The conceptual assassination of wilderness

Abstract

THE TIDES OF CHANGE are always harder to recognize when we ourselves are swept along in the same direction as everything around us. Specifically, as the tide of industrialism lays waste to the natural order, a complementary process occurs among those of us who inhabit the more affluent areas of the world, molding us toward an anxious individualism and generating an "empty self" that yearns to compensate for the loss of wildness and cultural meaning through consumerism and immersion in the distractions provided by the media.1 Wildlife documentaries, TV travelogues, and colorful calendar images of nature reinforce the comforting illusion that the wild world continues to flourish; and the entire ideological system of industrialism suspends us within a sort of manufactured alternative reality, so that children can now grow up with almost no experience of wild nature. Thus the wider context of wilderness loss is a parallel ebbing of those human qualities that value, express, and resonate with wildness. In this essay I focus on the ways industrialized modes of thought have undermined our ability to recognize the degradation of wilderness and wildness throughout the world.