What is wilderness? T.V shows defined wilderness as being a place away from civilization. Although the urban dictionary explains that the definition of wilderness is what we make it be. It is a statement that holds true for us to define wilderness we have to experience wilderness as I have done so myself. I joined my parents on a weekend to travel up to Asheville to watch my little brother soccer tournament. On the journey to Asheville, I could see the mountains that I haven’t seen in years beginning to pop-up as we approach our destination. The elevation was beginning to make its presence be known as it became harder to breathe. When we arrived at Azaela Park, I had an hour to explore before my whistle blows signaling the beginning of my …show more content…
The noise could have been anything, but what I found took me by surprised. I found a river that had a strong current that resonated through the forest. I analyzed the river for a while, as I sat down on a rock close to the river. I believe that the river was as wide as a basketball court and as deep as the bus that was parked in the parking lot. When I got closer to the river, I also noticed the trees that have grown on the side of the river bank. Other trees weren’t lucky enough, and erosion causes them to drop in the water affecting the current of the river. The water had a greenish brown color, and the current was gentle at times, but in some areas, it was filled with fury. I came to the conclusion that the faint noise was of the current hitting the fallen trees. I guess this is my place of wilderness, but I have yet to find wildlife, and it is an unnerving feeling not being able to find any sign of life besides the existence of human beings. It seems this is bound to be our inevitable future if we do not change our ways for the better. After forty-five minutes, an otter on the other side of the river bank was my only sign of hope. As I experience this, I can define wilderness more accurately that I could have if I wouldn’t have experienced it …show more content…
Wilderness is a place that is full of wildlife in an uncharted territory. A place that is unpredictable and full of danger. A place that forces you to use your skill, tuition, and craftsmanship to fight off the dangers of wilderness to survive. A place that forces you to rely on yourself in order instead of others to survive. A place that has no laws and everything is a fairy game. A place where you can connect to nature. A place where you can become one with nature. A place that changes you instead of you changing the place. The wild may sound like a horrible place, but the wild is undeniably beautiful. After this experience, the wild to me means more than just a place that is uncorrupted to the human hand because humans are a part of wilderness. If I could sit in a rock connecting with wilderness without disrupting the stability then others can as well. I can now understand that we humans are wild and have retreated from the wilderness. I can now see some similarities between the wildlife and humans. We humans are territorial, fight for mates, and thrive on the thought of survival. In the end, all I can see is that we were wild and have domesticized ourselves to the point where we can connect to nature. Although this does not mean we can’t enjoy the wilderness when we feel homesick because the wilderness is our
From the prologue through chapter one in “Wilderness and the American Mind”, the author emphasizes the affect wilderness had on the Europeans during the colonization of America. In today’s society, we are familiar with the concept of wilderness but few of us have experienced the feeling of being encapsulated in the unfamiliar territory. Today we long for wilderness, crave it even. We use it as an outlet to escape the pace of life. However, we have a sense of safety that the Europeans did not. We are not isolated in the unfamiliar, help is usually a phone call away. Though we now view the wilderness as an oasis because we enter at our own terms, in the early colonial and national periods, the wilderness was an unknown environment that was viewed as evil and dangerous.
Cronon, William “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90
The people of the Eastern Woodlands made many tools to help them in their everyday lives. They made spears, weirs, nets, bows and arrows, lances, knives, taps, snares and deadfall for hunting. Most of those tools were made of wood or bark and other forest material. Arrowheads were made from chert, or flint, from sedimentary rocks. They were shaped like isosceles triangles, the smallest arrows were used for hunting birds, the bigger ones were to spear bears or deer. Flint knives were often oval, or teardrop shaped. For fishing they made spears, weirs, and nets. They also made canoes from hollowed-out trees to help with fishing in the lakes and streams. Some other tools they made were axes made of stone to strip bark, clear fields and removing fat from hides. Axes
the idea of the wild and its importance and necessity of human interaction with the wild.
He believes that the wilderness has helped form us and that if we allow industrialization to push through the people of our nation will have lost part of themselves; they will have lost the part of themselves that was formed by the wilderness “idea.” Once the forests are destroyed they will have nothing to look back at or to remind them of where they came from or what was, and he argues everyone need to preserve all of what we have now.
It was a very quiet morning and everything was very settled on May 5th, 1864 in the state Virginia, until a high powered Battle broke loose on a very open and vulnerable terrain that stretched 70 miles wide and 30 miles long. The battle ended just 2 days later on May 7th. By the end, over 3,700 soldiers lost their lives, of what was left over 4,000 were missing or captured. The 162,000 involved lives were changed for a battle that was found inclusive. What was this pointless battle called? Its known as “The Battle of the Wilderness”. This battle was between the Potomac, IX corps (Yankees) and the Army of Northern Virginia (confederates) .The Yankees were lead by Ulysses S.Grant and George G. Meade and the confederates were controlled by Robert E. Lee.
