Wilderness

Definitions

Conceptions of landscape vary widely from culture to culture and from person to person within a given culture. When William Bradford debarked the Mayflower, he pronounced what he saw a ‘hideous and desolate wilderness’; to the native Americans, who had preceded him, it was home. In the United States in the 20th century wilderness has come to mean a designated area or region where (a) natural forces are at work with minimal human intervention, and (b) there are opportunities for primitive and unconfined forms of recreation (Nash, 1982). This view of wilderness is reflected in the institutional definitions adopted in the United States and in the international community.

In the United States the Wilderness Act of 1964 (P.L. 88–577) provides both poetical and practical definitions of wilderness:

A wilderness... 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. An area of...