What is "Wilderness?"

[Skyclimber]

Wilderness is any place on the woodland trail that is peaceful, beautiful. A place away from all the stress of everyday living.

 

[BrentD22]

The difference between Wilderness and WILD...

My small 2 bedroom apartment may not be wilderness, but if you've meet my youngest son you'd swear it was.

 

[JJwilliams]

there is Forever wild land right next to the mall in Saratoga, 45 acres that pataki made part of the Adk Park.

drawing a line around an area, declaring it wilderness in and of itself is an act of management.

anything mnanged is not wild.

especially the Adirondack Park, calling it wilderness is the biggest tourist come-on ever.

move people out, burn houses and whole towns, then call it it forever wild and act like we mean it. having a wilderness experience is one thing, but having it in someone's back yard is another.

I stand on the American Indian idea that nothing was Wild-ness until the white man came and declared it so.

i always think of people making wilderness trips here as the guy that is screaming Help I'm Drowning, and flopping around in a pond then finally just puts his feet down and the water comes up to his belly button.

like my boss says:
you're in the middle of the ocean even while only sitting in a bathtub if you can trick your mind into believing it.

 

[porky]

I voted for "other"

The trouble with defining wilderness as "A place without roads or buildings", much less the even more restrictive conditions offered, plays right into the hands of those who would take the last open spaces remaining and turn them into pit mines or parking lots. A classic argument for development in a wild area is to point out the old dirt roads, active electric lines, or abandoned farmsteads and say, "See! It isn't wilderness! It was used once (or is still being used, if lightly), therefore drilling twenty oil wells and building a jetport is just more of the same!" Really, almost every acre of "wilderness" in the eastern US was once exploited in some way, and much the same can can be said of the West. If one is sensitive and familiar with the histories of our local mountain ranges, one realizes that the quiet dale we are enjoying on a hike was once a quarry, or a bustling lumber camp, or a farmer's pasture. The trail we walk may have been (in fact may still be) a logging road. So what? If it offers solace and escape from the din and havoc of the worakaday world, it's good enough. Call it wilderness and keep calling it wilderness. Who knows, maybe eventually enough people will believe you. Then it may be allowed to truely be wilderness again.

Just my naive opinion,

porky pine (who actually thinks true wilderness is any place where prickly rodents are happy)

 

[afka_bob]

there is Forever wild land right next to the mall in Saratoga, 45 acres that pataki made part of the Adk Park.

drawing a line around an area, declaring it wilderness in and of itself is an act of management.

Uh, here in the east, not drawing a line around it and not managing it is called rampant development. Or soon-to-be-somebody's backyard

anything mnanged is not wild.

What about beaver ponds? The beavers seem to manage them quite diligently. Are those just natural rampant development?

especially the Adirondack Park, calling it wilderness is the biggest tourist come-on ever.

Uh, OK. Since hikers are just tourists with more or less luggage (and overwhelmingly white men!), could we then say that anything even just hiked really isn't wilderness?

move people out, burn houses and whole towns, then call it it forever wild and act like we mean it. having a wilderness experience is one thing, but having it in someone's back yard is another.

If we truly want to be as painfully pure as you seem to wish to appear to be, wouldn't it really only be wilderness if lightning caused the fire? Or a volcanic eruption? Wouldn't setting a fire (especially white men setting a fire) be a form of wilderness-nullifying management? Let's be consistent, here, please -- I mean, at least act like you mean it.

Or how about just acting reasonably within the context of our modern reality?

I stand on the American Indian idea that nothing was Wild-ness until the white man came and declared it so.

Uh-oh -- white man reference! Don't know 'bout you, JJ, but my self-loathing knows no bounds.

i always think of people making wilderness trips here as the guy that is screaming Help I'm Drowning, and flopping around in a pond then finally just puts his feet down and the water comes up to his belly button.

like my boss says:
you're in the middle of the ocean even while only sitting in a bathtub if you can trick your mind into believing it.

With a lot of effort, you can probably even trick your mind into believing your boss is profound.

 

[Stan]

Wilderness to me is anything that helps me change my perception of civilization. I'll let the Philadelphia lawyers argue about the other nuances.

 

[funkyfreddy]

What is wilderness?
In the east, wilderness would be defined, by me, as 'unimproved or primative land' and there is precious little of it.

Yes, and however you define it, the more the better IMHO.

 

[JohnL]

Originally posted by Pete_Hickey
"If it has been mapped, and/or its features have been named, it isn't wilderness."

Also gotta disagree with this statement. Having been to some places that are well mapped and features named, they were certainly what I would call wilderness. Five to eight days walk from the nearest stone age villages and not a man-made structure anywhere. I also just finished reading a book about a doomed Arctic expedition in 1913 who had to make their way across the sea ice to remote uninhabited islands off the coast of north east Siberia. Well mapped and charted even back then but this was certainly wilderness at its remotest.

JohnL