Wilderness yesterday, wilderness today
Alexis De Tocqueville visits America in the 1830’s and wants to see the wilderness. The early settlers don’t understand his fascination. The pioneers explore the wilderness for economic reasons or colonial reasons, say for logging, war, trapping, mining, but never for pleasure. It is chaos, the face of the deep, the unfettered darkness.
Eventually, however, the settlers fill their stomachs, put their feet up, eradicate the panthers (real or imagined). The wilderness ceases to be so fearsome. Along comes Thoreau down to Walden Pond in 1845 to chop down his arrowy willows and drive life into the corner, and consequently, or coincidently, the Americans become less chary of wild places.
Emerson is also poeticizing nature, and then after both Emerson and Thoreau comes John Muir rhapsodizing in his rank pantheism. Yellowstone becomes a national park in 1872. The first hunting magazine, Forest and Stream, publishes its first issue in 1873, changing the face of hunting and giving it a gentlemanly air. Teddy Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell establish the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887 to address the vanishing wilderness, to save the big game on a national scale.
The twentieth century sees Chicago and Detroit and New York become crime-riddled morasses, and Upton Sinclair writes a book in 1906 titled The Jungle, one of the first critiques of industrial exploitation of slaughterhouses in Chicago. The Jungle draws a metaphor on wilderness as chaos and darkness. The center of chaos and danger has shifted from wildness to urbanity.
In 1942, Walt Disney releases Bambi, an overwhelmingly anthropomorphized film in which the title character is given oversized eyes and body language to evoke empathy from the audience, whose mother is killed by a hunter’s arrow. Humans are the problem, implies the film. Aldo Leopold publishes A Sand County Almanac in 1949, making “conservation” a household word and laying out a set of ethics of humans relating to nature.
And from this era, the lines of wilderness and its utility begin to split, merge, and complicate. Bambi gives rise to a naivete that says all nature is sweetness and light. Demonizing the savagery of the wilderness falls out of favor. Wilderness is a political luxury, say some, and ought to be set aside for development as soon as we need it. Earth-firsters say wilderness is our salvation, don’t you dare cut a tree off of it. Others say we ought to save the earth and stop having babies altogether and keep the butterflies. Voices like Wendell Berry posit that the wild and the domestic need not be mutually exclusive.
And then the marketeers saw the outdoor types as a customer base, and today we have a marketable demographic for expensive gear. Cabela’s, REI, The North Face are here to take consumerism to the woods. Authors like Richard Louv make books about the restorative and developmental powers of nature. Michael Easter writes that we have become too comfortable—so go make life hard for yourself, outside. Wilderness, in 2025, is untrammeled good.
And so the wilderness has morphed from the domain of the devil where savage beasts chased little girls in red hoods to the true expression of God’s creativity and providence. (Think of the campfire anthem, “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder.”) Or, for the godless types, at least a kind of restorative and helpful environment. It has changed from chaos, a blank slate, worthlessness, to restoration, the true nature of things, the place where our true humanity emerges. Nothing has changed in the wilderness, except for some wildness going away, but something has changed in our perception of uninhabited places.
Who knows what changed the public consciousness? Was it artists, who were able to see beauty in a rugged skyline? We know artists are geniuses of perception—they help us see things in new ways—and thus life imitates art. 18th century people averted their eyes to the forbidding mountains. Now real estate with a view to the mountains doubles its value. I’ve heard people look at mountains or a canyon and say, “How can anyone say there is no God?” Six or seven hundred years ago, people would have looked at the same scene and said, “How can anyone believe there is no devil?”
And so we partake in the complicated history of humans in relation to land. We have shaped the land, we have used it. Flying over the Midwest and peering down from 30,000 feet, it is hard to imagine how completely we have reshaped the earth. What is wilderness to us, and for us, these pieces of land that remain undeveloped? Or what makes us think it is for us? Is it the place where we confront the devil, as Jesus did, or a place where we go to grieve, and pray, also as Jesus did? Are the biblical accounts of wilderness a geography of the spirit or simply a physical feature?
