisely against the other.

The underlying principle is topological. What matters is continuity and connectedness within each sphere, not symmetry, uniformity, or geometric regularity. The boundary between wilderness and civilization need not be straight or orderly. It can be jagged, irregular, and complex. But it must be a single, unbroken interface where the two domains meet without gaps or overlap.

Human habitation would be located just inside the civilization side of this boundary. One step inward places a person within the continuous fabric of social systems—towns, infrastructure, institutions; one step outward crosses into the continuous fabric of wilderness. The boundary is therefore not distant or abstract, but immediate and lived.

The Edge, where human beings dwell, need not function identically at every point. It requires only a sufficient density of accessible zones where people can live in proximity to the boundary and cross it. In

this way, human beings would inhabit regions where wilderness lies within walking distance in one direction and civilization extends in the other. Humans are neither buried deep within a purely artificial world nor dispersed into the wild but situated precisely at the interface between two different forms of reality.

The boundary itself must remain clear and definite. It is not a vague gradient or a zone of gradual blending. On one side, human communities are organized according to principles of equality, justice, freedom, and beauty; on the other, wilderness unfolds according to its own ecological and evolutionary processes. There is no creeping expansion, no slow dissolution of one into the other. At the same time, crossing is regular and intentional: human beings enter wilderness as visitors, not as settlers or managers extending control.

Within this model, wilderness is not a patchwork of parks, but a continuous, self-governing domain in which non-human life unfolds according to its own dynamic laws, free from sustained human pressure. Civilization, likewise, develops according to its own

internal organization and purposes—not diluted or partially wild, but developing forms capable of meeting human needs in a rational and artistic way.

The result is a stable spatial order: two distinct yet interlocking systems, one self-formed and wild, the other human-directed and civilized, held apart by a real boundary and brought into structured relation by design. Together, they form a single articulated world structured not by domination or blending, but by adjacency, continuity, and balanced coexistence.

What this spatial model ultimately describes is a reorientation in how the Earth is organized and experienced. It is not only a physical arrangement, but a revolution in perception—a new world-image through which the Earth becomes intelligible as a structure composed of two autonomous yet interlocking domains. Like any genuine philosophical vision, it operates by reshaping perception itself.

Human transformation and genuine progress begin with a new way of seeing. As the Earth is disclosed differently, so too is the meaning of human needs and

desires. This shift is not superficial but ontological, altering the basic framework through which the world is encountered and understood.

Within this image, the idea of “half” must be carefully interpreted. The oceans already cover roughly 70 percent of the planet and function as a preexisting wild matrix. Against this background, the remaining 30 percent—comprising terrestrial wilderness and human civilization—would be divided into roughly equal parts, each occupying about 15 percent of the Earth’s surface (15% of Earth equals 50% of land). The result is not a literal halving of the globe, but a structured duality embedded within a larger, already wild Earth.

The model, then, is not about strict numerical symmetry. It is about establishing a clear and intelligible spatial relation between two continuous life-worlds set within and supported by the enduring wildness of the oceans.

Of course, there is ultimately only one world, one planet, but it is possible to set aside at least half of it

as wilderness in the spirit of the 1964 Wilderness Act, with human beings living and creatively developing the other half. I will now argue why this is the best planetary model.

Why a Half Wild Earth

There are two primary reasons why a Half Wild Earth is both necessary and ideal. First, wild animals require a world in which they can live in peace and privacy, free from human artifacts and activities—except for aesthetic visitation. I am not a scientist, and I do not claim to know whether biodiversity strictly requires a Half Wild Earth. But the best insights of conservation biology—represented by scientists such as Reed Noss—point in this direction. What I do know is that it is fair and just that at least half the Earth be wild for the sake of the more than twenty million non-human species with whom we share the planet, so that they may have a world of their own where they are left alone.

