Trumpeter (1995)
ISSN: 0832-6193
Humans-in-the-Wilderness
About the Author: Glenn Parton, PO Box 1997, Weaverville, CA 96093 USA
Introduction
The purpose of this essay is to articulate a new, yet realizable concept of humans-in-the-wilderness. The idea entails human beings returning to the wilderness without forfeiting all of the achievements of civilization over the last 5000 years or more. I do not regard historical civilizations as a series of stages on the road to the good life, but rather results of a wrong turn that has led to the catastrophe of the industrial age. Indigenous peoples should steer clear of this course, but for those of us who have already wrecked our natural environs and ourselves, I suggest that we carry only the best parts of modern life toward the goal of preserving and restoring wilderness as the existential context of our being.
The Meaning of Wilderness
It is generally assumed that we must choose between flourishing human culture and wilderness, not in the sense of opting for one without the other, but in the sense of determining how much wilderness is enough for sustaining biological diversity and how much wilderness must be sacrificed for human progress. In other words, dualism - to one degree or another - is commonly accepted as the correct relationship between human cultural systems and wild nature. This perspective spans the spectrum from the endorsement of small wilderness areas that are surrounded by humanscapes to the endorsement of large wilderness areas that surround or complement human places. My idea of integrating advanced human communities into wilderness, so as to overcome dualism, is dismissed by almost everyone (including intellectuals and environmentalists) as impossible.1
If wilderness, by definition, excludes human culture, then obviously the only way to have wilderness and human culture is to separate them or set them alongside one another - and this has been the thinking and acting of the modern world. However, this wilderness concept, which was institutionalized in the American Wilderness Act of 1964, is flawed because prehistory proves that wilderness can withstand or sustain human residency and appropriation. Are remote valleys in the Brooks Mountain Range of Alaska no longer wild because a few people have camped and gathered firewood there? Has the entire Amazon Basin been dewilded because primal peoples dwell throughout the region? The Nenet, one of the Russian Arctic's minority cultures, have herded reindeer across the Yamal Peninsula every spring and fall for more than 1000 years - a 620 mile journey that crosses 11 major rivers and takes 3 months to complete. Is this frozen land no longer a wilderness because it is frequented and utilized by these people? Of course not. I submit that although human cultures are not intrinsic to wilderness, some human cultures, like the Nenet, are compatible with wilderness, while others destroy it. It is the degree and kind of human occupation and utilization of the land that determines whether or not a geographic area remains or becomes wild.
Dualistic thinking about human culture and wilderness is the result of civilization as we have known it. The Nile Valley, for example, had been inhabited by hunter/gatherers for 20,000 years before agriculture based on sheep, cattle and wheat invaded the place around 5500 B.C. Before civilization took over the valley, Elephants, Rhinoceri, Giraffes, and Homo sapiens dwelled together, with each species fit and free, and the place was wilderness. The pre-civilized world was not split into a human realm and nonhuman realm - all native creatures shared the same ground. Once we jar our memory of an older/original wilderness concept and place, then the idea of future primitive or postmodern human communities on a restored wilderness landbase becomes an alternative in the modern world. We open the possibility of building a new human way of life that is rooted in our primal past and in the wilderness.
What is required, if we are to reinhabit the wilderness, is that we become little parts of a much greater reality that is structured by, and functions for all native species. When the landscape matrix, from which we draw our living, primarily reflects the pattern or face of humanity, instead of remaining a composite of all living kinds, then human alteration of the environment has eradicated wilderness. In other words, a wilderness terrain is the collective expression of all indigenous inhabitants, whose life-stories are signed on the ground for all to read. In contrast, a tame or human-made countryside reflects predominantly human tracks, and it tells the tale of a species that has ripped, sliced, and torn nature. In the modern world, it is no longer possible to read the comprehensive book of life from the land because so much of it has been trampled and pulled asunder by civilized Homo sapiens. We must restore the native topography of the land, signed by its original authors, where the footprint of humankind is hidden and lost in the landscape, then we will be part of the wilderness again.
To conceive of wilderness as one pole of dualism is to presume that the historical course of civilization will continue into the future. Let us instead contemplate deep changes in the modern lifestyle that would reconcile human culture and wilderness.
