An even more relevant and striking article 7 years later. I truly worry for the kind of world my children may grow up in, filled with manufactured fears and helicopter parents buzzing about trying to prevent the world from getting in.
At 25, I grew up in one of the last unadulterated times to be young in our history. No cell phone, not much supervision, just a couple of friends and a forest that felt the size of the world. I wonder how long until true childhood adventure is lost for good - marginalized to after-school curriculums and playdates planned on "Tinder for Tots".
Go outside, get cuts and scrapes, and you'll turn out all the stronger and more knowledgable from it.
I've architected my life so that adventure in the woods is still a quick bike ride to the trailhead.If I have more time acailable, There's the National Forest, Wilderness and a National Park, all a few hours by bike. I can bring along a sleeping back and stay out indefinetly.
Without this access, yeah I'd feel a little dead inside.
"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - E. Abbey
"The wilderness once offered a plausible way of life. Now it functions as a psychological refuge. Soon there will be no more wilderness. Then the madness becomes universal. And the universe goes mad." - E. Abbey
"The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.” - EA
This quote has always been a source of debate for me. Does the idea of wilderness need no defense? Must we create heavily managed spaces simply to prevent the tragedy of the commons from occurring? Does the fact that wilderness is a political designation mean that it is not truly "wild"?
I'm of the mind that because societal negligence of our natural world leads to its destruction in one form or another almost certainly, then yes, the idea of wilderness needs no defense, but one can argue that the designation itself leads to a place losing its "wildness"...
There could be a good argument that nothing is Wilderness, and that Wilderness itself - in the US at least, is a 18th-sh century construct, created by a European-leaning philosophy that didn't understand the relationship between the land and the people that were there before them, but were instead bound by the God and Relgion on the idea of almost a second Eden and a Manifest Destiny to take the land which belonged to on one.
In reality all those forests that the original author writes so daringly about were manicured and well-cared for woods, engineered to provide food in the form of nuts and berries, as well as prime hunting ground for big game, say nothing for easily passageway between villages for trade and seasonal migration.
In this perspective man has for a very long time held the spot of curator of so-called, "Wild Lands". It's my opinion that we continue to do so. Not for monetary gain (although there is - the Outdoor Industry isn't that small), but because without it, we all commit suicide, in a very real way.
There's no evidence Native Americans managed the land to this degree. In fact it's clear there weren't enough of them to do so.
The population in all of the Americas, from Alaska to Patagonia, was somewhere around 50 million. All of Canada had about 500,000 people. Do you know how much forest there is in Canada?
There's a theory that early man had widespread effects on the environment using purposeful burning, but even if that's true (it's hard to tell the difference between lightning strikes and purposeful burns), it hardly amounts to "manicured and well cared for woods". Unless you are willing to give beavers an equal designation.
There's a lot of compelling theories in the book, 1491 [0] about how forests were modified in ways in which I elude to, and how the population of the Americas was much, much higher than just 50 million, and how the were civilization much earlier than what we had first thought.
If we just take east coast of Maryland, where the author grew up, the first explorers talk about villages that interconnected across the coastline, Chestnut and walnut trees everywhere, and established hunting grounds. Burning was an immensely useful tool to do this. Everyone had a fire starter.
Later on, early settlers saw something drastically different - a dying off population from diseases brought by Europeans that they had no defense towards. And that is why our estimates on the population of the Americas, and the level of which they modified the land could be really off.
"much, much higher"? In that book Mann argues that the higher counts are more likely to be right. 50 million is among the higher counts. The highest count reasonably argued for being just double that, so we're not talking about orders of magnitude difference.
The Americas were a vast, mostly empty (of humans) land. Except near the coasts.
Unfortunately, there is so much antagonism between the conservationists and the sports(eh, people...), when, really, they should be allies. Ultimately, their goals are actually aligned, although they don't seem to realize it. A healthy ecosystem provides healthy populations for hunting, with good ratios of trophy animals, and likewise, an animal population needs predators or else you end up with the sad and disgusting spectre I have seen in too many mid-Atlantic and southern states, where the animals are emaciated, undersized, and disproportionately succumbing to vehicle hits.
> one can argue that the designation itself leads to a place losing its "wildness"...
There are always more people on the hiking trails and in the campgrounds in places designated "wilderness" on maps than places not so described.
These days the best places don't have a lot of publicity, manicured trails, designated camping areas, forest rangers, or puff pieces in glossy magazines. No, I'm not going to share, sorry. Use your imagination and buy some old-fashioned topo maps. (Your phone won't work there, so Google won't be of any use.)
I built "forts" throughout what felt like miles and miles of empty woods. Leave the house in the morning, get back sometime later that day.
I'd want the same for my future children, but my greatest fear is a nosy neighbor calling CPS due to my seemingly negligent parenting style. (As inferred from my children having copious amounts of free time, bereft of adult supervision.)
Ditto. My kids are now old enough that they can both ride a bike, so I let them circle around the block on their own. Every time they go, my heart is gripped by terror that some neighbour will report "feral" children.
I grew up in a block of small "working class" flats with large communal gardens and a small park; I could safely ride and play with other kids, and most of them were going to the same school as me. Now I live in middle-class suburbia, in a larger house with a nice private garden; but my kids cannot wander around without risking to be hit by a car, their "parks" are just playgrounds with lawns, and because they attend a "better" school a bit further away, don't really know anyone in the area.
This is the product of an individualist culture, of which I am a prime representative. I don't like conflict, not even the occasional low-intensity friction which is inevitable when you share anything (a block, a garden, a parking lot); so I bought a house where People Shall Leave Me Alone and where Kids Shall Be Safe. This makes it much more difficult for my kids to be social and "explore the wilderness". And no, virtual realities are not a replacement.
> At 25, I grew up in one of the last unadulterated times to be young in our history. (...) I wonder how long until true childhood adventure is lost for good
Perhaps whenever something is lost, something else has been gained. And this even when we not able to spot it from each of our unique, and no less important, vantage points.
At 25, I grew up in one of the last unadulterated times to be young in our history. No cell phone, not much supervision, just a couple of friends and a forest that felt the size of the world. I wonder how long until true childhood adventure is lost for good - marginalized to after-school curriculums and playdates planned on "Tinder for Tots".
Go outside, get cuts and scrapes, and you'll turn out all the stronger and more knowledgable from it.