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Show 137, we caught and trapped the wilderness? I would presume that a process of capturing or trapping begins when men try to "open out routes" among the mountains, as Leslie Stephen suggested. A mountaineering route, a trail, or a guidebook seem to be the first tools in a progressive domination of the landscape. Why? Because these works of men give form to a world which, up to that point, could only have had an internal structure that owed nothing to men. The truly pathless way is a spiritual journey and an unmapped landscape. The experience of a wilderness and the wilderness itself are inseparable. Any human tool which mediates between man and mountain separates journey from landscape, and thus alienates man from Nature. In this primary significance, wilderness is neither an abstract nor a subjective term. What we have made of the term is another matter. One day, I listened to a talk given for a group of agriculture students by a "Wilderness Expert" from the Bureau of Land Management. He announced that wilderness was a political abstraction, about a type of land use; he dated the term from the nineteen twenties, and attributed its use to Aldo Leopold, appropriately enough. He discussed the history of wilderness in America, on the assumption that history was made up of legislation and bureaucratic machinations, leading to the Wilderness Act, Rare I and II, the BLM Organic Act, and FLPMA. What can one say? It isn't the term which is important, but the idea, and the idea goes back a long way, and deep into the spirit of American life. What's more important, when the |