A New/Old Economy
I advocate the development of a human lifestyle in which people to live in small villages sparsely scattered through a wilderness environment. Although this framework or groundplan is borrowed from aboriginal peoples, it is far more flexible than has been thought. We can devolve or scale-down modern civilization to closely fit ancient land use patterns without returning to the Stone Age. I specify dual criteria for overcoming dualism between human culture and wilderness: So long as 1) there are great distances between villages, or clusters of villages, where human works are substantially unnoticeable (within the overall landscape) or no more noticeable than the works of nonhuman creatures, and so long as 2) these human places are radically open to wild nature, then we are "in" the wilderness or part of the wilderness - like aborigines - even though we retain and re-design some features of modern life.
1) There is no mathematical formula for determining the ideal distribution of human sites across a wilderness land-mass because some physiographical areas can support (without loss of identity) higher population densities and certain cultural activities that other areas cannot support. In general, free-flowing rivers, wide-ranging predators, and the natural contours (shapes and slopes) of the land are integral parts of an undivided world. The wilderness carrying capacity of the continental U.S., as demonstrated by history, is sixty million Buffalo, fifty million Whitetail deer, forty million Pronghorn Antelope, two million wolves, several thousand Grizzly Bears in the Central Valley of California, ten million beavers in the Northeast, perhaps ten million Homo sapiens, and fish in waters and birds in the air everywhere too numerous to count. We must open our minds to images of this idyllic past, and to mature concepts that are oriented toward the fulfillment of these images.
2) Radical openness with wild nature means that our everyday lives are determined/regulated by the cycling of the seasons, the passage of day and night, migrating animals, and so on. We must ensure that the eagle flying overhead is not primarily a symbolic, aesthetic, or economic value, but an existential value - that is, having to do with the plan and purpose of our existence. Insulating humans in an artificial environment, so as to release even 98% of the land for wilderness recovery, is still dualism that sets people apart from nature, instead of preserving the flight of evolution everywhere. Radical openness (or human living beyond the wall) means our participation in the larger patterns and processes of creative evolution established over the last 4 billion years, including floods, fire, and other disturbing forces of nature. Jared Diamond reports that traditional New Guineans live "so close to the forest that they can hear fifty bird species while still lying in bed".2 For traditional peoples, wildland is lived. In contrast, National Parks, Wildlife Refuges, and designated Wilderness Areas - even if enlarged, diversified, and interconnected - make us visitors and spectators of wild nature.
In short, I am proposing (through the dual criteria) that we recapture the vernacular paradigm, with its proper balance and interaction between humans and the rest of nature. This is basically a matter of adapting the modern economy to the structure, function, and composition of the former, pre-civilized whole. There are ways of growing food other than as wall to wall fields of wheat, barley and rice. Hopi cultivators, for example, were part of the wilderness, like Pleistocene hunters, because their (shifting) gardens did not separate or alienate wilderness and village; they did not zone the landscape into fundamentally different and isolated domains - such as wild, rural, and urban. New technologies can be incorporated into our ancient milieu through miniaturization and localization. Technology does not need to be used as a weapon against wild nature. Self-sufficient (for the most part) human communities are capable of adopting various methods and innovations selectively, while immersed in the evolutionary continuum of wilderness and its vital flows of life.
Technical capacities have outgrown the framework of exploitation and ruination of wilderness and suggest options beyond anything envisaged by civilization so far; they raise the specter of our living continuously in the wild. The possibility of completely re-organizing and transforming modern society so as to preserve some of its benefits within a wilderness setting has been obscured by a monstrous agricultural and industrial apparatus that imposes itself as sole source of the good life (for humans). A paradigmatic shift, in keeping with Paleolithic reality, would drastically decentralize civilization. Roads, pollution, extinctions, human overpopulation, for examples, are unavoidably anti-wilderness, and would not survive devolutionary change, but science and technology, released from their service in the enslavement of nature, promise us new forms of freedom. A post-technological wilderness world haunts the now obsolete productive process of contemporary civilization.
In the 1830's George Catlin traveled the Missouri River through the Great Plains of America and he observed: "Almost every mile I have advanced on the banks of this river, I have met evidences and marks of Indians in some form or other,..."3 Catlin understood the active role of Native Americans in shaping a landscape, but he never doubted that the region was in a wilderness condition because he saw, firsthand, that traditional Indian cultures preserved wildlands. His idea of a "Nation's Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty,"4 is conceptually right, for it does not discount wilderness-dwelling peoples. All of Pre-Columbian North America was, and can be again, a National Park in Catlin's sense, if we live as just one species among many species, and give back to the Earth more than we take.
