Let’s talk about wildness in the West

Yeah, wildness -- that which precedes our park-ified Wilderness in the West today...

My significant other and I were watching some low-thought TV the other night on NetFlix and happened on this show about vacation properties – one of which was in my neck of the woods. It rented for $12,000 per night and one of the hosts noted it was in the “Blah Blah Wilderness” (omitting the name to prevent over-loving of the place.) Yes, a $12,000 per night “cabin” with a multi-car garage is in this Wilderness area… 

Which triggered a clear thought about how the American public and mind perceives non-domestic spaces – Basically, everything is wilderness if it has a pretty view. 

A little reductio ad absurdum there, but let’s roll with it for a quick read; The host didn’t realize that the property couldn’t be inside of the named ‘Wilderness’ area because all designated wilderness areas are bounded by the Wilderness Act of 1964. It was definitely outside of this wilderness area, and the host clearly didn’t know this – but neither do most Americans. 

In my experience, lower-case-wilderness is thrown around as a general term for any area people perceive to have natural character – areas near campgrounds, the mountains (in general), and anywhere they camp – or the spaces surrounding a cabin. It’s a place where birds chirp and streams flow — and it has to be pretty.

But they do not necessarily recognize that a capital-W-Wilderness area is a specific political boundary that restricts uses and “protects” a place from all mechanized travel including bicycles, resource extraction, and then regulates almost all other activities – like how you camp, whether you can bring a dog, how many fish you can keep, which areas have high-use restrictions, and so on – and it also makes the place an automatic marketing beacon for visitation. These are recreation areas, and there are never $12,000 per night cabins in them, because there would be no way to build or access the cabin. 

Welcome to a new Wilderness: A new BLM sign closing off a road on previously open public lands, about to become a ‘Wilderness’ area. Note that the BLM office and contact information was redacted since this post is about a concept, not this place, and to prevent re-and-over-visitation.

A little foray into the language on the subject reveals that many Americans also use the word ‘nature’ interchangeably with all of the above, but almost certainly for any place that has a view, and that does not have as much urban development around it. I frequently hear people say, “I’m going camping this weekend – I need to be near nature.” Always an interesting statement, which invariably comes out of exurban transplants and alike tourists.

There is one word that is rarely used, and that’s because it’s a little more nuanced - perhaps a little more contradictory to the conventional American thought on non-domestic spaces. That word is – Wildness. Directly borrowed from Aldo Leopold, I find this one to be the most juxtaposed to the common American understanding of wilderness, Wilderness, and nature … it’s the precursor to Wilderness, and defies the myths of nature that the American mind seems to be steeped in. 

Wildness is the word that helps clarify that there is no infrastructure in a place – there’s no naming it, it’s not on trip reports, no big outline on a map that says, “go here, it’s nature, of the relaxing yoga variety” and the place is left to do what it does without things like fire suppression, herd or predator control, search and rescue, or any of the protections that Americans have come to expect in their relationship with nature. Nope, wildness is the thing that Americans, and especially the exurban variety, seem to entirely lack exposure to and understanding of.

Places with truly wild character are the places without the ski patrol to save you when you fall down and get a boo-boo, and without a tourist / recreation map to show where to go with numbers pointing to where you can find Instagrammable identity boosting treasure-troves. Your friends back east will be so jealous when they see what you discovered, you adventurer, you …

Wildness is missing from our vocabulary, because places with truly wild traits are becoming rarer and rarer. There’s so much infrastructure in places like Colorado, Utah, California, and the rest of the interior West now, places with truly wild character are headed for extinction. Most people don’t know that the last grizzly bear in Colorado was killed in something like 1950, and wolves sometime in the 1940s, after a long history of being exterminated to help make the place safer for tourists to ‘enjoy nature.’ Mission accomplished, it seems … 

As the population of Colorado and the rest of the interior West continue to grow in an exponential pattern, the paradox is in the people who are arriving for experience in the wilderness and in nature – and how their entire vision and ability to navigate the place is entirely predicated on the presence of familiar and safe infrastructure – which is the antithesis of wildness, and counter to the myths that are driving people to move here. So few realize that their Wilderness Act-designated areas are infrastructure – and they’re not conducive or even related to wildness. They’re not even conducive to an authentic experience in what some are calling, nature.

And as for lowercase-wilderness, I’m not convinced that any of the people moving west even know what that is since they use it to describe an aesthetic with no semblance of a holistic understanding of what they’re describing.

In the end, we appear to be in a pattern of ‘park-ification’ as those flooding into the West create demand for spaces that are navigable via clearly delineated infrastructure, meanwhile lacking clear language to describe the mythologized non-domestic spaces – nature, wilderness, Wilderness, or whatever dithered pet name they choose to give it. The myth is that all of these places are wild, the same, and governed by non-human processes, lending to in-tact ecosystems. In Colorado and the rest of the West, none of them are anymore.

Is the West wild anymore? Definitely not – and it’s because of the new westerners who are driven by myth, image, and who lack any real understanding of what they’re looking at when they see a $12,000 per night cabin in a place that’s not in Wilderness, is also not in the wilderness or nature, and shares absolutely no semblance of the wildness the place once was.

The Fleeting West is written, informally and without edits or apologies, by a rooted westerner with a bone to pick and a riot act to read.