Slate: What Counts as Wilderness?

Your answer likely depends on your formative experiences—which books you’ve read, the types of landscape you visited growing up, and, of course, your native language. For American English-speakers well-versed in Ralph Waldo Emerson and his literary descendants, wilderness might bring to mind endless trees, raging rivers, and “the distant line of the horizon” described in his 1836 essay, ‘Nature.’

But for those who grew up elsewhere, the word, and the concepts behind it, could conjure up something entirely different.”