In the United States the intellectual and material resources already exist (and they are quantifiable and calculable to a high degree) for re-storing the Central Valley of California, the Ohio River Valley, and Missouri Bottomlands to the great wilderness areas they were on the eve of European conquest - and the direction to attain this goal can be identified and projected. Removing people and their activities from these places will not bring back the world that was lost, with its oneness between people and land. However, by changing the nature and extent of our occupation and modification of these areas, we could recapture this essential unified world. The tantalizing possibility is not merely peaceful co-existence or mutual tolerance between humans and wild nature, but rather intimate association and involvement of one with the other - interspecies history.
In Africa, it was wrong to remove the Ik, for example, from what became Kidepo National Park, not because Third World people are too poor to afford the luxury of wilderness preservation, but because the Ik already had a culture that preserved wilderness. Kidepo Valley - about 36 miles across - is almost completely hemmed in by mountains, with an opening in the southeast corner. When the rains came, large intelligent mammals such as Ik and elephants moved from the valley floor into the mountains. The Ik, elephants, mountains and valley belonged to each other and the entire ecosystem was wilderness. Call it aboriginal wilderness, as distinct from nonhuman wilderness, but the decisive point is that the Ik literally inhabited wild nature for thousands of years. They point us toward the idea of a postmodern wild culture.5 Colin Turnbull suggests that if we do not learn to be more like the Ik of yesterday, then we will also become "the loveless people." that the Ik are today. He states, "when they [Ik] were imprisoned in one tiny corner, the world became something cruel and hostile, and in their lives cruelty took the place of love."6
The New Ecological Mosaic: What it Would Look Like!
The ideal situation is a wild matrix, in which anthropogenic habitats exist as patches within a mosaic of older, nonhuman countryside that remains relatively constant over time. This system would resemble that which would occur over large areas in the absence of human alteration because the practice of our intervening in nature on a grand scale would be replaced by simple human reproduction, where village life is the germ cell or basic unit of a new social network that is connected by a labyrinth of meandering footpaths. I mean a human way of life to match the patchwork of the prehuman terrain - with tremendous diversity within the compass of a few square miles; not a human-dominated environment, but a land where all life-forms depend on a wild landscape mosaic.
We have a rightful place and role in wilderness, as a "keystone species," that enriches the diversity of life on Earth, if we nestle our social units into a self-managing natural order, and acknowledge that we can only positively affect a tiny fraction of wild nature. A well-integrated human-island system, arranged almost randomly, and dispersed through wild nature, could preserve all (existing) species in their natural patterns of abundance and distribution. Human wilderness resettlement integrates humans and nonhumans within a single, extended community, and nothing else will achieve this end. It is a vision of the future that looks a lot like the past, but one that allows for significant human change and progress.
Wilderness works - that is to say, it sustains, diversifies, and elaborates the whole of life. No other form of land-protection (and many substitutes are now being offered) has been time-tested and proven. Notably, as wilderness declines around the world, the biodiversity crisis worsens. We would be wise to turn away from the ecological ideal of a human-controlled landscape, and, instead, seek to re-enter the ordered pattern of wild nature.
The principle of human power over nature has been extended past the point where evolution, by itself, can force a constellation of natural human settlements. What traditional peoples did spontaneously, by the will of nature, we must do deliberately, which means that the emergence of a future rational society must proceed and endure according to an overall wilderness plan. Some coordination at the continental level, among local units of human self-determination, is a precondition for achieving and maintaining human balance on the land. Central authority is rational inasmuch as it permits a free interplay between humans and the rest of nature that prevailed in the landscape of perpetual youth. As the poet Baudelaire said: "Genius is childhood recaptured."
Walkabout
Critics of my idea of humans-in-the-wilderness will argue that the only way to end dualism, as I propose, is for modern (or postmodern) people to become nomads, as were Paleolithic people. This utopian possibility is becoming evermore realistic by new discoveries in science and technology. Solar energy, for example, could be the primary energy source for lightweight and portable cultures. The libertarian possibilities of science and technology are effectively contained within the framework of modernism, but there is nothing stopping us, theoretically, from treading evermore lightly, and finally wildly, on the Earth - except our own lack of imagination and will-power. The issue of whether or not we must move, and how far and how often, depends in part on the pre-given and unique characteristics of the land wherein we dwell.
