“Wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” (Wilderness Act of 1964)

Recently, several writers on ecopsychology have suggested that wilderness is an example of the alienation between humans and nature that is causing the ecological crises we now suffer. I’d like to respond as someone trained in ecology working in the conservation field. I agree that a root cause for the ecological collapse we are now facing is the radical alienation and technological encapsulation of the modern human from the rest of life, but I do not agree that the idea of wilderness is a dangerous, un-evolved, or outdated concept. 

There is no “concept” of wilderness separate from the reality of wilderness; if so, that would only be another example of separation between body and mind. So we must think of the physical consequences of declaring wilderness a false psychological concept. The majority of the current human population does not know how to interact with rare plants, rare animals, and intact, self-organizing ecosystems without destroying them. We may even destroy our favorite places through loving them to death (too many visitors to a park for example). Our inability to live without destroying our ecosystem is the very issue ecopsychologists are attempting to address for the future. 

But the therapy provided to a people who are diseased can’t be throwing the doors open to our wilderness areas and declaring that "wilderness" is and should be dead. My reasons why are very practical. If we do not right now, with vigor, conserve and set-aside large tracts of land where ecosystems are able to form themselves with minimal human interference, we will be robbing the future planet of the genetic and biological diversity that is key to survival for many species, not just our own. What today's humans allow to survive will form the building blocks of a new biologically diverse Earth eons from now after the current extinction event is over. 

There are sensitive ecosystems where humans can only be “a visitor who does not remain” if we want them to survive. These systems are so sensitive to a change in pH, the introduction of a new species, to being trammeled (literally under boots or even bare feet), to harvesting or having root systems disturbed, or changed hydrology that our routine presence would alter the habitat enough to cause certain species to blink out of that community. 

This does not deny that we are a part of nature, in fact it says the opposite. Saying we shouldn’t go everywhere and be everywhere is a mature intelligence of our own ecological limits. I believe our species in its mature form will choose to minimize interaction with certain places. We will contain our living spaces to carefully designed and tended areas. Humans and other species will co-manage these places. On a depth level, the place will manage our psychologically and we will affect the psychology of the place. We will ecologically engineer these places to meet our needs. But we can't avoid the facts of life. Where humans manage an ecosystem to meet our needs, other species do lose habitat. Where we encourage nut trees to grow for example, as indigenous communities did and permaculture encourages now, there are other tree and animal species that are displaced. Some of these displaced species need wilderness (a place we are mostly separate from). 

Another reason for wilderness is that humans do not live well with other large, dominant predators. Telling people that wilderness is wrong and that we should roam freely everywhere, is tantamount to a death sentence to large cats, wolves, bears, sharks, and other “dangerous” species. Where humans live in large natural areas, wild animals are displaced and killed when the inevitable interactions occur between them, shared food and us. You can legitimately say those deaths are natural, but then you’d need to look at two things: how many humans are we talking about (much smaller numbers of hunter-gatherers than today’s population have caused the continental extinction of megafauna) and what is our technology. The reality of the present is a country bristling with guns and a mainstream attitude of an Earth void of all consciousness and intelligence except for the human. A metaphysical license to kill. In this reality, telling people they have a right to go and be anywhere, to never separate from wilderness, is pulling the trigger. We are responsible for each other.

At least for me, and I suspect for others, wilderness is a love song for the feral in the world (to reference George Monbiot’s popular book “Feral”). For me, the call for wilderness is a call of the soul for a fully alive human transparent in its environment. But it includes a recognition that to achieve this, humans need to maintain wilderness. 

It may seem wrong to say that feral humans should have a place and stay mostly within it. It may seem instead that being feral means living everywhere with abandon. The ecological reality is we can’t physically be everywhere and maintain the non-human feral on Earth. Other animals respond to us and domesticate themselves in our presence. It’s not an inherently bad process, but would we like a world with no wolves and only dogs? Isn't the urge to inhabit all of Earth with human a sign of our discomfort with mystery and other?

Humans are inherently part of Earth, but the intelligence of no individual human or group of humans, even if you assembled the best and brightest of us, can remotely match the ancient intelligence of Earth. Our ecological engineering, our human understanding of how the Earth’s systems operate is limited by our perceptual abilities. Unless one truly believe humans have dominion over Earth and can engineer the entire planetary ecosystem, we do need to get out of the way and let Earth’s intelligence supersede us. 

So yes, my individual ego cedes major ground to wilderness and there are places I will not go, out of respect for that which sends a tingle down my spine and wakens all my nerves - the wild. There are places I will only go rarely out of the deepest respect, and in a manner of awe. I will follow the rules we set in place through law and administration to make sure these places and their inhabitants survive on Earth. 

We cannot tell 7.2 billion people (population of Earth) that no place should be set aside and psychologically separate, and also maintain biodiversity and the survival of the human species. We need a space called wilderness for Earth to engineer its own systems separately from humans to give rise to that biodiversity that feeds and nourishes us body, mind, and soul. In my view, to live on Earth respectfully, means we enter relations with a true attitude of humility and we leave some beings alone. 

Most of us agree there is much, much more to life, to existence, than the human being. To merge with it fully in consciousness does not mean we replace the other physically or psychologically. It means we become more while respecting and allowing the existence of this everything else we consciously join.