I wasn’t even outside but I could feel the warm glow the sun was projecting all across the campsite. It seemed as if the first three days were gloomy and dreary, but when the sun on the fourth day arose, it washed away the heartache I had felt. I headed out of the trailer and went straight to the river. I walked to the edge, where my feet barely touched the icy water, and I felt a sense of tranquility emanate from the river. I felt as if the whole place had transformed and was back to being the place I loved the most. That day, when we went out on the boat, I went wakeboarding for the first time without my grandma. While I was up on the board and cutting through the wake of the boat, it didn’t feel like the boat was the one pulling and guiding me, it felt like the river was pushing and leading me. It was always nice to receive the reassurance from my grandma after wakeboarding, but this time I received it from my surroundings. The trees that were already three times the size of me, seemed to stand even taller as I glided past them on the river. The sun encouraged me with its brightness and warmth, and the River revitalized me with its powerful currents. The next three days passed by with ease, I no longer needed to reminisce of what my trips used to be like. Instead, I could be present in the moment, surrounded by the beautiful natural
I think that he is trying to say that wilderness is something to be cherished and loved, because it gives definition and meaning to his life. His whole life was spent looking after and trying to preserve the wilderness. This is a plea for the preservation. I think that Leopold believes one day a lot of what we have today and he want it to be preserved so that in the future people have the chance to see there cultural inheritance like our ancestors let us see by preserving things.
The drive to cross the Kentucky border had taken hours and hours of strenuous patience to finally arrive in another state. The view was by far country like as hints of cow manure could be smelled far from a distance. We drive through small towns, half the size of our hometown of Glen Ellyn had been the biggest town we've seen if not smaller. The scenery had overwhelmed us, as lumps of Earth from a great distance turned to perfectly molded hills, but as we got closer and closer to our destination the hills no longer were hills anymore, instead the hills had transformed to massive mountains of various sizes. These mountains surrounded our every view as if we had sunken into a great big deep hole of green pastures. Our path of direction was seen, as the trails of our road that had followed for numerous hours ended up winding up the mountainous mountains in a corkscrew dizzy-like matter.
that is hard to answer. Why not just leave the wilderness alone, and let it
have both a sense of the importance of the wilderness and space in our culture
It has never been an uncommon thing for one to retreat to nature in an attempt to ‘find one’s self,’ and somewhat cliché these days is the retreat to nature to ‘find God.’ Hundreds of books, essays, seminars, and retreats devote themselves to helping one understand how to find enlightenment and healing through connecting with nature. It is a phenomenon that transcends religious boundaries—everyone, from Buddhists to Christian Mystics to Quakers, seems to think that the key (or, at least, one of the keys) to enlightenment lies in nature. As one may suppose, this is not a new concept. Throughout literary history, there is a distinct trend of authors praising the virtues of nature, singing of the peace that it brings and the enlightening attributes of these places away from the noise and clutter of the cities. Shakespeare tells of finding “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, [and] sermons in stone”(Shakespeare); William Wordsworth implores us to let nature be our teacher; Goethe claims that there is rest and respite on the mountain top; and George Washington Carver admits that he tries commune with nature everyday. It seems that from Henry David Thoreau right down to contemporary authors, no generation or writing period has been devoid of at least one prolific author who takes to nature in order to find the answers.
Chris McCandless and Buck serve as examples of the archetype of the wild through their experiences of leaving where they feel most comfortable and answering the call of the wild. They show that each experience is inimitable because the wild is unique to every individual. For Buck, the wild is a place outside of civilization and his dependence on man, where the external threats of nature exist and he must prove himself as a true animal with instincts for survival. In McCandless' case, the place outside of civilization is actually an escape from his fears because the wild for him is in relationships, where the threat of intimacy exists and he must learn to trust others for happiness. This is because for each of us, the wild is what we fear, a place outside of our comfort zone and, as McCandless' experience shows, not necessarily a physical place. To render to the call of the wild we must leave everything that makes us feel protected, and we must make ourselves completely vulnerable to the wild. McCandless and Buck show that in order to successfully respond to the call of the wild we must relinquish control and drop our guards, until ultimately the fear subsides and we find peace with ourselves as well as with our environments.
In Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer explores the human fascination with the purpose of life and nature. Krakauer documents the life and death of Chris McCandless, a young man that embarked on an Odyssey in the Alaskan wilderness. Like many people, McCandless believed that he could give his life meaning by pursuing a relationship with nature. He also believed that rejecting human relationships, abandoning his materialistic ways, and purchasing a book about wildlife would strengthen his relationship with nature. However, after spending several months enduring the extreme conditions of the Alaskan wilderness, McCandless’ beliefs begin to work against him. He then accepts that he needs humans, cannot escape materialism, and can never fully understand how nature functions. Most importantly, he realizes that human relationships are more valuable than infinite solitude. McCandless’ gradual change of heart demonstrates that exploring the wilderness is a transformative experience. Krakauer uses the life and death of Chris McCandless to convey that humans need to explore nature in order to discover the meaning of life.
In essence, it’s more like seeking an identity. As a matter of fact, this provides a metaphor for human personality divisions with society, civilization and culture being representative of humanity rational side while the wild represents irrationality and primitivism that presents itself in each and very human. There is a dramatized urge for the civilized to ignore wilderness or rather, primitiveness to no success. It almost sounds that Atwood emphasizes that there is an aspect of human personality that we have to defend ourselves against. This is achieved in his elaboration on the usefulness of defending against wilderness. Like in many poems, it presents some form of tension, typical of humanity. Landscapes as presented in the poem are just as harsh as the lives of the forefathers depicted in the