Up until the late nineteenth century, wilderness was the basic ingredient of American culture. 

 

Today wilderness is in danger of being loved to death.

 

Wilderness is a concept, a human construct to distinguish wild, uninhabited areas.

 

Civilization created wilderness.  For the nomadic hunters and gatherers, who represented our species for most of our human existence, wilderness had no meaning.  The word was all wilderness.

 

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

 

The intellectual consequence 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 (12,000 BC).

 

A pastoral lifestyle is that of shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land. It lends its name to a type of literature, art, and music that depicts such life in an idealized manner, typically for audiences living in towns and cities.

 

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, to which they lived in and were a part of, and became an adversary.

 

There was simply too much wilderness for appreciation.

 

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

 

If paradise (a garden to be cultivated) was the greatest good, wilderness was the greatest evil.  According to the Bible, Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden and sent into the wilderness.

 

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

 

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 earthly hell.  The Hebraic imagination made the wilderness the abode of demons and devils.  Presiding over all was Azazel, the arch-devil of the wilderness.