Editor's Note: This essay exploring the idea of creating US parks and preserves that would prioritize conversation over recreation sparked a healthy debate, including a rebuttal from environmental writer Emma Marris. You can read Marris's response at the science website The Last Word on Nothing.

The land mines have been good for the birds. In 1982, the Falkland Islands—a wind-lashed, nearly treeless archipelago 300 miles off the coast of South America—were the center of a brief war between Argentina and Great Britain. The British quickly reclaimed the territory, which had been a British colony since the early 19th century, but as the Argentine military retreated from the islands, it scattered some 20,000 land mines on the beaches behind them. Rather than clear the mines, the British left the beaches alone. In the process, they inadvertently created a nature preserve. Local penguins—the southern rockhopper, the macaroni, the jackass—are too light to trigger the mines, and they have thrived on the deserted beaches.         

The Falklands isn't the only place where human conflict has benefitted biodiversity. On the Korean Peninsula, the 400-square-mile demilitarized zone has been largely devoid of humans for more than half a century, and today it's a haven for species like the Asiatic black bear, the rare Amur goral (a kind of goat), deer, cranes (in huge numbers), and spotted seals. On the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, another demilitarized zone—110 miles separating warring Greek and Turkish factions—also functions as a refuge for endemic species like the Cyprus bee orchid, the Cyprus tulip, and the mouflon, a wild sheep native to the island.                 

Land mines are a terrible way to go about creating wildlife habitat. But the way wildlife flourishes in the few spaces on Earth where most humans are afraid to go raises a provocative idea: What would happen if the United State were establish nature preserves that were off-limits to most people?

Even when human presence poses no obvious threat, it still often disrupts the behaviors of birds and beasts. A study published last year in Science found that mammalian species become more nocturnal when people are around. In an earlier study, researchers in Colorado found that birds like nuthatches and meadowlarks become scarcer around hiking trails and that the presence of canoeing and trail running can reduce the number of nests that are built in a season, and the number of chicks that are fledged. Even the quietest and most abstentious of hikers leave some trace, though that may be no more than a ripple in the force of the forest. Homo sapiens are the most invasive species on the planet—or at least the most annoying.

There are already preserves in other countries that stringently limit human presence. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists hundreds of sites that meet its definition for a “strict nature preserve” that are “managed for relatively low visitation by humans.” While many of these are relatively small research stations, others are big enough to preserve ecosystem functions at landscape scale. Russia has some of the most strongly protected natural areas on the planet. Its 105 strict nature preserves—zapovednik—protect 85 million acres in which nature is left almost entirely to itself.

It’s time for government officials in the United States to consider something similar: preserves and parks in which nearly all kinds of human visitation would be prohibited. That would mean no tourists in RVs, no Strava-addicted trail runners, no anglers. Even the most experienced and conscientious backpackers and hikers—no matter how leave-no-trace or outdoorsy—wouldn’t be allowed in. Nor would amateur birdwatchers or wildlife photographers.  

Given the state of environmental politics in the United States today and the Trump administration’s scorched-earth campaign against public lands, this proposal is, admittedly, a long shot. And it’s still worth considering—if only to remind ourselves that conservation isn’t just about conserving natural resources for human use but also about protecting the homes of other species. Here, on the edge of the sixth mass extinction, it’s more urgent than ever to establish preserves that would be for wild nature alone. 

That approach would be a major departure from the history and spirit of landscape conservation in the United States. Creating a US nature preserve virtually off-limits to people would be a tough sell.  “It’s an interesting idea,” Jon Jarvis, the former director of the National Park Service, told me in a conversation before warning that the notion would be politically radioactive. “When you say, ‘nobody can go in there,’ the first question would be, ‘Which court do I file suit in?’ . . . Remember that the establishment of protected areas and parks are a political construct, built on public support. If you don’t have some level of public use, you won’t have public support.”