Peter J. Wilson, in his book, The Domestication Of The Human Species, argues that the practice of living in permanent homes and settlements (which predates agriculture) is the major event in hominid evolution that shifted Homo sapiens from a wilderness environment to civilized life. He states, "the domestication of plants and animals follows the domestication of human beings and is inspired by it."7 According to Wilson, permanent architecture, as distinct from the temporary use of natural shelters, seeks a "permanent, once and for all, utterly stable position of dominance."8 Wilson finds that the enclosure of human living space - beginning in the Mesolithic era - interferes with the free flow of attention between people and between people and the rest of nature. He notes that sedentarists form a social order founded on the boundary, rather than on a focus, and as a result they do not sustain the intimate and open societies that revolve around camps and hearth sites. In contrast, for nomadic people, the landscape is a spectrum where humans move gradually out of one district into another - the faintest line divides their living space from nature - and it is a way of life that emphasizes openness, independence, self-sufficiency, and sharing.
In SONGLINES,9 Bruce Chatwin speculates that natural selection has designed us for a career of seasonal journeys on foot. According to Chatwin, without compulsion no permanent settlement could be founded. He points out that in Middle English, the word progress meant a journey, and that men of the Golden Age are always remembered as migratory, without possessions, houses or war. Chatwin argues that the wandering life is not an aberrant form of behavior, but re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between humans and the universe. He finds support for an instinctive migratory urge (akin to that of birds in autumn) in the works of great philosophers and poets: "Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right," said kierkegaard; "For a long time I prided myself I would possess every possible country," said Rimbaud; "I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul," said Baudelaire.10
Chatwin claims that Australian Aboriginal culture was readable in terms of geology because it conformed to the contours of the landscape. Aborigines put "all their mental energy into keeping the land the way it was."11 He notes that they valued a pair of strong legs above everything, and they were always laughing - not caring at all for walls (but they do like a roof for the rain). They were poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning creation, because the rhythmic phases of their lifeway made it impossible for them to become anything else.
The 1964 American Wilderness Act defines wilderness as "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor who does not remain." Primitive nomads do not remain permanently in any particular place, yet they are at home in the wilderness. Could it be that they are at home everywhere because they remain permanently nowhere, i.e. because they are visitors in a primal sense rather than in a civilized sense? If we stop thinking of human places as fixed geographical entities, and start conceiving of them as villages that are capable of breaking up and reassembling as ecological needs require, then the wilderness idea is enlarged and enriched (by people). Real wilderness is dynamic enough and resilient enough to incorporate human residence and economic activity, if we to become nomads in a shifting mosaic of wildlands, in which abandoned human sites resemble areas after natural fires (with robust self-restoration) more than they resemble clearcuts - that is the way traditional Indians lived. As William Cronon has documented, it was "English fixity"12 - fixed features of the landscape, such as permanent settlements, cleared fields, pastures, buildings, and fences that destroyed the incredible abundance of North American plant and animal life.
Admittedly, the idea of postmodern nomadism is faraway from matters of political negotiation and bio-crisis intervention and manipulation, but are we searching for how human presence can be a positive enhancement of natural communities, or are we content to limit the deleterious effects of human presence on the environment? Beyond the quick fix and stimulus to immediate action, there is the philosophical question of the best of all possible lives. Certainly, an adventurous human lifeway of seasonal renewal, woven into the beauty and mystery of wild nature, is an ideal worthy of serious consideration, but unfortunately we are not wondering about it. This is a betrayal of the task of the intellectual to recall possibilities which seem to have become unrealistic possibilities,i.e. to keep alive the images and values of a qualitatively better life - of high culture - which may, one day, "de-realize" the established framework of things. What if freedom requires the attainment of what is today called utopia?
The Wildlands Project
Until the time when we are ready and able once again to inhabit a river, prairie, or other ecosystem type without disrupting the harmony of its life, The Wildlands Project will and should continue its effective conservation program of saving biodiversity by carving out an interconnected system of large wilderness reserves within civilization.
The Wildlands Project is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for balancing human/nature relationships - that is to say, we must first preserve and restore enough wilderness so that later on future primitive Americans can move back into the Big Outside. Integrating ourselves into a single wilderness whole is the only way to overcome our estrangement from wildness because recreation, aesthetic enjoyment, and other forms of wilderness visitation will not satisfy the species-being of Homo sapiens, which is not a product of history but of prehistory. The ultimate wilderness plan, in my view - that corresponds fully to human nature and that includes the human economy - entails the emergence of a free association of bioregional wilderness groups, a broad eco-commune movement, where human places are so integrated into the hills and bluffs that the inhabitants of one locality impact little on those at a distance, and where the vast and lonely landscape is without roads, dams, mines, cattle, and permanent human habitats.
