Deconstructing Wilderness: Time to Take a Walk on the Post-Wild Side

• Author: G. Tracy Mehan III
• Pages: 178-181

178 Best of the Books: Ref‌lections on Recent Literature

Deconstructing Wilderness:

Time to Take a Walk on

the Post-Wild Side

By G. Tracy Mehan III

Rambunctious Ga rden: Saving Na ture in a Post-Wild World, by

Emma Marris. Bloo msbury. 210 pa ges.

From the September/ October 2012 issue of The Environm ental Forum.

There is a growing resistance toward

accepted notions of nature, wilderness,

ecology, and the “balance of nature”

that views the ideal as a steady state and has

been ambivalent, if not outright hostile, on the

presence of human beings on the landscape.

Daniel B. Botkin, a noted ecological sci-

entist, wrote a path-breaki ng book, D iscor-

dant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st

Century (1990), which arg ued that human

mispercept ions of a natural balance in nature

actua lly hi ndered scientic eorts at protec-

tion and re storation.

Botkin cited the Boundary Waters Canoe

Area in northern Minnesota, a very wild

place, which “could persist with the lea st

direct human inter vention.” It has from the end of the last ice age until the

time of European colonization, “passed from the ice and tundra to spruce

and jack pine forest.” From there it shifted to paper birch and alder, and then

back to spruce, jack pine, and white pine driven by va riable climate. “Which

of these forests represented the natural state?”

“If natural means simply before human intervention, then all these habi-

tats could be claimed as natural, c ontrary to what people really mean and

really want,” wrote Botkin.