- Admin
- Jan 10
- 12 min read
Alexis de Tocqueville, poignant witness to American democracy, is far lesser known for his sage characterization of America's wilderness on the brink. Today, our own government - to whom we have entrusted so much of this country’s nature – is preparing to demolish our public lands. As we beg for the future of our favorite places through ordinary petitioning, public comments and legal means, we must get creative to hold at bay Tocqueville’s enduring prophecies.
When he visited this country in 1831 to report on the American penal system and democracy for France, Tocqueville spent nine months traveling the eastern region of the continent, with a brief expedition into the wilds of Michigan. In addition to capturing the nascent country’s governance methodologies and values, Tocqueville was determined to experience America’s untamed nature and meet native communities. He excluded most of his wilderness exploration notes from his most famous tome, Democracy in America. But after his death, his travel companion, Gustave de Beaumont, published Tocqueville’s account of their excursions in the monograph, A Fortnight in The Wilderness. His stories resemble Lewis and Clark’s journal entries from twenty-five years before. But Tocqueville’s commentary on the impending loss of American wilderness and the tsunami of destruction across native communities stands apart.
Today, many people are likely revisiting Tocqueville’s lessons to refresh their appreciation for America’s brand of democracy and understand the system’s weaknesses. His tome, Democracy in America (extraordinarily long for modern tastes), surveys American governance and offers provocative insight into the many virtues of America’s polity: the unique emphasis on strengthening the republic through high-quality public education; Americans’ love of liberty tempered by their commitment to a healthy society; the profusion of the free press in American culture.
And yet, only seventy-five years into America’s founding, Tocqueville sensed democracy and capitalism as unfortunate bedfellows; somehow, he could see Americans getting comfortable sacrificing high-quality craftsmanship for quickly made, mass-market, “shoddy” goods.[1] Likewise, Tocqueville’s characterization of despotism hits at the guts of this type of timeless rot: the despot “by its very nature suspicious, sees the isolation of men as the best guarantee of its own permanence…. [The despot] calls those who try to unite their efforts to create a general prosperity ‘turbulent and restless spirits,’ and twisting the natural meaning of words, he calls those ‘good citizens’ who care for none but themselves.”[2]
This isolation has, of course, proven today to be fertile ground for an American-grown despot to hold our country hostage. How he came to understand the nuances of American society in only a short time and while on the move is mystifying and deserving of gratitude. He articulates about us what we struggle to know of ourselves.
With similar astuteness, Tocqueville describes the evils of slavery and goes further to recount the perpetual inequalities between freed slaves and Whites:
“In almost all the states where slavery has been abolished, the Negroes have been given electoral rights, but they would come forward to vote at the risk of their lives. When oppressed, they can bring an action at law, but they will find only white men among their judges. It is true that the laws make them eligible as jurors, but prejudice wards them off. The Negro’s son is excluded from the school to which the European’s child goes. In the theaters he cannot for good money buy the right to sit by his former master’s side; in the hospitals he lies apart…. So the negro is free, but he cannot share the rights, pleasures, labors, griefs, or even the tomb of him whose equal he has been declared.”[3]
Tocqueville starkly describes White segregationist trends that would be codified into law during the Jim Crow Era. But then his hypotheses fall short. Unlike Jefferson, who had faith in the American people to peaceably eliminate racism, Tocqueville posited that even in a post-slavery America, Blacks and Whites could never live on equal footing.[4] Tocqueville surmised that the end of slavery would cause one race to eradicate the other in a Southern racial war.[5] He rightly understood the depths of slavery’s entrenchment in the South and that abolishing this evil would take brute force, but he got the players wrong: he did not anticipate that the war for freedom would be fought primarily between the White forces of North and South.
