Making Nature Sacred 2 – Spencer Beeson

Although the traditional definitions of wilderness hold true, they also limit its meaning in many ways. Wilderness is anything not made by man, or in other words, anything that can be found naturally on earth. According to Roderick Nash, “There is no specific material object that is wilderness.” This makes wilderness, as Nash says, “elusive”. In looking at traditional definitions of wilderness it’s clear that the land has to be uninhabited by humans, but this makes no sense. When looking back to a pre-human stage of the world, the entire earth was, what is now considered, wilderness. How can it be said that the ground, be it in the middle of the forest or next to an office building, was wilderness at one point but now is not? It’s irrational to denounce a piece of land of its ‘wilderness’ just because humans have settled near or on it. Are humans not nature? Land does not lose its ‘wilderness’ when a family of birds nests in a tree, or when a beaver builds a dam in a river. This is considered wildlife but humans are not? Daniel Williams explains what has recently happened to wilderness. “Though leaders of the wilderness movement sought limits on the spread of modern civilization, they were perhaps unwitting accomplices in the modern machination to commodify nature. …By emphasizing wilderness as specifically “designated” places for moderns to seek reconciliation with nature, and by putting nature on the map as places to escape modern civilization, they tamed nature as surely as the loggers, miners, and road builders.” This means that wilderness as it’s commonly known is nothing but a social construct. The traditional definition is only the ideal, or what we want wilderness to be. In actuality, wilderness is everything; it’s me, the sky, the earth and its many layers, the sky, the birds, the squirrel in the tree, and the deepest parts of the oceans. Wilderness is all-encompassing, which is why it is elusive.