ABSTRACT
The US Wilderness Act was enacted in 1964 or 40 years after Aldo Leopold first proposed wilderness status at Gila National Forest in the United States (US Wilderness Act, 1964). The act established that the absence of roads and permanent residents is essential to make an area a wilderness. Yet, in recent times, protected areas with a resident population have been recognised and called ‘inhabited wilderness’ (Catton, 1997). The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has been accepting a moderate presence of humans in wilderness since 1992 (Dawson and Hendee, 2009). In fact, protected areas in IUCN’s category 1b, among other objectives, aim ‘to enable indigenous communities to maintain their traditional wilderness-based lifestyle and customs, living at low density and using the available resources in ways compatible with the conservation objectives’ (IUCN, 2014). The recognition of indigenous communities’ rights, however, may lead to a potential conflict between nature conservation and livelihoods as such communities can hardly be expected to spend their entire lives isolated from the surrounding civilisation, which relies on motorised transportation like automobiles.
