Why We Need WILD PLACES
How to Invite Nature Back into Our Lives and Landscapes
by Sheryl DeVore
O
n a blustery day, Julian Hoffman stood outdoors and watched wild bison grazing in the
restored grassland of Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, fewer than 50 miles from downtown Chicago. For him, it was a wild place, affording a glimpse of what North America looked like hundreds of years ago when bison roamed the continent by the millions. “We’re witnessing, in a way that’s both terrible and tragic, just what the profound cost is of continuing to destroy the natural world,” he writes. Saving wild places is critical for human
health and well-being, say both scientists and environmentalists. But defining what a wild place is or what the word wilderness means can be difficult, says Hoffman, author of Irreplaceable: Te Fight to Save Our Wild Places. “If wilderness means a place untouched by humans, then none is leſt,” he says. Even the set-aside wildernesses where no one may have ever stepped have been altered through climate change, acid rain and other human interventions. Humans are also losing the wilderness
that is defined as land set aside solely for plants and creatures other than humans. Prominent naturalist David Attenborough, whose most recent documentary is A Life on Our Planet, says that in 1937, when he was a boy, about 66 percent of the world’s wilderness areas remained. By 2020, it was down to 35 percent. A wild place can be as spectacular as
Yellowstone, a 3,500-square-mile national park in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, filled with hot springs, canyons, wolves, and elk. It can also be as simple as a sky filled with a murmuration, or gathering, of thousands of swooping starlings, which once caused two teens to stop taking selfies and photograph the natural scene above them instead, as Hoffman witnessed in Great Britain. Such regions that offer vast tracts of
natural beauty and biodiversity are even found in and around major cities like Chicago, says Chicagoland nature blogger Andrew Morkes. “A wild place is also where you don’t see too many people, or any people, and you can explore,” he says. “You can walk up a hill and wonder what’s around the next bend.” “A wild place could be a 15-minute drive
from home where we can walk among plants in a meadow, or a tree-lined street, or
18 Central Florida
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