Despite misreads like those, Tocqueville’s merit lies in his many clear observations and his willingness to reckon with what he saw. Which brings us back to his thoughts on nature in America. When he takes stock of the American wilderness, he correctly predicts the coming decimation, illustrating the stakes with concise, poetic, and penetrating imagery.[6]
Word was out in Europe about the wonders of American wilderness, as he writes, “Europeans think a lot about the wild, open spaces of America.”[7] For centuries, Europeans had dismantled the ecology of their home continent, rooting out nature to better sustain livestock and cultivate crops, so much so that Tocqueville remarks on how the sounds of humanity – church bells, footsteps, barking dogs – pierce every European woodland and meadow. Europeans acknowledged this immeasurable loss and fantasized about a new vast continent brimming with the biodiversity described in Lewis and Clark’s journals. Tocqueville carried this ethos on his journey.
When Tocqueville arrived in Saginaw, the nature he found did not disappoint; however, his narratives of the forests and meadows were suffused with dismay at the pace and extent of the ecological havoc the repatriated Europeans had already wrought. According to Tocqueville, “Americans themselves hardly give [the wild, open spaces] a thought… They do not see the marvelous forests surrounding them.”[8] Americans were missing out on feeling the thrill of the wilderness that seemed so obvious to him. Tocqueville lamented the early Americans’ belief that pristine nature was at their disposal, and their appetite for leveling it.
In Michigan, Tocqueville aches over the murdered tree stands – bark deliberately axed, preventing the circulation of sap and growth of leaves - yielding sunlight for the pioneer to cultivate his crops, no need to exert the effort to chop down the forests and manage the colossal tree trunks. The American “race” “fells the forests and drains the marshes; lakes as large as seas and huge rivers resist its triumphant march in vain. The wilds become villages, and the villages towns. The American, the daily witness of such wonders, does not see anything astonishing in all this.”[9] For a man who ventured into the Michigan wilderness to experience the ecstasy of nature, the Americans’ willingness to trash it for the sake of expansion was deeply disturbing. To them, nature merely obstructed success. And when we look at the history records, Tocqueville seemingly stood alone as a vocal witness to this loss. The destruction was extraordinary and the voices were absent.
Tocqueville begs the question: how could people who had already suffered the loss of nature in their homeland bring the environmental destruction with them? The answer: clearcutting to make way for expansion was mothers’ milk. The people who were driven toward material prosperity, at the very least, abandoned any sense of responsibility for keeping nature intact. Maybe the pioneers were of a certain disposition to trounce whatever stood in their way or maybe, as newcomers their disconnect with the land “leave[s] them cold” to the richness of their surroundings, as Tocqueville writes.[10] The same went for their bludgeoning of native cultures across the new continent.
From the very first pages of A Fortnight in the Wilderness, Tocqueville recounts the entwined destruction of American Indians and nature. Indians were “vanishing daily like the snow in sunshine, and disappearing from view over the land.”[11] European Americans filled the homes and lands of the lost indigenous communities and quickly moved to vanquish nature in the name of prosperity. Somewhat anachronistically, Tocqueville recognized the cultural depth of Native communities and the ruination as Americans eradicated them. His characterization of American Indians as “the first and legitimate master of the American Continent” mourns the immensity of the loss.[12]
As he traveled beyond the new American civilization, intentionally seeking and immersing in the open spaces and backwoods of America, Tocqueville agonizes over the westerly surge of development lapping at this generous landscape: “All that one feels in passing through these flowery wildernesses where everything, as in Milton’s Paradise, is ready to receive man is a quiet admiration, a gentle melancholy sense, and a vague distaste for civilized life, a sort of primitive instinct that makes one think with sadness that soon this delightful solitude will have changed its looks.”[13] This is his first mention of “melancholy” but not his last.
“It struck us as a peculiar privilege of fate … that we, children of an ancient people, should be brought to witness one of the scenes of the primitive world and to see the still empty cradle of a great nation. Here it is not a question of the more or less doubtful anticipations of the wise. The facts are as certain as if they had already occurred. In but few years these impenetrable forests will have fallen. The noise of civilization and of industry will break the silence of the Saginaw…. And we are perhaps the last travellers who will have been allowed to see it in its primitive splendour, so great is the force that drives the white race to the complete conquest of the New World….
