Writing from the southern Rockies, Molly Murfee shares her disappointment with how some young people think about wilderness
We were talking about what defined wilderness. The students in my nature writing course came up with this – wilderness was the place you lost your cell phone coverage.
That was when it got real, they postulated, when help might not be just around the corner, when an ambulance couldn’t arrive to swoop you up in case danger materialized in physical consequences.Not the presence of large predator species needing hundreds of square miles to live. Not the presence of thousands and millions of acres. Not silence, or solitude.Their definition wasn’t based on intact ecosystems, wildlife corridors for the roamers in our midst, rich biodiversity, or unbroken habitat deep enough to preserve native species.Cell phone reception.I almost threw up….(more)
