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| A Wilderness Scene from Denali National Park |
The Grand Tetons, the geysers at Yellowstone, the African Savanna, the Great Barrier Reef, the Southern Alps of New Zealand; wilderness areas like these have become cherished in the popular mindset of recent years. Tourists and adventurers flock to them in order to witness breathtaking views and rare ecosystems. Environmentalists use them as lightning rods for their causes, citing the damage and threats to these places to push through legislation and protection. We treasure wilderness now. We use it to define our nations and utilize them for once-in-a-lifetime experiences of self-discovery. It was not always this way. The wilderness used to be thought of as a place of horrors, of danger, and of the other. It was where children went missing, where monsters loomed, and where Jesus was tempted by Satan. But, beginning in the 19th century in America, wilderness began to be thought of a finite resource and one worth celebrating. It became a way to escape the pressures of modern society and this escape was being threatened by the ever encroaching mechanisms of industry. The American frontier was disappearing and the protection of the few remaining pockets of wilderness became a desperate cause.
Eventually what emerged from this shift in attitude was the environmental and conservation movements. Natural resources were no longer only to be exploited. Wild places were to be preserved for their own sake. Yet the otherness surrounding the wild remained. Humans extolled the virtues of wilderness and nature, but they remained something apart from us that we could only ruin. We created a dichotomy between the natural and the artificial or human. Natural places became pure and pristine, while anything that contained the stain of human influence was deemed corrupted.
Recently, J.B. Callicott coined the phrase "the Received Wilderness Idea" to describe this way of thinking. Its principles are simple. Wilderness is nature as its most pure, with limited human influence, and such influence must be kept at an absolute minimum to preserve its purity. On its surface, this philosophy seems a logical way to a manage wild places. In truth, the Received Wilderness Idea is one of hidden falsehoods and flawed logic. Despite our best intentions, human beings will always influence the natural environment and vice versa. Creating walls around natural areas, physical and political, does not preserve them but isolates them to waiting dangers and isolates human beings from the natural around them.
Wilderness is in actuality a complete human construct. While these areas may seem devoid of human interference, it is nonetheless there under the surface. Wilderness exists because of the human histories of conquest, expansion, and relocation. And now wilderness is deeply affected by our policies and impacts. If human beings worldwide accepted the connection that wilderness has to mankind, it would greatly improve the manner in which we interact and manage these landscapes. Like the shift in thinking that happened during the dawn of environmentalism, we need to change our mentality towards the wild and the remote.