Transcending the dualism between civilization and wilderness, as I propose, is not the focus of The Wildlands Project, not because its supporters do no share this fundamental goal, but rather because, as David Johns says, "In the near and medium term, if not the long term, the essential nature of civilization is not likely to change, and life on this planet needs to be protected from it.[now]"13 In other words, The Wildlands Project is a stopgap that seeks to safeguard as much biodiviersity as possible, as fast as possible, from the rapacious appetite of a consumer society. Although critics of The Wildlands Project portray it as extreme and unfeasible, it is actually a bare minimum strategy for securing North American wildlife - that is to say, it is merely linking up minimum dynamic land areas, determined by the science of conservation biology, for sustaining viable populations of large mammals such as Black Bears, Grizzlies, Wolves, Wolverines, Mountain Lions, Elk, Bighorn sheep, Bison, Moose, etc. The unrealistic sound of The Wildlands Project is indicative of the political forces which prevent it from being put on the ground.
The status quo continues to resist the consequences of hard scientific data, but the best minds already see beyond the minimum program of The Wildlands Project to the desideratum of the full realization of biological reality, which presupposes social revolution, or massive economic conversion, or the end of the intensive activities associated with civilization. This is why good science is a radical protest against the modern lifestyle. As Reed Noss (Science Director for The Wildlands Project) and Allen Cooperrider have said, "Only a spectacular reduction in the scale of human activities on earth will allow biodiversity to recover,..."14
The Wildlands Project is only the immediate expression of wider and more fundamental aims, the first step of a continual movement toward the wild. The North American Wilderness Recovery Strategy (another name for The Wildlands Project) is identifying and protecting individual wildlands, and linking them together, without the need to wait for radical changes in modern society. As wilderness is preserved and restored, one acre at a time if necessary, civilization will wither away because there will eventually be no sacrifice zones on Earth. Advanced primitivism will take its place: humble and respectful human places together with the forces and faces that drive evolution. Then we will have recaptured that lost unity of the given world.
Eco-theory, and revolutionary theory in general has been beset by the problem of getting from here to there - that is to say, good ideas must be driven in some way by actually existing reality or they will never be materialized. The Wildlands Project bridges the gap between theory and practice because it begins with the development of a new wilderness preservation system within the dominant political reality, and it ends with the development of a new political system within a dominant wilderness reality. The Wildlands Project is a proactive strategy for achieving the desired future condition of the next millennium - a wilderness world once more - where human households become living parts of our larger wilderness body, and we work and play lightly on the soft surface of the Earth. It is a clear path that leads us out of the biodiversity crisis and to an entirely new mode of life.
Human Nature
The New Conservation Movement, christened by Dave Foreman for the creation of large core wilderness areas, surrounded by buffers and connected by wide habitat corridors, is guided by science, but it is powered by essential human nature. This essential nature, which Edward O. Wilson has identified as "Biophilia,"15 is the gift of our common wilderness heritage. There is thus an instinctive foundation for The Wildlands Project, which makes it more than an environmental ethic; it is also a biological disposition of the human organism - a sound basis for a winning strategy.
The human heart is pumping wildness through our veins, and although we cannot see fully the final end toward which we are directed, actions that spring from instinct precede, rather than follow, a clear comprehension of our goals. This depth dimension of our being is the source of an enduring activism; for instincts strive after the ultimate state of well-being, and they never give up the struggle. What is at stake is the realization of a utopian dream that is also the essence of humanity.
Organized hatred, like that of Wise Use people and other militant champions of civilization, does not arise from human nature, but from the structure of modern society, which blocks the "species-being" of humankind. Human nature is, on balance, intrinsically good or life-affirming, but it has been corrupted by the laws, institutions, and technologies of modern society. How could it be otherwise for Homo sapiens, as mammals, represent a high form of organic development. In virtue of our animal past, we are better than the world we have built, better than what we think, say, and do. The wisdom and perfection of evolution is deposited in our genes.
