wilder(ness

 

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The marvel of a basket is in its transformation, its journey from wholeness as a living plant to fragmented strands and back to wholeness again as a basket. A basket knows the dual powers of destruction and reaction that shape the world. Strands once separated are rewoven into a new whole. The journey of a basket is also the journey of a people.


—Robin Wall Kimmerer
Braiding Sweetgrass, pg 256

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The inhabited regions of earth – if prehistoric people had such a conception – were simply the location of a band within some traditionally determined hunting area. The idea of wilderness with connotations of wasteland, badlands, or hinterlands was not conceivable, just as a round earth is not conceivable to people who believe in a flat earth. 

Paul Shepard argues that space for prehistoric people “is a society of named places – not categories such as ‘river’ or ‘mountain’ but proper names, marked in tribal memory and sometimes in myth… Seeing all nature as a society may have made possible the evolution of intelligence to that acute degree of awareness without which the vast physical universe would be found terrifying, even intolerable”. 

Home was a natural world of plants, animals, and land with which archaic people were bound. 

The idea of “being lost in the wilderness” logically necessitates a geographical referent conceptualized as home as distinct from all other places; but for Paleolithic people home was where they were and where they had always been. 

They could not become lost in the wilderness, since it did not exist. The conjecture that the conscious life of Paleolithic people was devoid of such ideas as “being away from home” or “in the wilderness away from the inhabited regions of earth” is thus plausible.


—Max Oelschlaeger
The Idea of Wilderness

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