Wild at Heart

“The idea of wilderness needs no defense,” Edward Abbey once declared, “it only needs defenders.” It’s a good line and a brave one, but, like so many things, it might not hold up as it once did.

September 3 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Wilderness Act, one of the landmark accomplishments of the modern American environmental movement. We should be celebrating the occasion with champagne and high-fives. Instead, many longtime conservationists have found themselves in something of a defensive crouch. The wilderness ideal – which once seemed so self-evident to so many people – is facing harsh new attacks.

In this special edition of Earth Island Journal celebrating wildness Brooke Williams writes (page 33): “Wilderness has insidious new opponents who mask their opposition with compelling verbiage about humans’ role as masters of the planet.” Supposedly, in a world of unchecked human authority we have to dump the hope of leaving some places beyond the reach of civilization’s intentions and embrace our role as gardeners of all of Earth.

Not so fast. The fresh doubts about the value of wilderness come, in part, from the academics’ usual overthinking. Some of it comes from the desire of “serious people” to parrot what passes for conventional wisdom. Much of it is just plain wrong.

But some of the second-guessing springs from a natural confusion about how wilderness makes us feel. As Williams points out, wilderness is often ineffable: We struggle to translate our experiences into words. Wilderness as a place and wildness as a quality defy easy definition. This ineffability is part of what makes them magical. Yet it also makes it hard to scrunch the wild into the sort of soundbites that are the currency of our political system.

Listen to Williams trying to make sense of a close encounter with a musk ox on the Alaska tundra: “It was all brand new and somehow age old at the same time – as if deep in the past, part of me had been there before.”

If that sounds mystical – well, it is. And, if you’ve spent any time in the wild, you know exactly what he means. Perhaps you were at a slot canyon waterfall, or among a grove of tall trees. Perhaps it happened when you made eye contact with a bear or an elk or some other wild critter. In that moment, a remembrance of another age rose out of nowhere.

There’s a word for this sort of unlived memory: Instinct.

We’re hardwired for the big open of wild spaces; our species was born in the wilderness. Which doesn’t mean that we can’t learn new things (like how to thrive in a city or use an iPad), but it does mean that we forget the old lessons at our risk.

“Going to the mountains is like going home,” John Muir said. Substitute “mountains” for your own favorite place – the shoreline, the desert, the prairie – and there you have it: Wilderness is where we came from, even if we can only return as visitors.

Without wilderness, we’ll find ourselves homeless, like too many species before us. It’s a discouraging prospect – and a reminder that home will always be a place worth defending.

graphic of Jason Mark signature

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