The second reason, or justification, for a Half Wild Earth is that human beings themselves require the aesthetic experience of autonomous nature—a Wild Earth—for psychological balance and for forms of insight and wisdom that make possible a sane and satisfying civilization, without which the entire planet is in jeopardy. For human beings, an aesthetic relation to wilderness is an existential relation. Today, vast numbers of people are so deeply immersed in systems of propaganda, consumption, and artificial need that they no longer know what is of true value in life. Regular aesthetic experience of wilderness is necessary to move beneath and beyond these false needs and desires, which produce forms of collective irrationality and ecocide.

When we encounter the beauty of wilderness, we perceive the world for its own sake, independent of our particular interests and concerns. This kind of contact with wild nature gives rise to feelings, intuitions, and ideas that cannot be accessed in any other way—insights that are indispensable for right livelihood, proper living, and moral citizenship. The

beauty of art, of friendship, and of love can and do transform us for the better, but only by aesthetically entering another world—real wilderness, entirely free from human influence—does the possibility of radical transformation in human subjectivity arise. It provides a vantage point entirely outside civilization from which civilization itself can be evaluated and judged in its totality.

However, the aesthetic experience of wilderness is fragile. Utility lines, mining scars, clearcuts, cattle tracks—any visible human alteration—can disrupt the harmony of a place and break our sense of aesthetic oneness. Once that unity is broken, the flow of insights and ideas is diminished or lost. And with it, our ability to free ourselves from the sophisticated forms of manipulation that dominate the modern world.

Given the scale of the human population, even if it were reduced to two billion in the foreseeable future—which is probably still too much—we would still require a Half Wild Earth to ensure that people can regularly experience solitude in vast wilderness, out of

which come feelings and ideas for improving human social life.

The Half Wild Earth ideal organizes civilization around permanent access to wilderness-scale experience. Our perceptual and affective capacities were formed in relation to such environments. This does not imply a return to earlier historical conditions, but it does suggest that certain dimensions of human experience remain dependent on sustained contact with nature at comparable scales

In short, the justification for a Half Wild Earth rests on two arguments: an ethical argument on behalf of non-human life and an aesthetic argument grounded in the fundamental structure of human nature.

The Half Earth Ideal and the Half Wild Earth Ideal are two very different conceptual frameworks with very different outcomes. The former may be able to sustain biodiversity, but it is experimentally risky at best because wilderness is, in fact, the only proven way of sustaining biodiversity. In any event, my two arguments for the Half Wild Ideal stand independently

of the issue of sustaining biodiversity in the scientific sense of viable populations of all species that are abundant and well-distributed across diverse landscapes. There are sufficient aesthetic and sufficient ethical reasons for a Half Wild Earth.

As Michael Soulé argued, conservation biology is not a value-neutral science but one grounded in a prior commitment to the preservation of life—a commitment that precedes and guides scientific method rather than emerging from it. Understood in this way, the ideal of a Half Wild Earth is not external to conservation science, but implicit in its defining mission. In this sense, aesthetics, ethics, and conservation science converge on a common horizon.

The question that follows is no longer what this world looks like in principle, but how such a world might be brought into being, which will be discussed in Part 2.

Long-term Strategy for the Environmental Movement

Part 2

Getting There

For some time now I have come to regard the central question of our time as how we are to move beyond the ecological crisis we have created. The account that follows is not intended as a final answer, but as an invitation to reflection and further development.

The Half Wild Earth Ideal, proposed in part 1, cannot be realized as a conservation objective alone. It requires a corresponding transformation of human civilization, for the establishment of a World Wilderness

Preservation System (WWPS) and the reorganization of civilization are mutually dependent on conditions of a single, coherent planetary worldview.

How do we move beyond global capitalism—a system in which there is both too little wilderness and too little genuine human desire for it—toward a Half Wild Earth?

My answer, in a single word, is “vision.” By this, I mean a clear and comprehensive outline—not a rigid blueprint—of an alternative way of life capable of satisfying the fundamental needs of both human and non-human beings.

