Essay On Concept Of Wilderness

Is the Concept of Wilderness Useful? Does wilderness exist? To many people, this would seem to be a very meaningless question. Of course wilderness exists. But, coming from a student who decided to enroll in a class called Humans and the Natural Environment: Impacts and Moral Obligations, this question has become one that has almost thrown my world upside down. Before we can answer the question, we must first know the definition of wilderness is this, “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor who does not remain.” Because of my recent class periods and readings, I believe that the concept of wilderness does not exist, and that it is not useful. Throughout this essay I will explain why

The fact that man can have no touch on wilderness is to say that man cannot be a part of wilderness. Man must be completely absent, only appearing as a visitor. But why can man not be a part of wilderness? Many people believe that man is separate from nature due to religious beliefs. They believe that God created Adam and Eve and then created the rest of Earth specifically for the use of man. But even after Darwin, some people still do not seem to understand. All humans are a product of evolution, as are every other species that inhabits this planet. Our ability to think, reason, and understand does not somehow overshadow that fact that we are still a species of great ape. Ultimately, we are glorified monkeys. Monkeys that have sent themselves to the moon and seen astronomical technological advances but still monkeys nonetheless. To say that the other four species of living great apes can be a part of nature, but the line is drawn when it comes to humans is hypocritical. I believe the idea of wilderness is based on a false definition of the word, and therefore does not

One of those faults being that we fail to acknowledge the fact that Indians roamed the Americas long before the Europeans showed up. The Europeans had believed that all of America was untouched by man, therefore making it a wilderness area. But they failed to understand that those lands had already been used for living, farming, hunting, and gathering. The Indians even used fire to manage their lands. Many believe that their use of fire has even shaped our landscape today: making our forests rich and diverse. If not for their fires, America would most likely be overrun by brush. So, when President Obama declared 2 million acres of land “wilderness areas” back in 2009, he did so to land that has been shaped by the hands of man. There for discrediting it from being land that untrammeled by man, the very definition of