The Need for Wilderness? (1/3)
Finding ourselves
Children are currently born into a very different world than that of a hundred years ago and even more so of a thousand years ago. Our life environments have significantly changed, from large expanses of wild landscapes intertwined with small areas tamed by humans organically to large artificial environments molded by humans and degraded natural landscapes coexisting with small expanses of accessible wilderness.
In essence, we are mammals, one tiny piece in the great interdependent and interconnected web of life that inhabits our blue marble, the Earth. As we are born from our mother’s womb we take our first big gasp for air filled with vital oxygen loudly screaming, we expect our mothers’ protective warmth and start receiving nourishment from her milk. We share this story with all other mammals on the planet, wolves, orangutans, mice, elephants, tapirs, bears, jaguars, koalas, and so on. In essence, we are born wild.
In our current world, for many, our essential wilderness experience starts evading us since the moment we are born. We are placed in a crib, inside and squared angle room, usually with white walls and we start interacting with artificial elements of all types. In many cases, even the milk is an industrial product delivered to our mouths by a plastic container.
As we grow and develop, wilderness keeps evading us. We develop in kindergartens full of artificial elements to explore and play, we then go to school for over 12 years and learn in rectangular classrooms, all this time receiving our nourishment from packaged foods coming from supermarkets.
Growing up in postmodern environments we fall into great separation from nature, our brain incorporates the codes of modern artificial environments into our essential way of reading and relating to our world, an increasingly urbanized world, an environment lacking wilderness. We need to recover wilderness in our experience as it is in our basic essence and we have lost our contact with it.
We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. — Henry David Thoreau in Walden
Wilderness has the power to bring us back as individuals to the realization of who we are in this complex system of life. Wilderness allows us to remember our essence and reconnect with nature’s underlying magic.
We need wilderness in our lives as we grow, explore and learn. As we develop a sense of being and understand how we relate to our planet’s systems. We need wilderness to aid in connecting our brains allowing greater empathic capacities. Empathy with nature is a critical component of the empathic triad nature, other and self.
We need wilderness’ capacity to stimulate our sense of awe, and with it to open doors into our most profound creative powers, feed our sense of planetary belonging and responsibility.
It allows us to re-connect and strengthen the aspects of the self which will make it possible for us to reclaim our role as stewards of the Planet and allow us to shift our ways into regenerative and peaceful communities.
We each need wilderness, I need wilderness to find myself.
Luis Camargo is the Founder and Director of OpEPA.
#INeedWilderness #WhyWilderness #NatureForAll #NatureBasedEducation
