Wilderness

Defining Wilderness

In Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash attempts to define "Wilderness" and identifies several historical facts surrounding the term:

• Wilderness is explicitly a Eurocentric conception. Native Americans, India, China and Japan do not share a similar concept
• Ancient Isrealite conceptions of the Wilderness held it as the place where God resides and a place where you go to be purified
• It is from the Greco-Roman traditions that we arrive at a view that the Wilderness is a place to be feared
• Celtic traditions furthermore identified Wilderness as the "Will-of-the-land," a place where the land itself was self willed.

Nash cites Jay Hansford Vest's article Will-of-the-land: Wilderness Among Primal Indo-Europeans.

• Ancient Celtic religion was born of a "Nature Awe." Nature was alive with a creative life force shared with humans. Will-power, thought, and feeling extended to nature both animate and inanimate.
• Nature spirits animated springs, rivers, forests and mountains.
• Wilderness means "self-willed-land"
• The Celts didn't erect temples, but instead held pilgrimages to undisturbed oak groves deep in the woods in order to commune.
• Heathenism is nature worship. One who worships upon the hearth: moor, gladew, grove, wild waste etc.
• The Breton war leader Brennus, upon conquering Delphi laughed at the Greeks representing gods in human form.
• Wilderness can also be a portal to otherworldly or heavenly realms

History of Wilderness in the U.S.

• The adirondacks end up only getting preserved due to the threat of flooding and/or droughts downstream and the economic impact this will incur; not the efforts of Romantics.

External References

1. Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. Yale University Press. 2001.
2. Vest, Jay Hansford C. Will-of-the-land: Wilderness Among Primal Indo-Europeans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1985.
3. <https://vimeo.com/ondemand/uponthemountain>
4. Cronon, William. The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental History. 1996.
5. Moronuki, Julie. There is no rural culture <https://thestore.substack.com/p/there-is-no-rural-culture>. The Store. 2023-08-25.

Linked References

• currently-reading-2022
  

  Nash, Roderick. [[Wilderness]] and the American Mind

• mabinogion
  

  [[Wilderness]] has some notes exploring the Celtic traditions surrounding wilderness specifically in-depth. This particularly comes into play in the Pwyll branches both in Pwyll's relationship to Arawn which seems to be located in an otherworldly realm reached deep in the woods during a hunt, as well as the curse placed upon Dyvad in the third branch which transforms all of southern Wales back into a wilderness.

• panpsychism
  
  • [[Wilderness]]
• solarpunk
  

  [[Solarpunk]] is incompatible with [[Wilderness]] as the espouses a philosophy of incomaptiblity between humanity and nature.