God seems to have a thing for the desolate and marginal places, because when He wanted the attention of his people He took them into the wilderness. He sent Abraham up on a mount to offer Isaac. He asked Moses to come up to Mount Sinai to receive the law. Elijah heard the still small voice in a desolate place, the Children of Israel spend some formative years in the wilderness. John the Baptist was an aboriginal of the desert. Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness, fasting and praying, and then defeating the devil. God called to Moses from the bush when he was on the backside of the desert.
Historically, God spoke to His people through the land. When the people did not allow the land to lie fallow the seventh year, God punished them. When they disobeyed and worshipped false gods, He took their land from them and deposited them in a foreign land. When they repented, he came and healed their land. He sent droughts, and floods, and famines. And then He dragged them through the wilderness to make them depend on Him. When they obeyed him, their land flourished.
How is it then, in our modern sensibilities, that we view our position in the land as a merely transactional relationship? For many modern people, the earth is a place to get things, an industrial supply store. Even the wilderness, for all of its twenty-first century poetic associations, is often viewed as a place to get something. (i.e. exercise, food [for hunters], experience, Instagram posts) What we do to it, in the modern mind, is neither moral nor immoral, and the wilderness is indifferent to our uses of it. And so we are indifferent to it.
I posit that the wilderness and civilization stand in counterpoint like darkness and light, cold and heat, fasting and feasting. Without contrast, we accept as normal the predominant mode of living and normalize its crowded days. Every now and then we can step away and evaluate. In this way, the wilderness is a geography of the spirit, a place to retreat to, as Jesus did, to pray and reflect. The ultimate marriage of spiritual and physical would be a feature of geography and a landscape of the spirit that draws you closer to God, clarifies your purpose, energizes your ideas.
There are three elements that recur in the biblical accounts: 1) You are alone. To have another person or distractions makes it into civilization. 2) It is always temporary. Even if it feels permanent, such as when the Children of Israel wandered in the desert, the desert is not the destination. 3) We go into this emptiness for self-development, and in this way, to better serve our people. It is not merely for fun, it is not merely to recreate, it is not a vacation.
Civilization is the community where we gather to worship, disciple, and participate in the grand unfolding of God’s plan for humanity. It is where we will spend most of our time, find the most meaning, and do the most good. But the wilderness provides us a mirror to enter a geography of emptiness, of silence and aloneness, and self-reflection. Solitude. Or maybe suffer a little bit to put some of our comforts back into perspective. Wilderness, biblically speaking, is characterized by silence, discovery, and revelation, a place of vulnerability and a reconnection with the primal.
It would be easy to appeal to such an argument to convince your wife you need more time in the mountains. This seems to be always toeing the line between selfishness and self-development. (Certainly, we can spend time in the physical wilderness and not allow it to change us.) Maybe we should all do time in the wilderness—I could see this as more salutary than a weekend in the Florida Keys or at an Airbnb at the lake, and if all dads spent at least one week a year in the wilderness? Sign me up for such a civilization. I think it would have a different kind of man in it.
Maybe, as I posited once in a diary (it was in a diary for a reason), wilderness is a “state of mind.” But I think that is mostly bunkum. I have difficulty entering a wilderness when sitting at my desk, and have not found it to be some kind of Platonic state of mind. In my experience, it does not take a mountain range, but it does take a few trees and some stillness.
Maybe this entire essay is a personal confession, skewing reasoning to fit my experience. Certainly, every time I have needed comfort I have gone to the woods, where I have found a quietness, a clarity that has rarely comes to me in religious meeting houses. Roaming the woods with a water bottle and without a destination has always felt as if I were only a happy accident from enlightenment; that someday the vectors of luck and fate would cross and I would experience something rare and beautiful, transcendent, even. Am I then trying to universalize an experience that many people wouldn’t miss? Since I have enjoyed my time outdoors, am I romanticizing a wilderness into a kind of nonsense, so I have a good excuse to leave my wife at home while I head to the mountains? I do not know. But I do know I love the woods, and that it changes me for the good.