To suggest that wilderness cannot exist within the context of the Anthropocene epoch is to fundamentally misunderstand the definition of nature and wilderness. The Anthropocene does not imply that humans constitute a force of nature, but rather that human actions have enough global impact to affect Earth’s composition and ecosystem on the scale of geological time. This does not change the fact that wilderness, areas relatively untouched by humans and in relative natural state, cannot exist. The key idea here is that wildernesses do not have to be entirely untouched by humans, or that the “natural state” of a region is invalidated by human intervention at any point. This idea reflects those of William Cronon, who describes the concept of “rewilding”
