The Cultured Wild and the Limits of Wilderness

Authors

Paul Faulstich, Pitzer CollegeFollow

Document Type

Book Chapter

Program

Environmental Analysis (Pitzer)

Publication Date

1994

Keywords

nature, culture, ecology, aboriginals, cultural construction, wilderness, preservation

Abstract

Let me make it clear from the outset: my vision for Earth is a planet populated sparsely by humans, where nonhuman processes prevail, and where alienation between humans and nature is absent. Nature is a human construct imposed on the world, and we constitute it in ways that make cultural sense. It is an ideologically charged project, and knowledge about it is necessarily a social product. Nature is both something we observe and something we believe. It isn't simply an assemblage of things-as one sees in a natural history museum- but a way of understanding the world.

Rights Information

© 1994 Island Press

Recommended Citation

Faulstich, Paul. The Cultured Wild and the Limits of Wilderness. In David Clarke Burks (ed.), Place of the Wild: A Wildlands Anthology, pp. 161-74. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. 1994.