Wilderness

Wilderness is a wild and uncultivated area marked by minimal human influence on the natural environment and its processes. The word is derived from the Anglo-Saxon term Wil(d)deor, meaning “wild deer” or “wild beast.” Wilderness has a long history of use in Western culture. In medieval Bibles, it referred to an arid and unsettled wasteland that was a sign of God's displeasure. Yet it also was a place that drew hermits seeking to escape human temptation and cleanse their souls. Hence, a foundation existed for the later positive transformation of the term. Wilderness continued to mean a disordered—even dangerous—place until the end of the 18th century. Settlers along the eastern North American coast used the term to describe the expansive forest to the west and vigorously sought to erase and thereby civilize it.

One of the earliest signs of a changing concept of wilderness appeared in the work of landscape architects. Orderly gardens dominated by human structures were replaced by natural-looking scenes that exhibited “sublimity,” that is, a vaguely disturbing wild character. Artists and writers also began celebrating wild places, as did social organizations such as the American Civic Association, partly in response to industrialization. Authors John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, poet William Wordsworth, and artist Thomas Moran brought positive views of wilderness to the settled populations, especially in the eastern United States.

The transformation of wilderness to mean a positive, physically, and emotionally necessary place spawned a powerful preservation movement whose followers sought protection for such areas. In the United States, preservationists Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, and Howard Zahniser convinced Congress to create tangible wilderness areas with explicit legal restrictions. The Wilderness Act of 1964 defined wilderness as a place where the earth and its community of life are “untrammeled” by humans who visit but do not remain.

The exportation of this idea of wilderness proved to be controversial when other countries tried to establish such reserves in long-settled areas. Less developed countries, in particular, rejected it as a Western concept that denies use of large tracts by indigenous peoples. Scholars such as William Cronon and Max Oelschlaeger contended that wilderness is a cultural idea or a quality rather than a real place. The weight of this latest transformation of the meaning of wilderness has forced preservation groups to adapt their defense of legislated wilderness areas, especially in North America. They now define wilderness as a place without mechanization and where visual evidence of modern civilization is absent.