If You Can Call into a Work Meeting, Are You Really in the Wilderness?

Dear Sundog: Now that Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service is available all over the world, I’m having this nightmare. In it, I’m floating the Middle Fork of the Salmon—which runs through the largest designated wilderness in the lower 48. I tie up to shore, and just as I’m settling into the riverside warm springs, some hot-pot stranger whips out his phone and announces, “I gotta jump on a Zoom call.” Can we stop this hideous future before it’s too late? —Leave UnDeveloped Dirt In Tranquility Evermore

Dear L.U.D.D.I.T.E.: I share your fears of a Musky future, in which The Henry Ford Of Our Times convinces himself and his lackeys that his genius for manufacturing doo-dads equals a mandate for remaking society. But let’s not allow personality to cloud the discussion.

Starlink is a system of satellites that provide broadband internet virtually anywhere in the world. The portable dish, along with stand, Wi-Fi router and cables weighs around 18 pounds, can be easily installed in a RV, van, cabin, ski hut, fire lookout, backcountry ranger station, and costs about $100 per month. It can be hauled on a raft, sled, or mule. (Meanwhile, the new Starlink Mini is about the size of a laptop and weighs just 2.5 pounds—”easily carried in a backpack,” Musk noted on X.)

Starlink arrives with benevolent promises about how it will allow better medicine in African villages, education in Nepali villages, and science in Antarctica, claims which may well be true. But how does it affect the backcountry?

First, some definitions. Backcountry is basically any place you can’t drive to. That includes ski huts, cabins, fire lookouts, and hike-in campgrounds.  Wilderness is another layer of designation that expressly bans certain technologies like cars, bikes, chainsaws, cell towers—but allows others like camp stoves, horses, and GPS. The Wilderness Act of 1964 decrees that: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain … An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.”

Let me interject, briefly, that the reasoning behind the Act is flawed—all lands in America were “trammelled” for thousands of years, by people who were not visitors, but inhabitants, and while their works did not “dominate the landscape,” Indigenous people managed and cultivated this continent with sophisticated systems of irrigation, fire suppression, and agriculture, and built myriad permanent structures from the Cahokia Mounds to the Pueblo cliff dwellings to the Mayan pyramids. White people’s ability to view these lands as “primeval” is a result of the killing and forced relocation of Natives.

That said, the Wilderness Act may be an example—like Taco Bell’s Crunchwrap Supreme—of flawed thinking that yields sublime results. Without the Act, iconic wilderness areas such as the Bob Marshall in Montana, the John Muir in California, and the Boundary Waters in Minnesota would likely be overrun with roads, helicopters, and motorboats. Just look what “accessibility” wrought in Yosemite Valley, Old Faithful, and the south rim of the Grand Canyon. If you can’t stand hikers cranking tunes on trails, imagine the band itself jamming in your campsite, live streaming, flash mobbing, geotagging, crowdfunding.

To be clear, the Wilderness Act was not about protecting animals, plants, soil, or water: that was left to the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and others. The Wilderness Act is about the human experience: maintaining a place where all souls can pursue “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive or unconfined type of recreation.” (The fact that such opportunities have statistically been skewed in favor of able-bodied straight white dudes is perhaps fodder for a column all its own.)

By this standard, broadband internet certainly violates the letter—and spirit—of the Wilderness Act. I imagine influencers leading “virtual tours” of Paria Canyon, and TEDtalks webcast from atop 14ers, but really, Sundog’s middle-aged imagination is so very limited. To fully predict how internet access would desecrate the wilderness, we’ll have to look to the visionaries who spent billions in venture capital to create a new subclass of working poor to deliver Whoppers to your doorstep, and build free publishing platforms for Holocaust deniers and the Sandy-Hook-was-a-hoax crowd. Really: what could go wrong?

Of course Starlink could be used for perfectly benign ends: checking in with loved ones, sending pix to friends, consulting maps and weather reports. It will simply render obsolete existing technologies like sat phones, SPOT, GPS units, guidebooks, and mule-carried letters. I spoke with a wizened avalanche forecaster who was not too worried about the future: “It’s like the afterlife,” he said. “Whatever you believe—it will likely come to pass.” He added that if he were in a backcountry ski hut, he’d love to be able to check conditions in the next valley over.

But perhaps paramount to the question of what should be, is the question of what will be. There is simply no feasible means of enforcing a ban on Starlink or any other service provider. Would the rangers somehow demand to see evidence that you are NOT a subscriber? Would they ban smartphones altogether? What’s more, a ban might literally require an act of Congress—at a time when this rogue nation is legislated by a hapless body of do-nothings run by a ruthless flank of know-nothings who don’t even accept that human-caused climate change is a real thing.

In other words, this world-changing technology likely cannot be stopped. And why is it being foisted upon us? Did we vote for it? As with the other technologies that have redefined our economy and relationships in the past two decades, Starlink is a business financed by venture capital from the wealthiest class, bound by corporate by-laws to earn a return for those investors. It’s not that capitalists can’t do good, it’s that when we accept any technology as inevitable we must acknowledge that what makes it inevitable isn’t societal consensus or even democratic majority, but the sheer will of the 1 percent.

Starlink now has two million subscribers worldwide, an infinitesimal sliver of the world’s population. It’s worth noting that the number of people who actively explore wilderness is likely even smaller than that. Will the benefits of connecting rural people to the internet outweigh harms done to wilderness? In the end I’ll have to concur with my friend, that when it comes to predicting this future, what you believe in is what will likely occur.

Readers respond: Should I clear a homeless camp on public land?

The bourgeoisie don’t accept everyone that is a fact, having compassion and patience for people disregarded from society is a spiritual endeavor not suitable for everyone. Having experienced homelessness violence inflicted and initiated by a local newspaper article in New Orleans declaring a war on homeless tents and having immediately my home of six months destroyed and stolen within one day, I understand the trauma inflicted by societal norms.  My camp was clean and tidy yet was gone nonetheless because of a front page headline that enabled any citizen to destroy my camp and tent. That is all. —Sean

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I would definitely work with the Forest Service/BLM and local police to alert them to the presence of a camp and schedule it to be cleared after fair warning. These are much like graffiti, they spread if left unmitigated. It’s not OK and violates local and federal laws. We live near Alpine, Wyoming, on the Palisades reservoir where seasonal construction workers live in camp way past the maximum permitted stay. Even if left clean in the fall/winter, the continuous occupancy damages the site. Cat holes with human excrement from months of use don’t go away and leach into the reservoir. Many camps aren’t left clean and they are scary as heck to walk/run/bike near, ruining the coexistence with local home owners and family weekend campers. So yes, you are entirely justified and, in my option, compelled to report illegal camping. Leave a note, then call the authorities.

-David

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