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Show 138. BLM speaker gave witness, he continued the false belief that we create wilderness, when in fact we are to be congratulated not so much because we have created wildernesses, but because we have systematically destroyed them. Wilderness is not an invention of man, it is not whatever we say it is, and until we accept the full meaning of the pathless way, we will not begin to be able to control our own nature, or understand Nature. One need not be surprised at the attitude of a man who works for the Bureau of Land Management. The definitive book on wilderness in America tells us that "while the word is a noun it acts like an adjective. There is no material object that is wilderness." Thus we are ready to think of the term in perfectly subjective terms; wilderness is what men think it is. In a dialectical way, one might argue further that we learn what we think it is in the act of subduing it. However, the author of Wilderness and the American Mind goes on to say that the common conception of wilderness is that of a desert, uncultivated or undeveloped lands, a place where men are absent, a place without paths or roads. A wilderness has been, for the western man, a place where "a person was likely to get into a disordered, confused, or 'wild condition.'" In other words, a place where a man would be bewildered. This definition suggests, at least, that the problem might be that of an ignorant observer rather than a chaotic world. Muir's bewilderment on Mount Ritter was a necessary step which preceded his discovery that the cosmos was indeed an ordered whole. |