The possibility of wilderness

Posted by Don Pinnock on 2 February 2011

wil·der·ness (w l d r-n s) n.

  1. An unsettled, uncultivated region left in its natural condition, especially:
    • A large wild tract of land covered with dense vegetation or forests;
    • An extensive area, such as a desert or ocean, which is barren or empty; a waste;
    • A piece of land set aside to grow wild, undisturbed by human activity.
  2. Something characterised by bewildering vastness, peril or unchecked profusion.

The news that you can now tweet from the top of Everest and get Facebook updates in its death zone got me thinking about wilderness. Is a tweetable place really wild? I remember dialling home from Antarctica and thinking, “˜Am I really in the most remote place on Earth?’

You can look up wilderness in a dictionary, no problem, but can it still be found in the world? Even in the unchecked profusion of central Sahara, the huge emptiness of the Pacific or the barren whiteness of Antarctica, human disturbance drifts over as industrial pollution, plastic waste swirls in vast gyres and global warming melts the polar ice.

In the distant past, our ancestors knew nothing of wilderness; it was simply where they hunted and huddled from the unpredictable elements and sabre-tooth cats. When they settled down as pastoralists and agriculturalists, it was merely land not yet tamed.

The idea of wilderness, it turns out, is relatively modern, coinciding with the loss of wilderness from the excesses of humankind’s expansion in the 19th century. We only realised what wilderness was, it seems, when we began losing it.

I was puzzling over this irony with André Burger, conservation manager of Welgevonden Private Game Reserve, surrounded by the apparent wilds of the Waterberg. His job entailed an interesting paradox – to manage wilderness.

“˜People who come here to see nature raw in tooth and claw wouldn’t believe the background work it takes to maintain a wild sense of place,’ he said. “˜Too many elephants can flatten a place, too many lions will eat you out of house and home. Elephants can roam more than 300 kilometres, so how big must an area be to be wilderness?’

We gazed out over seemingly pristine bushveld from the veranda of the elegant Makweti Safari Lodge as tea and delicious apricot tart were served. André looked at it and chuckled. “˜Wilderness in its purest sense is no longer really possible. Our footprint is everywhere. But we’re part of this planet, part of its natural processes.

“˜In a place like Welgevonden, we try to maintain biodiversity and species richness. But more importantly, it’s about maintaining relationships in the system, understanding the matrix of life and managing that to the best of our ability. We’re not God, we make mistakes. But over time, you build up a feeling for the place. You start to understand the web and to work with it.’

Wilderness, it seems, is not so much a place but a matter of degrees and depends on how you perceive it. Every step of early civilisation – up to and including the Industrial Revolution – was a struggle by humankind against wilderness. In the early days of colonialism, wilderness meant beyond the frontier – something that had to be driven back. There lay danger and heathens. It would have been very hard indeed to persuade people to protect what was thought of as a frightening wasteland of demons and beasts.

As Europe and America urbanised and wild lands were lost, however, thinkers such as John Muir and Henry Thoreau began campaigning in defence of wilderness, not merely to protect the environment but because, they said, without it we’d lose our sense of place in the world. “˜Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people,’ Muir wrote, “˜are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.’ Satan’s home was gradually becoming God’s temple.

The truth is that, although we’ve become increasingly domesticated into urban life, we’re still wild in claw and feather, in glide and pounce and fury. In her book Wild, Jay Griffiths says: “˜The human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness, to really live, to snatch the fruit and suck it, to spill the juice.’ We need to go back to the wild to be ourselves.

It’s surprisingly easy to be wild. You just find a nice cool, comfortable wilderness and sit still in it for five minutes. Perfectly still. The natural world quickly comes back in around you – birds take up the songs they’d left off, small creatures scuttle through the grass. Soon the strangeness dissolves.

The longer you sit the better it gets, until you blend in, are accepted and become part of the land. You can eventually merge so perfectly that other creatures will pay you no more heed than an antelope or mongoose. You can become the creature you are, part of the delightful matrix of life on Earth. All it takes is the courage to do it. Unfortunately, those things that eat antelope may also decide to eat you – but that’s what makes the place a wilderness.

So to rephrase the dictionary’s definition:

wil·der·ness (w l d r-n s) n.

  1. An unsettled, uncultivated region of your heart left in its natural condition.
  2. Something characterised by the bewildering vastness of your being.

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