DEFINING WILDERNESS

 Rod Nash, wilderness historian, tells us that wilderness is a difficult word to define. While the word is a noun, it acts like an adjective. There is no specific material object that is "wilderness". There is no universal definition of wilderness. He believes that wilderness is so heavily weighed with meaning of a personal, symbolic, and changing kind that it is difficult to define.

In early Teutonic and Norse languages, from which the English word developed, the root word, "will" meant "self-willed, willful, or uncontrollable." From "Willed" came the adjective "wild" used to convey the idea of "being lost, unruly, disordered or confused." Applied initially to human conduct, the term was extended to wildlife or wild animals as "being out of control of man." Other Europeans defined wilderness as "deserted places" and "lacking of cultivation." The idea of a habitat of wild beasts implied the absence of men, and wilderness was conceived as a region where a person was likely to get into a "disordered, confused, or wild condition."

Even in today’s dictionaries, wilderness is defined as uncultivated and otherwise undeveloped land. The absence of men and the absence of wild animals is a common, modern-day perception. The word also designated other non-human environments, such as the sea and, more recently, outer space. The usual dictionary meaning of wilderness implies "hostility on man’s part," but the term has also developed positive meanings. On one hand, wilderness is "inhospitable, alien, mysterious, and threatening." On the other, "beautiful, friendly, and capable of elevating and delighting us."

Today, some define wilderness as a sanctuary in which those in need of consolation can find respite from the pressures of civilization. Bob Marshall, champion for wilderness, demanded an area so large that "it could not be traversed without mechanical means in a single day." Aldo Leopold, wilderness visionary, set his standard as an area’s ability to "absorb a two weeks’ pack trip." A century-old movement to protect wild country reached it’s peak moments in time with the creation of a National Wilderness Preservation System, passed into law by Congress as the Wilderness Act of 1964. According to it’s authors, the Wilderness Act defined wilderness, "in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." The act went on to require that a wilderness retain "its primeval character and influence" and that it be protected and managed in such a way that it "appears to have been affected primarily by the force of nature."

Some Native American cultures do not have a word for wilderness or protect land as officially designated wilderness. They believe all land should be respected and all land is used only for survival, whether it be physical, spiritual or mental. If asked, we all have a different and unique definition for what wilderness means to us.

Credit: Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash, Yale University Press, 1982.