One sees them with a melancholy pleasure; one is in some sort of a hurry to admire them. Thoughts of the savage, natural grandeur that is going to come to an end become mingled with splendid anticipations of the triumphant march of civilization.”[14]
Nine days was all it took. Tocqueville knew the decline of nature that was coming for the rest of the continent was baked in. Americans, indifferent to the richness of the wilds and the ancient cultures in their midst, felt no sense of stewardship and believed the land and its endowments were their destined spoils. Tocqueville described with heartbreak the inevitable death of our wilds and the disappearance of America’s first humanity.
Communing with parched trees as droughts hold in the west during an unseasonably warm winter, I despair at the looming losses. And yet, while so much of the devastation he prophesied has come to pass, Tocqueville did not imagine that as society matured, Americans and our democratically elected leaders would preserve vast swaths of our wilderness. These federal lands and waters comprise our national parks, national forests, wildlife Refuges, monuments and lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), National Marine Sanctuaries, and Marine Protected Areas. They sustain ecology, fortify our guts and serve as a bulwark against extreme climate change. But the current administration, helmed by a president who relishes opportunities to cut down forests and dump chemicals into our drinking water, has come for these national paradises.
Thus, we find ourselves amid an open land and waters grab on a catastrophic scale. In late November, the Administration announced new offshore oil and gas leases across approximately 1.27 billion acres and in National Marine Sanctuaries and Marine Protected Areas;[15] curtailed the habitat protection provisions in the Endangered Species Act – habitat destruction is the leading cause of species extinction – threatening the wellbeing of 107 million acres of land in the U.S.;[16] and stripped Clean Water Act protections from wetlands and seasonal creeks, amounting to lost conservation status for somewhere between 38,000,000 and 70,000,000 acres of wetlands.[17]
These impending wrecking balls to the federal conservation infrastructure compound the Administration’s proposed rescission of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule and the 2024 BLM Public lands Rule. Together, the two rules protect a vast open space equivalent to 13% of the Continental United States’ (surface) landmass. At its simplest, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule safeguards almost 60,000,000 acres of national forest wilderness from road construction; logging; and coal, gas, oil and mineral leasing. This rule ensures ecosystem continuity, preserved watersheds and cleaning drinking water, and prevents ecological exposure to pollutants and fire hazards. It also gives Americans, who overwhelming love this rule, access to bask in extensive wilderness that would otherwise be open season for industry.[18]
The Conservation and Landscape Health Rule was implemented just last year and put conservation an even footing with other land uses at BLM. Up until the Rule - also known as the Public Lands Rule - was enacted, the BLM had clear policy guidelines for the land use side of their mandate, such as mineral and timber extraction, energy development, and recreation, but not conservation. The Rule allows BLM to lease lands for conservation purposes driven by scientific methodology and data: protecting lands with ecological value; restoring lands in need of rehabilitation; and developing renewable energy sources. Given BLM’s portfolio of land holdings – 10% of America’s land (245 million acres) – this Rule has enormous ecological reach.
To scrap the Rules, the public comment period lasted 21 days for the Roadless Rule and 60 days for the Public Lands Rule. I never believed the Administration would solicit public comments in good faith. In fact, I was surprised when they sought comments at all. It’s hardly worth whining over the brief time allotted when it seems exceedingly unlikely that even with ample time, the Administration would concede any of the points made by the majority of Americans who are in favor of the conservation policies. The common refrains from run-of-the-mill environmental organizations complaining about the length of the comment periods are discordant with the current state of policy destruction and unaccountability in this country. The people in power in the executive branch, congress and the high court, are not playing by the rules; they’re not even playing the same game. So if we want to preserve what’s left of nature in this country - the landscapes that Tocqueville dreaded would have already been long lost to development and ambition - we must consider straying from the normal course of action. It’s time we take to market-shifting boycotts, the streets, or some other form of creative mass mobilization.
