Wilderness Analysis

This week’s reading was a brief overview of the historical foundation for the views on wilderness of the early pioneers of North America and how these views on wilderness have shaped American opinion on wilderness. The early American settlers’ view had a strong historical precedent. Early Humans’ values were geared toward survival so things that were useful to them were deemed “Good” and things that were a challenge to their survival were “Bad”. As time went on humans were able to control certain limited aspects of nature, such as raising crops, and the control of or dominion over wilderness was became good. Even as civilizations advanced to the level of the Greeks and Romans humans continued to demonize wilderness and associate …show more content…
Considering the harsh desert environment where these people lived it makes sense, any lack of rain and all their food could die creating a challenge to their survival. Through the Bible we understand that the Hebrews associated wilderness with a lack of water and a sign of God’s punishment and God’s approval was shown through abundance of water. As such, desert wilderness was populated by Hebrews with demons and devils and was viewed as the counterpoint paradise. The casting out from Eden illustrates this taking man from a place of abundance, safety, and ease and then placing him into a desolate wilderness. Christian’s came to have a seemingly conflicting set of views on wilderness. One view was the established wilderness as a place of evil and sinful. The other view came from the experience of the forty-year wandering by the Israelites in which wilderness was both a refuge from a persecuting and sinful society and a place to find and grow closer to God. These themes of Wilderness as both a source of worldly evil and as a place of Sanctuary and Purification were maintained by Medieval Christianity. This contrasted greatly with the views of Far Eastern traditions which tended to view wilderness with love and unity, to the point of …show more content…
The Puritans were confronted with an untamed place filled with dangers and challenges as well as wild “savages” reinforcing their cultural experience through Biblical stories. For pioneers experiencing the challenges to their survival placed upon them by coming to an uncharted and wholly unknown place, their key concern was conquest of wilderness. To have control over the wilderness was to have surety of survival. While Europeans were driven by the idea that a paradise on earth lay to the west the harsh realities of life in the wilds of the New World simply reinforced the view of wilderness as a dismal place of suffering. This situation led the pioneers to adopt the use of military language to describe the battle of civilization against the “enemy” of wilderness. Some pioneers even viewed themselves as an army set out to “conquer” the wilderness. The use of language and way of understating continued on into the mid- and