Notes on the Perception of Wilderness

Wilderness was the basic ingredient of American culture. 

Wilderness is in danger of being loved to death.

Civilization created wilderness.  For the nomadic hunters and gatherers, who represented our species for most of its existence, wilderness had no meaning.

Lines [between civilization and wilderness] began to be drawn with the advent of herding, agriculture, and settlement.   Distinctions made between controlled and uncontrolled animals, plants, and spaces.

The intellectual consequences was the application of “wild” to those parts of nature not subject to human control.  The concept of wilderness emerged as a way of thinking about nature with the beginnings of the pastoral style of life some twelve thousand years ago.

A pastoral lifestyle (see pastoralism) is that of shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasture. It lends its name to a genre of literature, art, and music that depicts such life in an idealized manner, typically for urban audiences. A pastoral is a work of this genre, also known as bucolic, from the Greek βουκολικόν, from βουκόλος, meaning a cowherd.

Wilderness became the unknown, the disordered, the dangerous.  The largest portion of the energy of early civilization was directed at conquering wilderness.

Nature lost its significance as something to which people belonged and became an adversary.

There was too much wilderness for appreciation.

Wilderness was instinctively understood as something alien to man, an insecure and uncomfortable environment against which civilization waged an unceasing struggle. 

If paradise was early man’s greatest good, wilderness was his greatest evil.

While inability to control or use wilderness was the basic factor in man’s hostility, the terror of the wild had other roots as well.  Pan, satyrs, centaurs, trolls, ogres, werewolves, monstrous beasts, wild men.

The Bible gave wilderness a central position in its accounts both as a descriptive aid and as a symbolic concept. 245 times in OT, 35 times in NT.

Drought and barren land associated with wilderness were thought of as cursed areas—God withheld life-giving waters.

The identification of the arid wasteland with God’s curse led to the conviction that wilderness was the environment of evil, a kind of hell.  The Hebraic imagination made the wilderness the abode of demons and devils . . . Presiding over all was Azazel, the arch-devil of the wilderness.