[at-l] 'Wilderness' definition(s)...

[sloetoe at yahoo.com (Sloetoe)]

> Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 09:36:44 -0400
> From: "Bob C" <ellen@clinic.net>
> Subject: Re: [at-l] "Pro-cell phone Sloetoe..."

If wilderness is the absence of the artifacts
> of civilization. The proliferation of this new device that
> makes possible instant communication with home and business
> changes the nature of wildness and the experience of wildness
> for all who use the trails, the woods and the mountains.
> 
> Some may not recognize the change. But that does not mean that
> it has not happened. Many may welcome the change. But that
> does not mean that it is for the good. 
> 
> Whether seen, or unseen. Used discretely, or not. When we
> reach the point where everyone knows most packs contain the
> devices, the wildness that since at least the times of Jesus
> humans have sought in the "wilderness," will have been
> diminished.
> Weary
### I liked this alot, Weary, but that last part.... man, that's
just poetry.

> Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 11:55:27 -0500
> From: "Shane Steinkamp" <shane@theplacewithnoname.com>
> Subject: Re: [at-l] "Pro-cell phone Sloetoe..."
> 
> If I had to come up with a short quip, wilderness is the
> absence of people.

### Wilderness is where you touch the primordial, regardless of
geography...

--- Sloetoe <sloetoe@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 21:51:52 -0800 (PST)
> From: Sloetoe <sloetoe@yahoo.com>
> Subject: wilderness conceptual coolness... 
> To: at-l@backcountry.net
> 
> Well, I've gotta go home now, but in the morning, or sometime
real soon, I'm gonna write a nice little postie explaining how
"wilderness" is a construct, a concept we pick up and carry
around with us, and not some sort of deliniation you see on the
ground like an embodied USGS marker employed to meanly show only
Congressionally designated administrative areas (and demanding
more scientists to study them than visitors to hike them).
> 
> I'm gonna lay out how the wilderness construct comes from one
singular foundation, that being anytime YOU are not in
control. I'm gonna clarify how that can happen *anywhere* and at
*any*time*. The guy who was just gored by the buck in his
kitchen HAD WILDERNESS in his kitchen. The idiot doctor who
froze his cookies, cell phone and all, on top of Washington, was
*definitely* stuck in the WILDERNESS. Don't think so? Then feel
your way out to him and tell him so. Aldo Leopold wrote that
when you rise before your neighbors, you own the world; Leopold
knew what wilderness was. The hikers who rise and hike before
the nocturnal animals get bedded down for the day may sense
wilderness, and the poor woman who was mauled in the Smokys this
year died from it. 
> 
> Wilderness is shattered in Alaska and northern Canada, and in
Nepal and the Amazon, *all* in the same way: by man affecting
control over the animals and the elements. But when that control
is lost -- even in a back yard in New Jersey, we experience the
primordial. And THAT is the essence, and the only thing that
matters, about "wilderness."

Spatior! Nitor! Nitor! Tempero!
   Pro Pondera Et Meliora.