In 2003 Conservation International published a book called Wilderness: Earth’s Last Wild Places, the work of 200 researchers under the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science. To qualify as “wilderness”, the areas had to have 70 per cent or more of their original vegetation, cover at least 10,000 square kilometers, and have fewer than five people per square mile. Using these criteria, they identified 37 “wilderness areas” around the globe, representing tropical rain forests, wetlands, deserts, and arctic tundra. Most of the terrestrial globe, the densely populated bulk of the world, was blank. The book also, intriguingly, described the “human cultures unique to each area”. What is interesting is the ease with which the word “wilderness” suggests itself to the publicists of Conservation International to describe these areas. It is a particularly strange way to describe places where people live, even in small numbers. The idea that places little transformed by cities, roads and other features of industrial and urban development are “wilderness” is in fact commonplace in conservation thinking and writing, but it is nonetheless odd for that. It is in many ways a particularly American idea, although it is one that has spread and been adopted around the world. It underpinned the concept of the national park that was developed in the United States in the late 19th century, and which was such a powerful cultural export.
