Wilderness

 Five thousand years after the first cities emerged on the banks of the Euphrates and the Indus rivers, human civilization has spread across the planet. No place, not the high arctic, nor the Empty Quarter of Arabia, nor the ocean floor nor the near reaches of outer space, remains untouched by human footprints, human carbon emissions, human waste, and runoff agricultural runoff. When geographers talk about human-environmental interactions, they are talking about the entire planet.

Still, a few places on earth remain, if not free from the impact of civilization, then stubbornly wild and indifferent to human activity. The wildest of these places—places where human interactions have been minimal, are called wilderness.

We care about wilderness even as we fear it. Wilderness places remain wild and relatively free from humanity’s presence and influence, including forests, deserts, arctic tundras, high mountains, swampland, and glaciers, among others. In human geography-speak, wilderness is defined in terms of human-environmental interactions. Wilderness places reflect minimal, but not zero, human environmental interactions. The entire planet is impacted by climate change. Air pollution impacts forests and glaciers alike. Microplastics can be found in the ocean floor and in alpine glaciers. Somewhere in the last century or so, human influence extended everywhere, but, obviously, some places more than other.

Some of nature’s wildness can still be found inserted snugly into places long ago altered to fit human convenience, including urban landscapes. Here, the human-environmental interaction is complex and evolving. Examples abound: By the beginning of the 20th century, wolves had been exterminated from most of the United States. They held on in a Alaska, Florida, Northern Minnesota, and a few isolated places in the desert Southwest and the Rocky Mountains where they are just beginning to recover. But that did not end the story. Absent the large predators (wolves and mountain lions especially) that had once kept their numbers in control, whitetail deer populations expanded their numbers and ranged into areas from which they too had been extirpated by overhunting. Because no one went deer hunting in the suburbs, deer made their homes their too, grazing on suburban rose gardens and trees, where they quickly created problems for homeowners and facilitated the spread of tick born illnesses like Lyme Disease.

Then something really unexpected happened. Coyotes, the wolves’ adaptable, smaller cousins, began to drift across the landscape from the Mountain West and Great Plaines, across the Mississippi and into the forests, farmland, and suburbs of the East where they had never existed before. Today they can be found dining on unwary pigeons, road kill, young deer, and the occasional family pet, even in places as urban as New York City and Boston. Even more freightening, mountain lions have been known to stalk and kill humans in the American and Canadian suburbs before melting back into the wild. Though more limited in range that coyotes and mountain lions (or cougars, or panthers) have also been expanding their ranges, drawn to the east—and to the suburbs—by ever growing populations of deer. Nature has a way of reasserting itself where we least expect it.

Humanity may have made war on nature in its quest for global dominance, but the natural world has not surrendered just yet. Just as significantly, it seems that human survival will continue to depend on the keeping some of the world’s wild places free from agriculture, urban development, highways, and amusement parks. Some of these places are protected by their remoteness and inhospitable environments, but a few are intentionally preserved and protected.

A wilderness area is defined in federal (United States law (16 USCS § 1131) . . . as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain, . . . an area of undeveloped . . . land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.”

Many of the world’s few remaining wilderness areas have been preserved, “untrammeled” by humanity because they possess great natural beauty. Others are simply too remote, too forbidding, and too unpromising to lend themselves to human interference. Until the end of the nineteenth century, little thought was given to preserving wild land. Open spaces were worthless wasteland until they could be plowed, or fenced in for grazing, or built over as cities. The creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, and of the National Park Service in 1916 to manage all of the nation’s national parkland reflected revolutionary and controversial thinking in its day, as it seemed to run counter to the American spirit of continual expansion and the conquest of nature. But national parks (and state parks as well) proved to be wildly popular with city dwellers who longed to spend a few days a year in a quietly beautiful landscape. Other countries followed the American example, and spectacular parks and wilderness areas can be found in around the world, especially in Africa where Serengeti, Kruger, and other national parks preserve some of the most spectacular wild places and wild life on the planet.

Serengeti Landscape, Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, CC BY-SA 3.0

Preserving wild places comes at a cost. The Maasai communities who lived on the Serengeti, raising cattle and hunting, were expelled by the British colonial authorities to make way for a park, the majority of whose visitors were from outside of Africa. This conflict, and many others like it, continue to pit the needs of human communities against each other in competition for limited, wild, resources.

And not all of the world’s wild places are protected.

Protecting a wilderness area means, after all, that the natural resources found there are set aside and rendered economically “valueless” unless we take seriously the often quoted phrase of Henry David Thoreau’s, “. . . in wildness is the preservation of the world.”(“Walking,” The Atlantic” first published in May, 1862. Republished online at “Walking.”

Between the wilderness and the suburbs lies vast stretches of farmland, woodlands, and grasslands that are still retain a sense of wildness, even as they are given over for the production of crops and timber, and the grazing of cattle. These areas provide room for nature to assert itself in scattered woodlands, along hedgerows, and within the earth that insists on producing what it will in spite of the best efforts of human cultivation. In the American east, most of the forests had been cleared for farming by the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet a drive through these former farmlands reveals that hundreds of thousands of acres, from Maine to Florida, have been restored to forest lands, not often from a great sense of obligation to restore nature to its primal beauty, but because the land that once produced cotton and wheat grew tired, production too expensive, labor too difficult to come by, so the land was transferred to tree farming, a form of production that is not exactly wilderness, but still provides room for nature to be restored, at least to a degree.