From their inception, American parks have prioritized the interests of people. Our parks are meant to be, in the words of the first national park legislation, “pleasuring grounds.” The stone arch at the north entrance of Yellowstone National Park reads “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People.” Even congressionally designated wilderness areas—the strongest of American land protections—permit cattle grazing and small-scale mining.

“I think a lot of scientists would tell you, ‘Yes, there would be value in doing that,” said Arthur Middleton, a UC Berkeley wildlife biologist who studies wolf behavior in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, “We need baselines, some ability to know something about what happens in the absence of people. But to be blunt, it doesn’t seem within the reality in the US.” 

Excluding people from wild areas is complicated by the fact that many national parks—like Yellowstone and Glacier—were created by keeping Native Americans out of their traditional hunting grounds. A wilderness occupied solely by other species, with no humans around at all, is something that hasn’t existed in most parts of North America for a very long time (if ever).  

There’s also the ugly history of how Jim Crow segregation was used to exclude African Americans from public lands. “The people who got to decide what those limits were and who benefitted were very privileged,” said Carolyn Finney, author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. But Finney also said she could imagine a people-less park being a public good—as long as it was established by a broad group of stakeholders. “If we were all going to be at the table, and there was an equitable discussion? If you were able to do that, it would be spectacular.”

A totally unpeopled wilderness grounded in democratic consensus might be spectacular. But a park devoid of people would still have to justify its existence to, well . . . people.  

Proponents would likely have to concede that, yes, a park without people would foreclose human desires for activities as wholesome as birdwatching and backpacking. There would probably be the usual gripes about how removing people from the landscape is wooly-headed romanticism. 

But a park dedicated to preserving a scientific baseline of nonhuman nature is anything but romantic. This is very much an eco-modernist scheme. Working scientists would be the one group of people permitted to enter the preserve, and they would likely be involved in ecosystem management of some kind. In place of an outdoor playground, we’d have a living laboratory.

Probably the toughest objection to the idea is the argument that an off-limits landscape would feel too emotionally distant. Few folks will get connected to a tree they have no chance of ever hearing fall. 

The ubiquity of small, affordable wildlife cameras might offer a way of resolving that tension. The latest generation of wildlife cameras has provided biologists—along with many rural residents and hunters—with a striking new ability to glimpse the intimate lives of animals. (You’ve probably seen the YouTube hits of black bears going to town on backyard bird feeders and jaguars prowling the US-Mexico borderlands.) Park scientists could place wildlife cams all over the people-less preserve, providing the public with a view into the no-man’s-land. Imagine it: a 24-7-365 wilderness reality show. Birds and animals put into a sort of panopticon—for their own good. 

While it’s true that US parks and preserves have always been mostly about protecting places for the enjoyment of people, it’s equally true that a biocentric ideal has long flowed through the American conservation movement, an ideal that argues we should protect places for the benefit of other living beings. Just think of Thoreau and his line that “what we call wilderness is a civilization other than our own.” Or recall Aldo Leopold’s belief that the “land-community”—that is, the whole of an ecosystem including water, soil, plants, animals, and people—has a “right to continued existence.” 

The establishment of people-less parks would recognize that right, and mark a grand gesture of ecological solidarity. Like any true solidarity, the giver gains in the course of the sacrifice. Preserving a place truly beyond us would, in the end, be a blessing to ourselves.

More than 50 years ago, the novelist Wallace Stegner wrote that wild places are “good for our spiritual health even if we never once in 10 years set foot in it.” In an essay that is now canonical among environmentalists, Stegner, writing about Capitol Reef National Monument (now a national park), insisted, “Save a piece of country like that intact, and it does not matter in the slightest that only a few people every year will go into it. That is precisely its value.” He suggested, “Simply sit and look . . . simply contemplate the idea, take pleasure in the fact that such a timeless and uncontrolled part of Earth is still there.”

The American conservation movement has never quite fulfilled that ideal. Maybe it’s about time we did.