All too often when we go camping, people find themselves exclaiming as they return to the comfort of their home “Finally! We’ve reached civilization again!”. Though camping in the woods may not be everyone’s dream getaway, why do we think of such a stark difference between civilization and the wilderness? Why do we so frequently draw a line so definitely between the two concepts that we won’t allow it to be crossed even if it means opening our eyes to the restoration that needs to take place for our planet to truly thrive again?
Even as a young child I fell prey to this line of thinking, when I would go camping with my local girl scout troop. We would head off on a camping trip for the weekend and I would find myself dreading it. That I would have to leave the comforts of civilization and be shipped off to a place I didn’t like filled to the brim with bugs and made to sing songs around the campfire. That we would have to sleep in cabins or worse, tents that all too often let in terrifyingly huge spiders and cold shifts in the weather during the night. It wasn’t what I could call an ideal way to spend my weekend between my elementary school weeks.
Though as a child and even now as an adult, it is difficult to understand where this train of thought even began. As a young child I had assumed that I was surely different from the masses for not entirely enjoying my time within wilderness, that I would yearn further for the civilization that I called home. Though as I grew up and looked back on this time it became even more curious to me that I wasn’t the only one to have that sentiment, that people of all age ranges frequently felt the same way regarding the wilderness. It brings into question, if this was such a frequent occurrence where did the original idea of wilderness and civilization sprout forward from? Had it been a sentiment to appear just as the industrialization of America began to rise, in the last few decades, or at the beginning of America’s colonization as a whole?
To understand where this line of thinking began, we need to head back to the days in which pilgrimages began across the oceans to colonize and take advantage of land that was already occupied by indigenous people. When settlers arrived in America, the wilderness that they encountered wasn’t the likes of what they may have seen before and to them it transformed into a wild beast that needed to be tamed. When you break down the word ‘Wilderness’, you can see that it holds the suffix of ‘ness’ which typically means that something is full of. That is exactly what the settlers assumed as they imagined the woods filled to the brim with things that are wild and unknown to them. They would describe it as something that needed to be tamed and feared. So began not only the line of thinking between wilderness versus civilization but as well the line between human and nonhuman.
As history moved forward, the idea of wilderness as something that needed to be tamed continued until the great wilderness that they encountered became nothing more than hunting grounds and timber farms. Much as humans tend to do, they began to cycle of realizating the destruction that they had caused but had no plan of action moving forward. It was still being used for these commercial uses but in an act of realization began preservation of woodlands through national parks and restricted forest spaces. In which they would create something that is almost entirely different from the forest they had encountered before, a forest area created almost as a museum of a small bite of what used to be. As we created this combat between civilization and wilderness, we began to cause a phenomenon that we still see today, as civilization grows the wilderness shrinks. Despite the efforts in generations before to preserve what we could of the forests that were known before, the idea of nature existing outside your back door continues to dwindle under human influence.
Along with this idea of putting civilization and wilderness as concepts against each other has continued to reside over America for quite some time, as has the conflated idea of humans over nonhuman species. Another set of ideas that began to rise with the settlers, that created not only the idea of separating ourselves from nature entirely outside of using its resources but also thinking we are somehow separate from its ecosystems entirely. As humans,we frequently still hold onto the idea that we are somehow above the likes of the simple lives of animals. This is not entirely true as we take from the same pool of resources that they do and despite the invention of civilization and the harsh move of unplugging ourselves from the entirety of nature from a whole that we are still part of an ecosystem. Even if we are the ones actively destroying it and taking in expensive amounts from it.
That the effects of our own overconsumption somehow don’t have an effect on us the same way that they thus have an affect
As we look around our homes at the tables, doors, and the food in our fridges, we have to realize that they come from nature and are something molded by the human modernization of the world around us. We have become so disconnected from nature it isn't all that surprising that we see ourselves apart from it. As the industrialization and modernization of the society began, we shifted our ideals away from nature entirely and as time continued we began to interact with nature less and less. Thus pushing the line of thought that we are somehow apart from nature and nonhuman species even further until we seemingly forget the harm we are causing. Whether it is due to our industrialized cities, developed minds, or cognitive dissonance humans see themselves as the rulers of all far too often. This train of thought that has existed for decades seems to worsen at times, further increasing our destruction through overconsumption as well as other means of taking from the wilderness around us.
Overconsumption is an issue that has been on the forefront of people’s minds, along with the effects that the practice has on the climate changes we currently find ourselves witnessing . While some may imagine that with the growing population of the world, that overconsumption is a relatively new problem. When the modern person thinks of the overconsumption of product, we think of quiet stores and warehouses filled to the brim with wooden furniture all of which had to be carefully brought together from timber taken from forests. Another image that may come to mind is food and produce hardly past its expiration date left to rot in the garbage bins outside of grocery stores. Why do we take these resources at a rate that we could never consume them and then act surprised when they are wasted?
One may be surprised that while this is a problem that we need on a corporate level to take accountability for and change, that the beginnings of this siphoning of resources from nature without replenishing them or understanding the consequences could be a problem even during Aldo Leopold’s time. Even during the publish date of Sand County Almanac written in 1949, nearly seventy years before our current time Leopold was already seeing this overconsumption during his time in the section titled the remnants where he writes “any of the diverse wildernesses out of which we have hammered America are already gone; hence in any practical program the unit areas to be preserved must vary greatly in size and in degree of wildness ” ( Leopold 178) This may bring on the revelation for some that while Lepold’s lifetime wasn’t as long ago as we may imagine, they were witnessing the effects of climate change and overconsumption occurring already.
