Author: emkrall

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Henry David Thoreau’s conception of wilderness relies on divorcing physical space from civil society. “In Wildness,” says Thoreau, “is the preservation of the World” (37). This capital-W world Thoreau describes is the world of rocks, trees and mountains, and it is more real than the world of churches, schools, and town halls. He is thankful that he can walk miles without passing houses, crossing roads, or noticing where humans have influenced the natural world. This uninhabited and untouched land is Thoreau’s small-scale concept of wilderness.

In his 1925 essay called “Wilderness as a Form of Land Use,” Aldo Leopold defines wilderness while critiquing American land use practices. Wilderness, for Leopold, is “a wild, roadless area where those who are so inclined may enjoy primitive modes of travel and subsistence, such as exploration trips by pack-train or canoe” (76). Since he seeks to explain wilderness areas in terms of land use, Leopold does expand this definition to encompass wilderness more broadly. Rather, his definition demonstrates how Americans treat even wilderness as a resource. He grapples with the conflict between how conquering wilderness formed Americans, but widespread taming of large tracts of wilderness also threatens “the things that made us American” (78).

Mark Woods seeks to explain the legal understanding of wilderness preservation and the paradoxes inherent in making “a tract of de facto wilderness qualify to become de jure wilderness” in the American practice of wilderness preservation (134). Woods employs the definition of wilderness from the Wilderness Act of 1964. Through the definition, he notes the conflict between the instrumental and intrinsic values of wilderness to humans. Though he does not resolve the paradoxes, he does explain that American wilderness policy’s definition of land use involves the necessary components that wilderness be natural and be a place where humans can find solitude.

Assembling a definition of wilderness from these three sources leads me to conclude that wilderness is a place that is free from roads, able to be explored by humans but not welcoming to their settlement, and available to satisfy the ineffable desire for humans to experience the natural world. On January 19, Brandon mentioned a short definition of wilderness as “what existed before human interaction or manipulation.” Brandon gave a time frame for describing wilderness, and I think this is important. Is a place a wilderness only if humans have never gotten to it? Can a place be redeemed from its human intervention and become a wilderness? A definition of wilderness must include a time frame, but I am still puzzling over how we ought to conceive of wilderness chronologically (and where we ought to position ourselves).

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My daily interactions with Davidson’s campus differ sharply from my experience of viewing the collection of blueprints and maps that the librarians displayed for our class last week. The blueprints and maps demonstrate the way the college has appropriated the environment to suit part of its purpose: to provide a liberal arts education to students in a residential community. Walking across campus necessitates either climbing or descending a hill and seeing trees and lawns, reminders of the natural environment we inhabit. The plans and maps of the campus, meanwhile, present a conflicting understanding of the campus. In this bird’s eye view, the campus acts as an inaccessible, tamed, and unnatural environment compared to the experience of walking across it, which fosters an appreciation of its natural elements. Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City” explores the discontinuity between a city planner’s experience of a city versus a person who walks through the city’s streets. He addresses this in the context of a city, and I have tried to do the same for Davidson’s campus.

The seemingly natural parts of campus—Lake Campus and the Cross Country Trails—were manmade and planted by humans, respectively. Even though humans had a role in these two places and in the campus as a whole, those spaces are still natural environments. The inclusion of trees and lawns (however perfectly manicured) makes the campus a natural space. Human involvement in the process does not preclude a space from being natural, but it does alter the degree to which the space is natural. Old-growth forests and vast, uninhabited plains are certainly wilder and more natural. The college has necessarily tamed the natural environment of the campus but the campus can still be called natural (though not wild).

Despite these efforts at taming nature on campus, nature’s wildness has punctuated Davidson’s history. The librarian mentioned how the 1989 Hurricane Hugo destroyed many of Davidson’s trees, the president’s office corresponded with a landscaping company about the blight affecting the elm trees on campus during the early 1920s, and the green inchworms emerge every spring to threaten the ability of students to walk across campus without having worms attach to their hair. These examples demonstrate how natural events can bring unwelcome wildness to Davidson, acting beyond the ability of the college to control the environment.

The college has controlled the natural environment in the case of water. One of the blueprints showed a plan for a reflecting pool in front of Chambers. The librarian said there used to be a small lake on campus (as a result of a dammed creek). Now, there is a fountain with a small bit of water next to Sloane, but no large bodies of water remain on our main campus. I wonder if our everyday experiences on campus would be significantly different if we had a body of water on our main campus. Maybe it is not so easy to tame compared to trees and lawns.