A viable environmental strategy must entail a transformation of social life itself. It must speak to how people live, work, and find meaning within civilization—not merely to

what is preserved outside it. Without this, the environmental movement cannot generate the depth of desire, commitment, or sustained political will required for real change. What is needed is a vision in which wilderness preservation and the reorganization of human life are understood as inseparable—two aspects of a single, intelligible alternative to capitalism (or an endless expanding materialist economy).

A strategy that addresses only the needs of the natural world, however urgent, risks remaining abstract—external to the lived reality of human beings. The task is not only to criticize the existing power apparatus, but to articulate what could meaningfully replace it. Yet much of environmentalism remains defensive, focused on mitigation rather than

transformation, and hesitant to articulate a clear alternative. This hesitation may reflect a concern about alienating the broader public, but such caution is misplaced, since it is precisely this public that must be brought to an awareness of what a genuinely different form of human life could be.

The socialist tradition offers essential insights—its emphasis on cooperation, collective well-being, and resistance to commodification—but it is insufficient on its own. What is required is a deeper transformation in our relation to the Earth as a whole.

We need a vision of high civilization. We could produce more than enough for everyone through forms of democratic deliberation and planning, in ways that are

both materially sufficient and experientially meaningful, and that exist alongside a genuinely Wild Earth. An alternative must be articulated.

High Civilization

By high civilization I mean the cessation of the struggle for existence. This entails the end of compulsory labor, the possibility of long lives largely free from disease and insecurity, and a social existence in which scarcity with respect to basic goods and services has been overcome.

Within High Civilization, all people have access to the accumulated knowledge and cultural achievements of humanity, while maintaining direct, lived contact with a genuinely Wild Earth. Practices such as hunting and animal husbandry belong to an

earlier stage of human development and are replaced by healthy, high-efficiency food systems.

Advances in science and technology—including artificial intelligence—make it increasingly plausible that the basic needs of all people could be met at near-zero cost in the coming decades—once these capabilities are no longer subordinated to capital accumulation.

No pre-technological society has achieved High Civilization in this sense. Indigenous cultures deserve respect, but like all human societies prior to modern technology, they remained subjugated to the struggle for existence. For the first time in history, it is materially possible to construct a way of life largely free from want, toil, and necessity.

This possibility defines the horizon of High Civilization.

It must be emphasized that advanced science and technology, including AI, are potential vehicles of freedom. They can be used as tools to free human beings from the drudgery of labor and to release at least half the Earth from economic utilization of any kind, thereby rendering obsolete the basic institutions of capitalism—wage labor, private property, money markets, and the many forms of exploitation of human beings and wild nature that, through mystification, falsely appear as inevitable laws of nature.

We must advocate High Civilization, not simply as a condition of material abundance, but as a unique form of human order that reorganizes human life around vital human

needs and potentialities, including the human need for the experience of the beauty of real wilderness. Its defining feature is not technology as such, but the liberation of time, energy, and attention from economic necessity toward the contemplation of wilderness and the building of free human communities.

The contemplative-aesthetic relation to wilderness, made possible by such a form of life, is not a peripheral benefit of civilization but one of its deepest ends, alongside the flourishing of the human community itself.

High Civilization marks the end of the “business model” of society—the long historical condition in which human relations, institutions, and systems of production are structured primarily through

exchange for profit. In its place emerges a cooperative order oriented toward true human needs and intrinsically valuable forms of activity, where human effort is no longer compelled by economic survival but oriented toward cooperation, generosity, artistic creation, and the enjoyment of a Wild Earth for its own sake.

At the same time, High Civilization is defined by restraint and limit. It is a human world that knows where it ends. Its institutions, technologies, and built environments are shaped not only by conservation science but also by aesthetics and ethics, forming a lifeworld that is increasingly free without becoming totalizing.

