The Non-Existent Wilderness (Draft)

A once busy New York Street is empty. Instead of the hustle and bustle of people walking to and from work, there is instead a new visitor. In what can most certainly be a sight we never expected to see, a red-tailed hawk sits quietly in the middle of the street feasting on a mouse. This was the unexpected sight that we saw during the nationwide lockdowns due to COVID-19. During the months when we were locked inside our homes, animals ventured out into our cities, forever changing the divide between wilderness and the urban concrete jungle. The photos and videos depicting the dissolution between animals and humans spread awareness of the division between wilderness and urban life that didn’t feel so divided anymore. Photos published like the photo story in CNN, “With cities on lockdown, animals are finding more room to roam”, impacted me, among others, heavily. We began to see that the division we had always seen, the separation, between wilderness and urban life, maybe never existed at all. To put it simply, although we’d like to believe that there is almost an imaginary line that separates the wilderness from urban life has never existed. Instead, the separations we attempt to draw between ourselves and the wilderness were a construct created by man to find some type of security, some type of sanity, in a world that can sometimes feel anything but. However, this seemingly harmless way of thinking caused irreparable harm to the future of our planet.

To gain a better understanding of this topic, we must first explore what exactly wilderness is. This movement towards the removal of wilderness began back in ancient Greek and Rome where philosophers, out of dignity, felt it worth drawing a line between what was human and nonhuman. According to the journal from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, many philosophers articulated a “ view which implied wild nature was essentially wasted space” (American). Ever since those Greek and Roman times, this concept of division between humans and nature somehow prevails. The etymology of wilderness might offer insight into its creation. The article states that the etymology of wilderness is important and shows that initially wilderness was defined as “not only to the absence of human culture in the landscape but to the presence of that which is often incompatible with it. When the wolves and the bears flourish, the domestic livestock is in danger, and people fear to walk at night. And wild beasts are easily displaced by human activity and presence” (American). This shows the feelings and attitudes that are associated with this construct, a construct that created a divide between humans and wilderness, out of fear of the unknown. The author further uses an example to explain how feeble this construct truly is. “If wildlife is removed, although everything else remains visibly the same, the intensity of the sense of wilderness is diminished” (American). This passage illustrates society`s romanticized view of wilderness as pristine. For generations, sections of wilderness have been viewed as the “last frontier” a landscape left unaltered and unconquered by man. Learning of the destruction of wilderness ruins this romanticized view, thus the reality of the disrepair of wilderness is often ignored by society. This further shows the psychology behind this word and the construct it represents. We feel a separation from the wilderness, the animals might have been removed from our lives, but the human interference in the wilderness has not been. We chose to believe that our actions don’t affect wilderness, that the pollution we generate, the noise we create, and the buildings we erect live within our world and wilderness is protected by this imaginary line.

Author William Cronon wrote a piece explaining just why the concept of wilderness doesn’t exist. In the journal article “Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature” Cronon explains that the time has come to rethink wilderness. Cronon said that the idea of wilderness has, for decades, been central to the environmental movements, an idealistic place where civilization has not yet infected. Cronon states that there is no such thing as an “untouched” place in nature, “…instead, it’s a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made”(Cronon). He explains, “for this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world…” (Cronon). As Cronon says, the wilderness is simply a construct we created for our own reasons. We created the concept of wilderness to satisfy our own desires, not the animals which call this wilderness home. For centuries we have been touching this “untouched” place, polluting it and making it anything but wild. What began as a way to rationalize the world around us, has turned into an excuse to turn a blind eye to the faded wilderness that we would so like to believe still exists. To truly drop this idealistic vision of wilderness, we must start to see that there is no division between humans and nature. There is no “untouched” place on the earth, rather, there is one planet which humans have ruled, humans have made their mark, and humans could destroy. This concept of wilderness threatens the very idea of conservation, by choosing to believe we have no effect on the wilderness, that our actions have no consequences, we ignore the destruction that can be restored.

A final article that supports this view of wilderness, the idea that wilderness is simply an excuse to avoid the tough issues that nothing is truly wild anymore, is an article from Aeon. The article further expands on this topic of faded wilderness. “…‘wilderness’, a place untouched by human intervention. But wilderness no longer exists. Humans have irrevocably changed the climate, acidified the oceans, and altered the conditions of life for almost every species on the planet” (Mance). The author states that we have created this concept as a way to rationalize the world around us, but by continuing to use the concept of wilderness, we are rationalizing the hundreds of years of impacts that are now affecting our wilderness. The author states that to keep believing in the wilderness is to neglect the earth as it stands. “Wildness appears to be a state of mind, to which a sense of awe and astonishment is central. By being outside our control, natural forces remind us that our own existence is transitory and insignificant — the essence of the idea of the sublime, and an experience that many people think is worth cherishing, preserving and promoting.” (Mance). This final impactful thought illustrates the harm of fostering this wilderness ideology.

Through the impactful images shared all over the internet of a red-tailed hawk in New York City, a movement was born. A movement towards coming to the realization that the idea of wilderness was a construct created by man and that the continued use of the word, the division it creates, is detrimental to the future of our environment. To believe that anything is wild anymore is to be simply naive. Humans have forever impacted our earth, and those impacts will never be undone. However, by losing this concept of wilderness we can begin to see that there is no wilderness, there is only our earth, and our earth needs saving. Only once the concept of wilderness is forgotten can we change our earth for the better and begin to see the ways that we have forever changed and altered our planet.

Works Cited

American Wilderness Philosophy | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (n.d.). Retrieved October 15, 2020, from https://iep.utm.edu/am-wild/

Lanzoni, Will, and Kyle Almond. “With Cities on Lockdown, Animals Are Finding More Room to Roam.” CNN, Cable News Network, 1 May 2020, www.cnn.com/2020/05/01/world/gallery/animals-coronavirus-trnd/index.html.

Mance, Henry. “Tech Broke Our Relationship with Wilderness: Can It Mend It Too? — Henry Mance: Aeon Essays.” Aeon, Aeon, 14 Oct. 2020, aeon.co/essays/tech-broke-our-relationship-with-wilderness-can-it-mend-it-too.

Cronon, William“The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Homepage, www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html.