Notes Taken from Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash

 

Wilderness was the basic ingredient of American culture, and up until quite recently most people thought there was too much of it.

 

Wilderness is in danger of being loved to death.

 

Civilization created wilderness.  For the nomadic hunters and gatherers, who represented our species for most of our human existence, wilderness had no meaning.

 

Lines between civilization and wilderness began to be drawn with the advent of herding, agriculture, and settlement.   Distinctions were made between controlled and uncontrolled animals, plants, and spaces.

 

The intellectual consequences was the application of “wild” to those parts of nature not subject to human control.  The concept of wilderness emerged as a way of thinking about nature with the beginnings of the pastoral style of life some twelve thousand years ago.

 

A pastoral lifestyle is that of shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasture. It lends its name to a genre of literature, art, and music that depicts such life in an idealized manner, typically for urban audiences. A pastoral is a work of this genre, also known as bucolic, meaning a cowherd.

 

Wilderness became the unknown, the disordered, the dangerous, the wild.  The largest portion of the energy of early civilization was directed at conquering wilderness.

 

Nature lost its significance as something to which people belonged and became an adversary.

 

There was too much wilderness for appreciation.

 

Wilderness was instinctively understood as something alien to man, an insecure and uncomfortable environment against which civilization waged an unceasing struggle. 

 

If paradise was early man’s greatest good, wilderness was his greatest evil.

 

While inability to control or use wilderness was the basic factor in man’s hostility, the terror of the wild had other roots as well.  Pan, satyrs, centaurs, trolls, ogres, werewolves, monstrous beasts, wild men.

 

The Bible gave wilderness a central position in its accounts both as a descriptive aid and as a symbolic concept. 245 times in OT, 35 times in NT.

 

Drought and barren lands associated with wilderness were thought of as cursed areas—God withholding life-giving waters.

 

The identification of the arid wasteland with God’s curse led to the conviction that wilderness was the environment of evil, a kind of hell.  The Hebraic imagination made the wilderness the abode of demons and devils . . . Presiding over all was Azazel, the arch-devil of the wilderness.

 

Who is Azazel?  Azazel is a fallen angel whose evil influence led to the corruption of humanity. Because he was a leader among the fallen angels, the Jewish Book of Enoch commands its readers to “ascribe all sin” to him.

 

Wilderness and paradise were considered both physical and spiritual opposites.

 

Moses and the Jews wandered forty years in the wilderness.  The OT account emphasizes the hardships encountered in this “howling waste of wilderness.”

 

Wilderness could also be a refuge, a place for purification and atonement.  John the Baptist wandered in the wilderness; Christ went into the wilderness.  Such wanderings into the desert formed the basis of Christian asceticism. 

 

Asceticism, from the Greek meaning "exercise" or "training") is a lifestyle characterized by abstinence from worldly pleasures, often for the purpose of pursuing spiritual goals. Ascetics may withdraw from the world for their practices or continue to be part of their society, but typically adopt a frugal lifestyle, characterized by the renunciation of material possessions and physical pleasures, and time spent fasting while concentrating on the practice of religion or reflection upon spiritual matters.

 

Two components figured in the American pioneer’s bias against wilderness.  Physical threat to his survival.  Wilderness as symbolic of dark and sinister forces.

 

They shared the Western tradition of imagining wild country as a moral vacuum, a cursed and chaotic wasteland.  Thus they felt righteously justified in subduing the wilderness and eradicating natives.

 

In the morality play of westward expansion, wilderness was the villain, and the pioneer, as hero, relished its destruction.

 

The Puritan Cotton Mather in 1693 [!] stated: “Wilderness was a stage thro’ which we are passing to the Promised Land.”