Central to this condition is the recognition of wilderness as an independent, self-formed

domain, an awareness that does not arise from immersion in wilderness alone, but from a reflective distance developed by a cultivated human life—by art, science, philosophy, and forms of thought that cannot emerge under conditions focused on immediate concerns about survival, security, and the struggle for existence that have, until now, defined all human life, both modern and premodern.

It is the structured difference between the domains of real wilderness and high civilization that evolves human consciousness--one of whose distinguishing characteristics is Letting Nature Be.

The truth of this vision does not depend on immediate agreement, but on whether it can swilderness and high civilization over time. We are “edge beings”—not inhabitants of wilderness, and not creatures enclosed entirely within civilization. The idea of mediated oneness names this condition: a form of attunement to wilderness that depends upon aesthetic distance and takes shape within a specific mode of life that I call “living on the edge.” Only through this spatial and existential arrangement can human beings enter into a genuinely free and meaningful relationship with autonomous nature, while also participating in—and continually evolving—high civilization.

The vision I offer can be assessed over several generations by human beings living on the Edge. If biodiversity and wilderness are sustained and human beings are able to

live free and meaningful lives, then the vision gains confirmation; if not, it is called into question. Beyond this historical and ecological dimension, the vision also has a philosophical justification (as distinct from scientific proof): it aims to render intelligible the world as we actually find it, a world characterized by increasing human suffering and accelerating ecological loss.

Vision

It may be objected that visions of a better society have repeatedly failed—from Plato’s Republic onward through the long history of utopian thought, including the major socialist and communist experiments. But this does not show that vision as such is ineffective; it shows only that past visions have thus far proved to be inadequate, perhaps because

they failed to articulate a planetary model capable of meeting the fundamental needs of human beings and wildlife in a stable and compelling way.

My premise—or assumption, if you like—is that a social vision that adequately addresses the true structure of human needs, including our fundamental need for aesthetic oneness with wild nature, will resonate with many people. It will not remain abstract but will be recognized as answering to something real. To the extent that this recognition occurs, it can generate not only agreement but commitment—and eventually organized action for radical change.

In general, people are not aware of the quality of life available to them. It is therefore necessary to make this clear as part of a

broader strategy for saving wild nature, for without such awareness we are unlikely to save either wild nature or ourselves. If people understood what is realistically possible on this planet, they would be far more likely to demand it—not only for themselves, but for others and for the Earth as a whole. Environmentalists must offer such a vision.

The question, then, is not whether vision matters, but whether one can be formulated that genuinely corresponds to human nature—one that reveals, at the level of social organization and world structure, a way of living in which human capacities can be fully realized alongside a truly independent natural world that secures peace and privacy for wildlife. Such a vision

has a chance of moving from thought into history.

This emphasis should not be misunderstood. Vision alone is not sufficient. Real change requires material transformation, political struggle, and collective organization. But without a clear orientation, these forces lack direction and are unlikely to cohere into a durable alternative.

For a new world-vision to succeed, it must properly correspond to human nature. Human beings are ontologically contradictory creatures. On the one hand, we require a regular aesthetic relation to wilderness—a form of oneness grounded in perception and attunement rather than use. On the other hand, we seek freedom from want and necessity, overcoming the struggle

for existence and expressing ourselves creatively within a social world.

This account of human nature is not arbitrary. It reflects a deeper history of development in which aesthetic relation to wilderness played a constitutive role in the emergence of human consciousness itself (a perspective I have explained elsewhere). In this sense, the structure of these needs is not merely given, but historically formed. A vision that addresses and resolves this tension has a chance to mobilize enough people for real change.

Marxism, for example, strongly develops the freedom-from-necessity side of existence, but it does not secure and stabilize an independent, autonomous wilderness—aside from some profound comments in

Marx’s early writings—and this helps explain why the socialist vision has not resonated sufficiently to bring about a revolution.

