What does 'wilderness' mean to YOU?

Question

i'm not looking for a dictionary defintion. i'd like to know what you think.

This is the 1st in a series of 30 questions on Nature and the Environment which I'll ask in the following sections: Religion & Spirituality and Philosophy (for the first few questions only), Society & Culture, Environment, and Politics & Government. I will post them in the US, UK, Singapore and India Y!A sites.

This is not for homework, poll or survey purposes. The topics are ones that interest me specifically and are strictly for my own curiosity about the world.

If you are interested in seeing the complete results of these questions please send me a message.

Answer 1

Wilderness means land where no one hardly lives.  Untouched my human contact.  It touches the human soul through the animals, trees, bushes, mountains.  All the wildlife contribute to the wilderness.

Answer 2

Isolation

Very few people or machines

Animals

Answer 3

Wilderness is an environment which contains the essence of wild.  The wild includes all life that exists outside the civilization of man.  Some definitions get to specific in my opinion.  The wild can be influenced by man, there is hardly a place on earth that man hasn't been to.  What defines it as wild is simply without the settlement of man.  Civilization of course would have the most influence on an environment.

Answer 4

To me, it means an unspoiled, raw area in which anything is possible for the natural environment.

Answer 5

To me, wilderness is any place where you can't tell that people have impacted upon it and where there are no signs of civilisation. Hmm. There are not many places like that.

Answer 6

I believe the yahoo answers sites for different countries are all linked. Wilderness to me is something natural that I'm not accustomed to, such as an untrimmed bush.

Answer 7

The parts of Nature where Humans do not rule.

Answer 8

If there are no people, only wild things, we might call it a wilderness. We would likely not call a tropical rain forest a wilderness, nor would we likely call a vast boreal forest, although from our initial understanding we could.

Up in the 'arctic wilderness' we have so little wild life that we might question our use of the term, but what we are using the term for is to express the absence of (many) people. Clearly people do live in and visit a wilderness too.

So we find that a wilderness is a place where we would feel isolated, would have to live by our animal intelligence, finding food, protecting ourself from the elements... a threatening if liberating thought.

Of course, to a true vegan being deep in a wilderness without the means to escape would be especially threatening, In a wilderness, devoid of agriculture, she must live on what native plants she can find, and compete for that vegetation with the other vegetarian animals, even starving animals,  constrained by ethical principle from eating those starving animals.

Answer 9

Anywhere on Earth generally untouched and uninfluenced by man and technlogy and where nature, plant life and wildlife remain unchanged outside of their normal evolution and within some small percent of outside influence.