SOUL OF THE WILDERNESS
Preserving the Wildness of Wilderness in the Anthropocene by ROGER KAYE
Wildness: What is this evocative and elusive, primal and unquantifiable quality of Wilderness? Why is it so threatened in the non-analogue future we face? Why and how should we perpetuate it? We begin with the root word that wildness shares with Wilderness: will, referring to an entity’s being self-willed. But while Wilderness is a place, wildness is a condition wherein the processes of an area’s genesis are allowed to shape its future, free from human willfulness, utility, or design. Wildness is thus defined as “The state of a landscape characterized by its freedom from the human intent to alter, control, or manipulate its components and its ecological and evolutionary processes.” (Kaye 2012) Its being “free from human intent” is important, for two reasons. First, it reminds us that wildness also has an inter-relational dimension. It’s a way of relating to the land, a relationship of respect for, restraint toward, and deference to these processes. Second, it differentiates wild from natural, which dictionaries generally define as “not shaped by or substantially changed by human activities.” Or if you prefer a more, management-focused definition, the US interagency Wilderness Monitoring Protocol (Landres et al. 2015) defines natural as where “ecological systems are substantially free from the effects of modern civilization . . . where the primary goal is to allow ecological systems to evolve and change freely without human influence.” 12
International Journal of Wilderness | August 2021 | Volume 27, Number 2
Roger Kaye
“By definition, wildness is something—perhaps the only thing—we can never own or control. Thus, the perpetuation of wildness releases Nature from being ours to being its own.”
