The ReWilding: The Meaning of Wild

The dominant paradigm--the techno-industrial "world order"--must dominate every vestige of personal and cultural wildness in order to propagate its methodology of extraction and control. Theirs is the religion of separateness--a rigidly cultivated separation between body and intellect, vision and reality, self and planet. In order to guarantee the unimpeded dismemberment and marketing of the natural world, the paradigm must construct and tend a perceptual schism between the living Earth and its human constituents. We find the evidence of this campaign in the other, newer definitions of the word "wild": "unruly, desolate, out of control, extravagant, fantastic, furiously disturbed or turbulent, risky, random, erratic, deviating, disorderly and disarranged." The definition of wilderness has gone from one of "uncultivated, unrestrained profusion" to a "bewildering wasteland." In the real world, wilderness is all there is--a condition of profuse nature that includes but is not determined by populations of natural humans. In what John Trudell calls the "shadow of the real world," designated Wilderness is a sequestered preserve managed by the same forces destroying the rest of the planet, an isolated playground for the recreational indulgence of an increasingly privileged few. For even most "outdoor enthusiasts" wilderness remains something separate from the self, a place to visit rather than a condition of being. For those seeking deeper elemental contact with the forces of Nature, it is an opportunity to act out a wildness shared and enjoyed equally by the inspirited natural landscape. Those escaping the boundaries of propriety and objectification are characteristically fun, and demonstrably feral. To the dominant global society, wild means unruly, out of control, and hence dangerous. A few generations after escaping into the thickets, feral hogs have turned the tables on many an unwary hunter. The feral creatures are the ones who have returned to their true nature and their natural context, a freedom worth guarding once found. Society refers to a willful child as wild. Wild weeds. Don't pick up the wild cat. Beware the feral dog, the savage wolf, the savages of "lesser" societies. We can learn so much about a civilization by the application of its language. We read common expressions like "savaged by a bear," and witness people yelling at their kids for behaving like "little savages." Savage wilderness. The word is derived from the Middle English sauvage, fro