Because people are superficially civilized, the biological thrust of life itself may prove fatal to civilization, but the danger is that we, in our everyday lives, are down to the last threads of connection with wild nature. Still, the impulse to withdraw from the madness of modern normality is pervasive. Our deep being is ready to be reactivated, and we are still capable of resuming primitive life. Recovery depends on insight into the primal crime of civilization, and on a liberating awareness of an alternative way of life - a sustainable wilderness ideal - that stems from our biologic root, with its primal urges and passions and close ties to that biotic community of free organisms whence we came.
The truth about who we are and what we need is there to be discovered, beneath the edifice of civilization. Vision mapping, a praxis of The Wildlands Project, is not about drawing lines on a map, but about unearthing the reality of wilderness and wildness by seeing and feeling what we have lost. The almost total lack of real wilderness experiences in our present-day lives makes memory and imagination central to The New Conservation Movement. We must dream of immersing ourselves in the immensity of wilderness, where the waves of wildness wash over us; for external nature is not alien and hostile space, but rather the field of erotic gratification.
The content and goal of civilization, its principle of progress, is called into question and found to be a prison of comforts and conveniences, because the core of our being is primitive, which means that simple pleasures such as cooking and conversing around a fire under the stars, walking down to the river to draw fresh drinking water, interfacing with wild animals, etc. are routinely required for human health and happiness. We have failed to understand and promote ourselves as inextricably intertwined with elemental nature. The historically viable option of overlaying and developing human cultural achievements on already existing natural achievements, (begun by our primal ancestors), i.e. of human transcendence of wilderness without human abolition of wilderness, has not been carried through, but cut off and denied.
It is not only conceivable that we share common ground/wilderness with Jaquars, Grizzly Bears, and Crocodiles, it is also desirable and necessary that we do so; for not so very long ago they shared the world with us, and what evolved together belongs together. Witness the Caribou traverse the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; they print a message across the landform, a chapter from a wilderness text that, if rightly read, unfolds the story of creative evolution and interdependent life. Our place in this real life drama coheres with everything else - a thread of narrative - or we are not playing our proper role in the greater scheme of things.
We are still within cosmic wilderness; it is not something "out there," apart from humankind. The Solar system, the Milky Way, and the Universe envelope us. This conception of wilderness - that of a being large enough and independent enough to contain humans - if brought back to Earth, would put us within the objective order of deserts, prairies, and mountains. The human trajectory through time and space can and should preserve the free paths and cycles of our fellow-voyagers on this planet, thereby inscribing ecotopia on the ground - for all to read. This is my new/old idea of Earth Wilderness or wild Earth.
Conclusion
In order to overcome dualism between human beings and nature, we must reject the dominant paradigm of civilization (and not just reject the conventional conception of economic development). The primitive or vernacular paradigm is the key to resolving the contradiction between human progress and spontaneous nature - rather than settling for a trade off between them. Any ideal of human unity and harmony with nature that sustains a permanent polarity between human culture and wilderness is incomplete at best. Do we have the vision and will to go all the way home and really end human separation, isolation, and alienation from nature? Modern humanity has been the wilderness-terminating species; it is time for us to become again good citizens of wild bioregions, like the birds, bees, and bears.
Notes:
1. Notable exceptions are Paul Shepard, Gary Snyder, Christopher Manes, John Davis, Jerry Mander, and a small number of others.
2. Jared Diamond, "New Guineans and Their Natural World," The Biophilia Hypothesis. Ed. Stephen Keller and Edward O. Wilson, Washington: Island Press, 1993, p. 255.
3. George Catlin, North American Indians. Ed. Peter Matthiessen. Penguin Books, NY 1989, p. 274.
4. Ibid. p. 263.
5 See Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea Of Wilderness, Yale Uni. Press, 1991, especially chapter One.
6. Colin Turnbull, The Mountain People, Simon And Schuster, 1972, p. 259.
7. Peter J. Wilson, The Domestication Of The human Species, Yale Uni. Press, 1989, p. 3.
8. Ibid. p. 130.
9. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, Penguin Books, 1987.
10. Ibid. Chapter, "From The Notebooks."
11. Ibid. pp. 123/124.
12. William Cronon, Changes In The Land, Hill And Wang Publishers, NY, 1983.
13. David Johns, "Wilderness And Human Habitation," Place Of The Wild, Island Press, Washington, D.C. 1994, p. 150.
14. Reed Noss and Allen Cooperrider, Saving Nature's Legacy, Island Press, Washington D.C. 1994, p. 333.
15. Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia, Harvard Uni. Press, 1984.
Copyright retained by author(s)
PID: http://hdl.handle.net/10515/sy5n58cz3
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