Karen Berger on The Idea of Wilderness
Karen Berger is one of my favorite travel writers. I came across a foreword of hers explaining the idea of Wilderness that we (Americans) have constructed over the last 100 years in America’s Great Hiking Trails. I’ve read a lot of explainers of Wilderness, but this has to be one of the best I’ve ever seen.
Prior to the Wilderness Act, most of Americas public lands were managed for two broad purposes commercial use and recreation. National forests were managed in large part for the commercial production of timber as well as for grazing and mining. National parks were managed for recreation. Now we had another category,
Defined by law as land that “generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable [and] has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.” A wilderness, the law said, was “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.” It would be “devoted to the public purposes of recreation, scenic, scientific, educational, conservation and historic use.”
As ancient as the fact of wilderness is, that definition of it is an entirely modern construct that lies in opposition to most land use in history. It separates humans from land, and puts wilderness areas off-limits to development, industry, or any other use that would compromise their ecosystem and character.
With that revolutionary idea, the Wilderness Act became one of the most successful US environmental laws: it was passed by an almost unanimous vote, has lasted for more than 60 years without substantial amendment, and has inspired similar legislation in other countries.
However, other countries with different landscapes. population densities, natural resources, and historic patterns of land use have necessarily diverged in how they interpret the idea of wilderness. In some regions, wildernesses are managed in tandem with human uses, including settled towns and traditional nomadic communities.
According to Wilderness Earth’s Last Wild Places, a study carried out by Conservation International, 46 percent of the world’s land mass is wilderness, most of which is quite logically found in the least densely settled parts of the globe the tundra, the taiga, the Amazonian rain forest, the Tibetan Plateau, the Australian outback. and deserts such as the Sahara and the Gobi. Some of these regions are suitable for hiking, but many certainly are not-at least, not for average vacationers with limited experience in extreme environments and two weeks of vacation time.
Aldo Leopold defined wilderness as a place where you could take a two-week pack trip and not cross your own tracks. But it is more than that. Wilderness is not merely the absence of intrusions – development, commerce, buildings – it is also the presence of something ineffable: a silence that can be perceived, a sense of space, a connection with the primeval, and a realization that visitors must, by the very definition of wilderness, be self-reliant.
Today’s wilderness maps say nothing about dragons. But as we walk away from civilization, watching the bars slowly drain away from our mobile communication devices, we may well feel that we are walking off the edge of the known world. Indeed, that is the gift of wilderness: not just climbing a mountain, or going for a hike, but experiencing the other side of the known horizon. Leaving behind our tamed, mechanized, and familiar home landscape, we step off the edge into the unknown to experience, wonder at, and, for a time, live with those dragons of our imagination.
Emphasis mine.
Wilderness is difficult, odd, and bit controversial. It was conceived as a way for a prosperous, industrial society to say, in a small way, “even though we can, we won’t“. And in a world that has now moved to AI, self-driving cars, and screens everywhere, I think Wilderness has proven to be even more valuable & robust of an idea than supporters could have predicted.
