Wilderness Has a Purity Problem
What does it mean for a landscape to be pristine? Ande Peersen reflects on her love of the outdoors and her work for the U.S. Forest Service to interrogate the nature–culture divide.
Tagged: Wilderness
The Collective Work of Urban Conservation
Drawing on examples of urban wildlife refuges in California and Alaska, environmental attorney Nicholas Moore makes the case for not only protecting these places but creating more of them.
Where the Queer Wild Things Are
Can wildness be its own way of thinking and knowing? And where should we look to find out? Julia Dauer reviews Jack Halberstam’s wide-ranging new book, Wild Things.
There’s No Escaping Oil, Even in the Wild Arctic
A renewed push to open the Arctic to oil and gas drilling leads one writer to investigate petromodernity, arguing that oil flows through ideas of the environment as much as it does through the economy.
Fire and the Impermanence of Landscape
Photography is both an act of memory and a way to perceive change. For one writer, returning home means facing a landscape transformed by fire, climate change, and time.
Queer Camping, Then and Now
A cultural anthropologist explores how queer camping subverts masculine camping culture and supports new queer identities and communities in the outdoors.
Can Green Diplomacy Take Root in the DMZ?
Ecological challenges on a shared peninsula invite Korean green diplomacy. Read how pine trees and conservation matter to North and South negotiations.
A Nation’s Shadow at Bears Ears National Monument
In a series of photographs, a scholar and wilderness guide meditates on wild places and the politics of resource extraction in southern Utah.
From Herders to Hikers, the Shifting Lives of Scottish Bothies
Camping in a highland hut called a bothy, once home to Scottish hill farmers, a photographer finds kinship amidst wild space.
Private Land Conservation is Troubling—and Probably Indispensable
When a writer joins scientists on a mushroom hunt at a Gilded Age wilderness retreat, she grapples with the exclusions and inequalities that have produced such an ecologically valuable landscape.