With this consumerism mindset in place on the larger scale of our relationship with wilderness, the idea of wilderness exists more as a concept or a frame of mind in modern generations. This phenomenon has existed even before we hit this point in our parasitic relationship with nature, but it has since gotten that much more prevalent as we become more aware of just how little actual wilderness remains. In the generations before us the wilderness existed as a fantasy playground for escapism from modern life and facilitating the ideals of masculinity in the idea of a ‘wilderness getaway’. Though at that time authentic wilderness was still somewhat existent. Even if one was still plagued by a fear of the woods, at the very least the setting that they feared still existed in some form. Nowadays, any wilderness we now find is manicured forestry such as commercial parks and national parks. While these areas still exist, they are nowhere near what those before us have witnessed. Through that we simply take on the ideas associated with wilderness-whether that be fear, curiosity, facinsation, or something else entirely it is simply something we have learned to understand about the concept of the woods rather than what we have witnessed on our own. Regardless we are left with this idea of an untouched piece of nature, mostly left undisturbed by the likes of humans and teaming with animal as well as plant life. When in reality most forested areas that we are now witnessing are either manmade or protected areas of forest that are trying to be restored to what may have once been. Either way, we are left with only these empty ideas of what wilderness may have truly been and the burden of restoring the damage that we have done generation after generation.
Sometimes, even for our own sanity we tend to let the issues of climate change and environmental issues fall to the wayside. Our minds in this modern age seem to be so plagued by issues that stacking another on couldn’t possibly be manageable. At times we tend to simply shift the blame of this phenomenon onto the generations before us, that they caused this entirely and left us to deal with the aftermath. While in some capacity that is correct, we also have to understand as mentioned previously the not only the destructive cycle of our relationship with nature that was started with the settlers but the way in which climate change has been occurring for quite some time now. That the effects of it are not irreversible but that we have to push back on the changes that are necessary to help our environment. that we can’t sit backseat to these changes and let the world continue to fold in on itself around us after we’ve scraped clean all of the resources we possibly can.
That being said, I have also fallen prey to something I can only describe as ‘ecological anxiety’ during the disastrous beginnings of quarantine. All too often I would find myself frozen in fear in my darkened bedroom as I doom-scrolled through my phone, feeling nothing but anxiety in the pit of my stomach as I watched video after video of the new effects of climate change that we are currently living through. It would paralyze my senses to imagine what all the natural disaster movies had banked on since the beginning of their productions, that all of the sudden things would come crashing down all around us. While I can come to understand the way of thinking that most fall into even at the best of times and my own anxieties regarding the state of our planet, we can’t let it control us.
Not letting these fears control me was a huge part of the transformation that I have taken on not only during the duration of the continuing pandemic but through this class. While I wouldn’t define myself as the outdoorsy type, I have grown to enjoy the simple pleasures that nature can offer you. When things were particularly bad during the beginning of the pandemic and one would feel even more separated from the world than ever before, I turned to nature. While I live in the suburbs and the forest isn’t nipping at my backdoor, I do have my small and half shaded backyard. In which I found solace and still do on my particularly rough days of simply basking in the sunlight with my pets. I would allow myself to embrace the quietness that could be captured during that moment and allow the breeze to wash my worries away, even if only for a few vital moments. While in this isolating period of my life I looked outward towards places in nature that could make me feel a little less alone and more in touch with my surroundings. The funny thing is that I asked myself ‘why did I never think of this before?’. As if nature had somehow vanished from the horizon of my mind at a particular age, that somehow it had been disconnected from the realm of my life completely. When it has certainly existed within our worldview for the entirety of our lives, even in small capacities.
While at times my connection now to nature doesn’t entirely disregard the anxieties I was experiencing, nor should it take a forefront to the urgency of addressing the current state of climate change. Though I think that my time in this class has further opened my eyes to not only the history of our relationship to the wilderness, but what needs to and can be done to aid in its restoration. I think frequently when we think about climate change, as mentioned within the class we think about it as Leopold does in his writings of Defenders of Wilderness “Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. Invasions can be arrested or modified in a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, or for science, or for wildlife, but the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible” (Leopold 188). That all too often we fall into the pessimistic idea that there is no restoration that could save us at this current point, even if this fact is wrong. Though that doesn’t mean that what Leopold said is entirely wrong as through this extraction and exploitation of nature, as we learned that most of the old growth that may have been prevalent during that time and telling of the history of these areas of wilderness will never be seen again. Instead, while we can offer restoration for these areas to hopefully aid in slowing the immediate effects of climate change and other such ecological issues, it will never be the same as it once was.
With these things being said there are endless views of the wilderness in the modern landscape outside of that of the ecological. Though that is the most pressing and important one of the current day with the effects of our consumption becoming more and more evident as we continue to not address these issues. Another idea that I hadn’t put particular thought on prior to my experiences on campus was the idea of the cultural aspects of the wilderness. All too often we seem to forget that our environment plays a huge part in the way that we are molded into people and in the ways that we see the world around us. Therefore it serves as both an introspective ideal and a world-view depending on our geographical location. While it may have played a larger part in the generations before us regarding that of nature and their intersectionality in everyday life, it still does play the same role in a smaller capacity today. As though I didn’t have a large fondness for the wilderness in my childhood years, I did learn to have a respect for the land as girlscout in the previous passages.
When I look back on the reflections not only in the last few months but in the last few weeks. I begin to think a truth a lot of us have to grapple with when it comes to further understanding another facet of the wilderness that we all too often turn our minds away from is best stated in Defenders of the Wilderness is “Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.” (Leopold 189). I think this can be said for both the cultural value of the wilderness as mentioned but as well the ecological crises that we are facing the consequences of in the present moment. That in order to find any kind of answer or aid in this time, we need to put our humility to the sidelines and allow ourselves to understand that we may not have all the answers, that we have to remain curious in order to further understand and reconcile with the changes that need to be made.