Fall of the Wild: Why Pristine Wilderness Is a Human-Made Myth
14th September 2024
A century ago, the world’s first ‘wilderness area’ was established in the Gila Mountains of southern New Mexico, by the forester Aldo Leopold. He wasn’t concerned with preserving ancient wildlands or resurrecting a memory of the Pleistocene epoch. He wanted hunters to be able to take a two-week backpacking trip without encountering a road. Out of such pragmatic sentiments — and decades before the US Congress offered protections — grew a system of more than 800 wilderness areas on federal lands in the United States. Hundreds more have since sprung up worldwide.
The wilderness is widely seen as a place untrammelled by human activities. Not so, argues journalist Sophie Yeo in Nature’s Ghosts. Advocating lyrically for rebuilding a diverse natural world, she recognizes that, however wild a region might seem, human activities have left a mark in even the most isolated regions. People have been a part of nature as long as they’ve been around, coevolving with its ecosystems for millennia.