I am currently in process of developing a PhD dissertation on the effects of long duration wilderness immersive experiences on human experiences of the body and/or embodiment. As a research psychology PhD degree, this will involve human subjects. In such endeavors, the task requires critical thinking about terminology (e.g., nature, wilderness) and the operationalization of essential constructs (e.g., body, embodiment). Because I intend to study wilderness immersive experiences on location, I need to be very clear about how wilderness and nature are defined.

There is a false dichotomy between nature and the human world, a persistent story for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years that asserts that we humans are somehow outside of, beyond, or greater than and different from the wilder-than-human world. The last one-hundred plus years of empirical science have provided substantial knowledge which situates the human animal deep into the ecological fabric of our Earth's past and current ecosystems. Yet, the duality construct is sticky, having wound its way deep into many human languages and institutions which govern our social and cultural interactions daily.

Inherently and intuitively, everything is nature, and yet this indivisible reality does not readily make accessible the variety of landscapes and terms that are used to define, characterize, and develop a more refined understanding of what it is, exactly, and why such arbitrary binaries remain important. Landfills are nature, just as the protected wilderness of Antarctica.

[Have you visited a landfill? Such a simple experience can be profoundly educational.]

On the one hand, being able to speak about the difference between a highly modified environment like a SUPERFUND SITE in comparison to a very little modified landscape like the pristine 9 million acres of the Wrangell-Saint Elias Wilderness in Alaska has been critical for the emergence of a sociocultural awakening to the unintended consequences of ecosystem pollution (e.g., Rachel Carson's [1962] Silent Spring, which detailed how DDT was devastating bird populations by weakening shell walls of offspring). The many-sided movement to protect Earth's environment sprang from such emergent awareness, and consequently some of the most powerful legislation ever passed in this country (e.g., Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act).

Let us hold the science-based assumption for a moment that we humans are an evolutionary product of the 4.3 billion year history of life on this planet. Accordingly, then, there is no true separation between humans and nature: no US and no THEM. We Earthlings are all aspects of some greater web of processes ongoing, interconnected and consanguinated (Abram, 1996), symbiotic and sympoeitic (Haraway, 2016), and immediately interwoven with one another in an intercorporeality of enmeshment.

Ergo, in Chapter 1 of my dissertation, I propose an impact gradient with which to clarify the lexical fragility of wilderness and nature. Inspired by prior ecopsychological and deep ecological thinkers–-such as Buzzell (2016) and Naess (1989) respectively who also drew apart terms for clarity–-my central proposition here is for the articulation of an understanding of the lifeworld based on the technological imprint of the human species. 

What follows is paraphrased from my in process dissertation, so if you decide to use please give proper citation and credit to Thompson Bishop (2025).

In brief, there is a line of human egress into and onto once pristine environments and associated ecologies from human technologies, including from the light impacts of wild-crafting to the heavy impacts of industrial agriculture, or from thatched-roof huts to city-scaping, or from rock knapping to the complete reshaping of coal, lithium, and copper mined landscapes.

Simply put, areas of little technological (low use) muddling help sort the concepts of wilderness, conservation areas, and protected areas into a category of likeness just as areas of high technological imprint (high use) easily coalesce the terms of city, parking lot, land fill, and factory farm.

Low use areas refer to those areas of the physical world that are primarily free of human-built structures, commodification, and exploitation and which are alive with multispecies ecosystems and processes. These are areas which are largely minimally impacted as of yet by human development and use. High-use areas (e.g., parking lots, landfills, industrial areas, and urban environments), on the other hand, are places that have been significantly degraded and impacted by human use.

Nature as a term, then, can more clearly encompass the complete physical world in its entirety and do away with a false duality. Wilderness, therefore, can refer to a specific type of landscape, a low-use area which is mostly free from human modification.

Such reconsideration of environments based on use and impact can also allow for the refinement of ongoing technological infringement into light-use areas by overflying planes (both visual and acoustic impacts), satellites in the night sky (visual), and an increasing problem of shared air circulation which contains increasing levels of industrial pollutants, carbon dioxide, and other human technological remnant impacts (increasing use across the globe).

If you take a moment and consider the places in your life where you felt deep connection and mystery to something in the lifeworld, the vast nature which always surrounds us, was it place of high use or low use?

To begin to understand such inner inquiry is to begin to open ourselves vulnerably to the impacts we have---as individuals and as a species---on this precious and fragile planet we call home.

| tbird |

References

Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world. Pantheon Books.

Buzzell, L. (2016). The many ecotherapies. In M. Jordan, & J. Hinds (Eds.), Ecotherapy: Theory, research, & Practice (pp. 70–82). Palgrave.

Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

Naess, A. (1989). Ecology, community, and lifestyle (D. Rothenberg, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.

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