The Abstract Wild
“Those early visits to the Maze, Glen Canyon, and the Escalante led me to the margins of the modern world, areas wild in the sense Thoreau meant when he said that in wildness is the preservation of the world: places where the land, the flora and fauna, the people, their culture, their language and arts were still ordered by energies and interests fundamentally their own, not by the homogenization and normalization of modern life.”
“[Wildness is] the relation of free, self-willed, and self-determinate ‘things’ with the harmonious order of the cosmos.”
“Something vast and old is vanishing and our rage should mirror that loss.”
In a collection of eight essays, Turner examines the questions: “how wild is wilderness and how wild are our experiences in it?” He argues—angrily, unapologetically—that the threats to wilderness have their root in six harmful abstract values and mindsets that shape our modern character and culture: 1) “our diminished personal experience of nature,” 2) “our preference for artifice,” 3) “our…dependence on experts to control and manipulate a natural world we no longer know,” 4) “our addiction to economics, recreation, and amusement at the expense of other values,” 5) a Western homogeneity and monoculture of biology, culture, language, thought, and social structures, and 6) an ignorance of or refusal to recognize the catastrophic loss of our “several-million-year-old intimacy with the natural world.” He calls for a change in character and in culture so we can reunited with the “life-force,” reborn as champions who confront the abstractions that keep the wild abstract from us.