Rebranding the Wild

The thing that really struck me from this weekend's reading can be summed up in the first line of Paul Schneider's account of the Adirondacks: "In a sense this book is a romance, a story of first love between Americans and a thing they call wilderness" (Schneider, xi).

I think something can be said for the unfailing romanticization of the Adirondack Park, or wilderness in general--because that kind of "wilderness as the ultimate good" rhetoric seems to be a staple of environmental writing (well, the hopeful kinds anyway) (McKibben, 77). At its core, deified language like this acts essentially as a means of branding. In much the same way that Panera brands itself as a healthy fast-food-esque option, national and state parks like the Adirondacks are marketed as the best that nature has to offer, a place not just where people can go to birdwatch or soak in the sunrise, but where they can hear "the pulsating hum of insect warble r[ise] and f[all] in murmuring waves" (McKibben, 65). From these words, McKibben has already transplanted his audience into that "wilderness," painting an idealized (though by no means inaccurate) picture of those woods so as to give the reader a connection to that place, a reason to care about it, and then, hopefully, the drive to protect it. That's the romanticism of environmental writing at work.

I think it's important to note here that I'm all for what McKibben, and to some extent Schneider, is trying to do: by portraying the wild as this picturesque entity worthy of being preserved, he (hopefully) rallies up support for a more sustainable co-habitation of this planet. What's sad about this  tactic, however, is the idea that we have to sell the "saving the planet" mindset to people--we have to market the "3 R's of Sustainability" (reduce, reuse, recycle!) and advertise nature's glory; we have to define "the wilderness" as this remote, immaculate, natural archetype in order to get people to pay attention to its disappearance. The problem with this, I think, is that, as McKibben puts it himself: "when you walk through wilderness, you walk through an idea" (McKibben, 96). The "wilderness," as advertised, becomes this idealized, abstract concept constrained to far removed portions of Alaska where the general public isn't apt to venture.

I think a more fruitful endeavor might be a re-branding of "wilderness" as the ground under our feet. Humans are just as much a part of "the wilderness" as the trees or the bugs or the acid rain that our overzealous use of nitrate-containing laundry detergent has caused. While the land we live on may no longer be truly "wild" by McKibben's standards, human inhabited land represents a different kind of wilderness. It represents a biological wilderness because it is a life-supporting network of more living things than we can imagine; it is an economical wilderness because we humans are indebted to this land for shelter and food and life; it is an untamed wilderness because we do not yet know the full extent of human impact on its soil; but most of all, it is a wilderness with an attached, and very tangible, feeling of place. This kind of wilderness brings to the conversation a sense of responsibility and ecological servitude because the wilderness in our backyards is not idealized or exalted, but real and close and present--and that reality, I think, hits a little closer to home.

Ultimately, becoming a part of this new wilderness continues Schneider's book of romance--and finding a sustainable balance in this new landscape truly will be a labor of love.