By Tilly Ingall, University of Vermont
Photos by Kaggie Orrick
In school they taught us of the wilderness outside the classroom. We were taught of the elephant that represents the letter “E” on the alphabet wall hanging—up there with the xylophone and zebra. Nature was tokenized, an amalgamation of symbols and characters used in storybooks to teach lessons. I remember learning about climate change back when it was referred to as global warming and getting worked about saving the polar bears floating off into the ocean on a small raft of ice. Obviously, these perceptions of wilderness evolved as I grew up; I read Thoreau and Emerson, learned about the trophic cascades, was educated on the phosphorus cycle. However, this “wilderness” has frequently been taught to me as something separate from man, taught in the context of how man has altered and wreaked such irreversible damage on this “wilderness”.
We are constantly studying the effects of man on nature, removing ourselves as a foreign object to wilderness—the run-off that flows from our roofs into the streams and the CO2 rising from the tail pipes of our cars into the atmosphere. Living in a tent in Africa for the past two months has undoubtedly shown me that wilderness is anything but apart from man.
These past few months have shown me how futile it is to draw a line between humans and wildlife. Fences, which before seemed to me like an reasonable way of preserving wildlife, bare a very different meaning now that I have seen gemsbok running trapped between two fence lines and frantically looking for a gap. My perceptions of wilderness have drastically changed learning of the constant struggle communities face with wildlife, villages disallowed to hunt the wild animals they relied on and pressured into cattle ranching—an industry completely unsustainable for the ecosystem. The occasional run-in we have with a fox taking a neighbors chicken seems very small when you learn of lions snatching dogs from peoples yards. I cannot begin to imagine the struggle of running out in the middle of the night with pots and pans to deter the elephants we Westerners prize so much from ravaging your crops. It’s easy to separate yourself from wilderness in the West when we have eradicated the majority of the wildlife that used to roam where suburbs and cities now exist.
I have begun to understand that wilderness is a web far larger and far more complex then we can ever begin to comprehend. We are still learning about migrations we never knew existed, secret migrations that have gone on for years unnoticed. And while I fight to view wilderness as a space untouched by man, I can’t help but feel a greater sense of wilderness sitting under a mangosteen and listening to the soothing calls of lions, than sitting on the subway and listening to the buzz of music emanating from a fellow passengers headphones. It is for this reason that I hesitate to define wilderness. Wilderness is simply to grand that it would be a crime to define it, to reduce it to a few sentences. For man to define wilderness is another way he can conquer wilderness. I like to think of wilderness more as a language, one that we should always be striving to learn more about, continuously enlightening us of its idiosyncrasies. A language as Emerson put it, not learned so that “I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.”