Old World Roots of Opinion

The land is the Garden of Eden before them, and behind them adesolate wilderness.

Joel 2:3

European discoverers and settlers of the New World were familiarwith wilderness even before they crossed the Atlantic. Some of thisacquaintance was first-hand, since in the late Middle Ages a considerableamount of wild country still existed on the Continent. Farmore important, however, was the deep resonance of wilderness asa concept in Western thought. It was instinctively understood assomething alien to man—an insecure and uncomfortable environmentagainst which civilization had waged an unceasing struggle.The Europeans knew the uninhabited forest as an important partof their folklore and mythology. Its dark, mysterious qualitiesmade it a setting in which the prescientific imagination could placea swarm of demons and spirits. In addition, wilderness as fact andsymbol permeated the Judeo-Christian tradition. Anyone with aBible had available an extended lesson in the meaning of wildland. Subsequent Christian history added new dimensions. As a result,the first immigrants approached North America with a clusterof preconceived ideas about wilderness. This intellectual legacy ofthe Old World to the New not only helped determine initial responsesbut left a lasting imprint on American thought.

The value system of primitive man was structured in terms ofsurvival. He appreciated what contributed to his well-being andfeared what he did not control or understand. The "best" trees producedfood or shelter while "good" land was flat, fertile, and wellwatered. Under the most desirable of all conditions the living waseasy and secure because nature was ordered in the interests of man.Almost all early cultures had such a conception of an earthly paradise.No matter where they were thought to be or what they werecalled, all paradises had in common a bountiful and beneficent naturalsetting in accord with the original meaning of the word inPersian—luxurious garden. A mild climate constantly prevailed.Ripe fruit drooped from every bough, and there were no thorns toprick reaching hands. The animals in paradise lived in harmonywith man. Fear as well as want disappeared in this ideal state of nature.

If paradise was early man's greatest good, wilderness, as its antipode,was his greatest evil. In one condition the environment, garden-like, ministered to his every desire. In the other it was at bestindifferent, frequently dangerous, and always beyond control. Andin fact it was with this latter condition that primitive man had tocontend. At a time when there was no alternative, existence in thewilderness was forbidding indeed. Safety, happiness, and progressall seemed dependent on rising out of a wilderness situation. Itbecame essential to gain control over nature. Fire was one step; thedomestication of some wild animals another. Gradually manlearned how to control the land and raise crops. Clearings appearedin the forests. This reduction of the amount of wilderness definedman's achievement as he advanced toward civilization. But progresswas slow. For centuries the wild predominated over the precariousdefenses thrown up against its influence. Men dreamed oflife without wilderness. Significantly, many traditions located paradiseon an island or in some other enclosed area. In this way thewild hinterland normally surrounding and threatening the firstcommunities was eliminated. Wilderness had no place in the paradisemyth.

The wilds continued to be repugnant even in as relatively advancedcivilizations as those of the Greeks and Romans. The celebrationsof nature, which abound in classical literature, are restrictedto the cultivated, pastoral variety. The beautiful in naturewas closely related to the fruitful or otherwise useful. The Romanpoet of the first century B.C., Titus Lucretius Carus, spoke for hisage in De Rerum Natura when he observed that it was a serious"defect" that so much of the earth "is greedily possessed by mountainsand the forests of wild beasts." Apart from the areas man hadcivilized, it "is filled full of restless dread throughout her woods,her mighty mountains and deep forests." Yet Lucretius took hopebecause "these regions it is generally in our power to shun."

Turning to history, Lucretius drew a grim portrait of precivilizedlife in the wilderness. Men lived a nightmarish existence,hounded by dangers on every hand and surviving through the ancientcode of eat or be eaten. With obvious satisfaction, Lucretiusrelated how the race escaped this miserable condition through theinvention of clothing, metals, and, eventually, "ships, agriculture,city walls, laws, arms, roads." These enabled man to control wildnature and achieve relative security. Cultural refinements and "allcharms of life" followed the release from the wilderness.

When Lucretius, Horace, Virgil and their contemporaries confessedtheir love of "nature" and expressed a desire to leave thetowns for a "natural" way of life, they meant the pastoral or ruralenvironment. Lucretius, for one, applauded the efforts of the firstfarmers whose labor "forced the forests more and more to climb themountain-sides." This made room for the cultivated landscape thatwas so highly prized. It consisted of "fields, ... crops, and joyousvineyards, and a gray-green strip of olives to run in between andmark divisions, ... adorned and interspersed with pleasant fruits,and fenced by planting them all round with fruitful trees." If thiswas the ideal, wilderness could only be forbidding and repulsive.

While inability to control or use wilderness was the basic factorin man's hostility, the terror of the wild had other roots as well.One was the tendency of the folk traditions of many cultures to associatewilderness with the supernatural and monstrous. There wasa quality of mystery about the wilderness, particularly at night, thattriggered the imagination. To frightened eyes the limbs of trees becamegrotesque, leaping figures, and the wind sounded like a weirdscream. The wild forest seemed animated. Fantastic creatures ofevery description were thought to lurk in its depths. Whether propitiatedwith sacrifices as deities or regarded as devils, these forestbeings were feared.

Classical mythology contained a whole menagerie of lesser godsand demons believed to inhabit wild places. Pan, the lord of thewoods, was pictured as having the legs, ears, and tail of a goat andthe body of a man. He combined gross sensuality with boundless,sportive energy. Greeks who had to pass through forests or mountainsdreaded an encounter with Pan. Indeed,...