When you hear the word “wilderness,” what do you picture? Vast woods full of leaping stags? A mountain rearing up into the clouds? Jungles tangling in all directions? Or something else entirely
Your answer likely depends on your formative experiences—which books you’ve read, the types of landscape you visited growing up, and, of course, your native language. For American English-speakers well-versed in Ralph Waldo Emerson and his literary descendants, “wilderness” might bring to mind endless trees, raging rivers, and “the distant line of the horizon” described in his 1836 essay, “Nature.”
But for those who grew up elsewhere, the word, and the concepts behind it, could conjure up something entirely different. In Japan, for example, the closest analog to “wilderness” is kouya, which means “rough, dry fields.” In Iceland, the concept includes vast, sublime landscapes, but no wildlife, as even untamed animals are more likely to live near warm human settlements than in what Icelanders think of as “wilderness.” [...]
The whole idea of wilderness is relatively recent. “Go back 250 years in American and European history, and you do not find nearly so many people wandering around remote corners of the planet looking for what today we would call ‘the wilderness experience,’” the environmental historian William Cronon wrote two decades ago.
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