with congressional intent. For instance, natural soundscape monitoring, which measures anthropogenic versus natural sounds, and night sky monitoring, which measures the amount of artificial light in the night sky, both capture parts of the sensory experience and remoteness of wilderness and could be important tools for stewards to prioritize to better reflect the intended meaning of solitude. Beyond describing the richness of solitude, evidence from the hearings support the contention that the five qualities of wilderness character are deeply intermingled and interrelated (Landres et al. 2015). For example, natural and undeveloped environments were described as deeply intertwined with the congressional intent behind “outstanding opportunities for solitude.” Therefore, we believe that wilderness managers should, when appropriate, make local determinations about whether to include measures related to the natural or built environment to assess the state and trends of solitude to better ensure they reflect the multifaceted concept of solitude as understood by architects of the Wilderness Act. Although such improvements do not quantify unobservable, intangible, or ineffable aspects of solitude, they would nevertheless better align agency efforts with the congressional intent behind the “outstanding opportunities” quality of wilderness character and, because wilderness was explicitly defined by some of its earliest advocates as “an environment of solitude,” elevate the evident importance of the wilderness experience in contemporary stewardship.
JESSE M. ENGEBRETSON is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Forest Resources at the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences at the University of Minnesota; email: enge0322@umn.edu. TROY E. HALL is department head and professor in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University; email: troy.hall@oregonstate.edu.
August 2019 | Volume 25, Number 2 | International Journal of Wilderness
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