planet earth into the wilderness worksheet

As historian Dorceta Taylor pointed out, the creation of wilderness areas in the United States involved the removal of Native Americans, the creation of a myth that they never inhabited there, a racist and prejudiced culture tainted with eugenics rhetoric, the exclusion of ethnic minorities from these areas, and the later segregation of these spaces and their management. For many, the term wilderness has been synonymous with violence inflicted on them. 1 However well-meaning these calls may be, history has shown that their dualist perspective has also contributed to a number of violent conflicts around the world. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the theme of wilderness has been present in environmentalists’ calls to preserve wild spaces on Earth. Wilderness, marronage, coloniality, Americas, Caribbean

In response, the author argues that it was not “wilderness” but the ingenious relationships Maroons nurtured with these woods that created the possibility of a world: in marronage lies the search of a world.

Wilderness is portrayed as emancipatory on the condition that the enslaved and the colonized remain silenced. As a case in point, the author critically engages with a failed attempt to accommodate Black enslaved experiences into a wilderness perspective made by Andreas Malm in a 2018 paper titled “In Wildness Lies the Liberation of the World: On Maroon Ecology and Partisan Nature.” Paradoxically, in suggesting that fugitive slaves’ experiences of “wild” spaces can point to a Marxist theory of wilderness, Malm ignores the concerns of Maroons and Indigenous peoples, including their theorizing voices, their ecology, and their demands for justice. However, the author contends that the wilderness concept is problematic because of its inability to recognize other conceptualizations of the Earth held by Indigenous and Black peoples in the Americas and the Caribbean.

What is the relevance of the concept of wilderness today? For some, the recognition of a troubled history of wilderness regarding people of color does not challenge its pertinence in facing the ecological crisis.

Planet earth into the wilderness worksheet