Wilderness is changing.
From climate change impacts to smartphones keeping us constantly connected, wilderness is no longer a place to unplug in a land untouched by humans. And it never was. The land set aside as wilderness was expropriated from Indigenous peoples who managed that land for millennia.
If the physical landscape and our ideas about wilderness are changing, what does that mean for the land we’ve set aside as wilderness?
The U.S. designated the first official wilderness 100 years ago.
Now there are over 800 wilderness areas set aside under the federal Wilderness Act to be places that are “natural,” “undeveloped,” with “opportunities for solitude.” Places where “man is just a visitor.”
How Wild is a documentary-style podcast that looks at why we first made the distinction between land designated for human activity and what we have decided to leave “untrammeled.”
It’s for anyone who is curious about the relationship between humans and nature and what it really means to "leave no trace.”