There is a deep lesson here for environmentalists: a successful long-term strategy must respond to the whole human being. It must give concrete spatial and social form to the opposing tendencies in human nature. A comprehensive response to the enigma of human existence has a chance of resonating broadly, because at some level most people recognize that a satisfying life requires both real wilderness and high civilization. Most people are not moved to action by ecological concerns alone any more than by social concerns alone, which helps explain the weakness of both the

environmental movement and the Left-socialist movement.

The Half Wild/Half High Civilization vision articulates a planetary spatial arrangement that satisfies both inherent tendencies—not as competing alternatives, but as complementary conditions of a single, dynamic human way of life. A vision that resonates at this deeper level, where what is offered is not a forced choice but a viable mode of participation in both dimensions, offers a realistic path for saving all life on Earth

Conclusion

Any long-term environmental strategy that isolates wilderness protection from the re-

organization of social life will remain partial and ultimately ineffective. The preservation of wilderness and the transformation of human society are mutually dependent aspects of a single historical project. What is required is a vision of an alternative human lifestyle—beyond the false and destructive one--capable of awakening sensibility, imagination, and contemplative reason by appealing to the whole person--not either to our wild side or to our social side, but to both simultaneously.

Vision is not an escape from material constraints, but the condition under which they can be transformed. When a coherent alternative becomes visible and begins to resonate—especially one that speaks to unmet fundamental needs and widespread

dissatisfaction—it undermines the legitimacy of entrenched political power, economic inertia, and institutional resistance. Vision is therefore not a substitute for struggle or organization, but the “beginning” of a long-term movement with a realistic chance of preserving all of life on Earth.

Certainly, people require ecological and political education, as well as ethical instruction; but they also need a vision, for it mobilizes the imagination and brings into view a reality that is not yet present. Imaging another world must precede the realization of another world. In a world with too little wilderness, and too little desire for it, vision becomes a critical transition force for rewilding the Earth. This places considerablew

agent of change; but in the present age, where few powerful forces for genuine transformation exist, it should not be dismissed or undervalued. It is one of the most powerful means of resisting ecocide available to us, and it serves as an antidote to the extreme negativism and despair that so often accompany the recognition of ecological crisis-- despair that can close off the very idea that a solution is possible.

Those who understand the value of wilderness, those who recognize the necessity of overcoming capitalism, and those who can envision a positive human way of life remain fragmented and isolated. A coherent vision brings these forces into alignment by allowing each to recognize itself as part of a larger whole. In this way, a new

form of consciousness emerges—not as an abstract idea, but as a developing social force grounded in a shared understanding of the Earth and the conditions of a full human life.

In short, the environmental movement becomes transformative only when it evolves into a broader formation that unites ecological awareness, social critique, and a positive vision of human society. Those who prioritize wilderness advocacy over social transformation fail to grasp that wilderness exists for its own sake, and, in this mode of being, for humans as well. It must therefore be defended not only as a refuge for non-human life, but as a necessary condition for the sanity and satisfaction of human beings. Only when both claims are advanced

together does wilderness protection become a force capable of radically reshaping the whole of life on earth.

A transformative environmental movement depends upon a minimal commitment to the very idea of historical progress. Cynics and fatalists, to the extent that they deny this possibility, undermine the formation of a rational and radical coalition capable of real change. Only those willing to engage history as an open and developing process can participate in the task of articulating how humans can properly inhabit the Earth—dwelling on the Edge between real wilderness and high civilization.

I have offered a response to the crisis of the present age—both its social and ecological dimensions, which are two sides of the same

misunderstanding of human nature. The half-wild Earth / half-highly civilized ideal is far from complete and far from fully worked out, but it is a beginning—and it is realizable. It extends the work of rewilding already underway to its logical conclusion: a half-wild Earth that does not require an anti-human solution. What is required is not a miracle but a movement. Such a movement will not emerge so long as people believe the problem is too great to solve, or that no solution is in sight. There is a solution in sight - if we are willing to see it.