Our ask is simple: maintain the pre-January 6, 2025 protections for public lands. New legislation and new protections are a fight for a later time. Because what we have is spectacular, we need to protect the essentials both in terms of policies and nature.
Our coalition is enormous. Americans from all walks of life love our public lands. A few years back, as my clown car waited in line at the North Entrance to Yellowstone in Gardiner, the SUV in front of us donned a bright yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” sticker. I momentarily chuckled at the irony but then realized the confluence of our cars was profound. Nature is for everyone. It’s not about being liberal, conservative, pro-gun, pro-wolf, or anti-big government. It’s about being pro-wilderness and protecting what past generations of Americans understood as irreplaceable treasure. I suspect communing with fellow nature lovers and putting our energies toward protecting what we all love will do us all a world of good. We need to be clear-eyed, focused on the prize of protecting the lands and waters. That way, the petty issues that every movement reckons with can be put aside while we deal with the wilderness loss at hand.
Maybe we start with a boycott of the national parks on the President’s birthday, a day he has called for free admission to all national parks. Maybe we connect with business leaders to demonstrate that axing federal conservation measures is a losing campaign for the regime and speaking out for nature is not controversial. The business community has been acquiescing to the Administration’s worst impulses but in this moment of presidential weakness, maybe they can find a backbone when it comes to something so universal as the love of nature. It’s not enough to just wait for these cases to roll into court and rely on environmental nonprofits to fight this fight for us. With a dangerous high court, an executive branch that is completely unaccountable to the American people, and a rapidly changing political landscape, it is up to citizens to quickly come together to save what we have. Millions of us feel terrible pangs of imminent loss, the same feelings Tocqueville described almost 200 years ago. But while he felt helpless, we don’t have to. The people who have inherited this great nation of nature can swear off Tocqueville’s imaginings and together can continue the patriotic pursuit of preserving our wilderness.
[1] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 467.
[2] Ibid, 509.
[3] Ibid, 343.
[4] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 362.
[5] Ibid, 357-360.
[6] So often today, the commentariat decries those of us who appreciate Tocqueville as out-of-touch elites everyone seems to despise. That’s probably because it’s easy to point fingers at long, old books. There’s still tremendous value in the content and the vision of these forebearers and political theorists. If we don’t listen to them, we stand to lose so much.
[7] Ibid, 485.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Tocqueville, A Fortnight in the Wilderness, 2-3.
[10] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 485.
[11] Tocqueville, A Fortnight in the Wilderness, 2.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Tocqueville, A Fortnight in the Wilderness, 38-39.
[14] Tocqueville, A Fortnight in the Wilderness, 81-82.
[15] U.S. Department of the Interior, “Offshore Leasing Expansion Announcement.”
[16] Börk and Meek, “How One Word Could Strip the Endangered Species Act.”
[17] Hu, “The Clean Water Act 101.”
[18] More than one and half million people contributed to comments solicited by the federal government when the rule was first proposed. And they supported the rule when the Bush Administration tried to scrap it in the courts. The courts sided with the people and upheld the Roadless Areas Conservation Rule. Now, as if they have no accountability to the American people, the Trump Administration is erasing the Rule by edict.
------------------------------------------------------
Börk, Karrigan and Mariah Meek. “How One Word Could Strip the Endangered Species Act.” UC Davis, May 13, 2025, https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/blog/how-one-word-could-strip-endangered-species-act.
Hu, Sheila. “The Clean Water Act 101.” Natural Resources Defense Council, November 17, 2025, https://www.nrdc.org/stories/clean water-act-101.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. A Fortnight in the Wilderness. Translated by George Lawrence. Levenger Press, [1860] 1959.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated by George Lawrence. Harper & Row, [1835] 1966.
U.S. Department of the Interior. “Interior Launches Expansive 11th National Offshore Leasing Program to Advance U.S. Energy Dominance.” Last edited November 26, 2025, https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-launches-expansive-11th-national-offshore-leasing-program-advance-us-energy.