The Colonialist Subtext of the word "Wilderness"

As the global movement for climate action gains momentum and the discourse of ecological economics and regenerative design enter the public arena, it’s time to check the language of the movement to ensure we are a) being as effective as possible and b) not causing further harm in our advocacy, our activism and our actions.

As we know, language helps us to form our thoughts and our worldview, and it evolves and develops out of the interactions between us and our socio-environmental context. No language is benign or objective, all language is loaded with underlying meaning and is rich with cultural context, and this has a direct impact on the types of thoughts we can actually create or are more prone to create. Our language is what frames our worldview.

As such, it is important to examine the language we use today, especially the English language, which has become so widely adopted, so we can remove from our daily vocabulary the vestiges of colonialism and oppression, and pave a path towards social justice and equity.

Some of the terms used in modern environmentalism that come from this colonialist lexicon are still acting to reaffirm the colonialist-capitalist worldview and way of thinking. One of the words which is particularly counter-productive and acting to the detriment of environmental thinking is the word “Wilderness”, and removing it from our vocabulary would be a powerful move towards the decolonisation of our minds and the empowerment of more inspiring environmental thinking.

To begin with, the word wilderness is only used by a person who sees themselves as separate from the natural world, and it is not used by those who consider this so-called wilderness as a part of themselves, their identity, their society or their home. It is old, narrow-minded, short-sighted and outdated language, and the damage that this type of disconnected language and thinking has caused the planet and our global society is plain to see, in this, the era of the Anthropocene.

The word wilderness is only useful in the vocabulary of one who does not recognise the inextricable interconnection of human life and the natural world.

More to the point, “wilderness” was used by the colonisers who refused to acknowledge the validity of the civilisations and societies that lived in harmony with their natural world for millennia. As we begin looking into the ways the word was and still is being used, we notice that in the subtext of these phrases there still remains the sentiment of ‘civilisation as separate to wilderness’.

We soon begin to understand how referring to a place as untouched wilderness is about as offensive as claiming that Australia was uninhabited because the environment was intact and unexploited. It’s as if it is inconceivable to the Western mind that it is possible to touch something without exploiting and destroying it.

To understand a bit more about why it is so offensive to use the term “wilderness” to describe the natural world, especially as environmentalists and activists and change-making academics, we need to understand that the European colonisers and enslavers justified the atrocities they carried out across the globe through a few key strategic and collectively agreed upon lies, not the least of which was the intentional creation of the false construct of “race”.

In order to create this falsified classification of human beings into a 5-tiered racial hierarchy, the Europeans first had to document some misinformation to pass off as scientific observation upon which they could then build their scientific racism. Central to all of the lies used to justify slavery and colonisation was the lie that civilisation did not exist in the parts of the world they stumbled upon.

 

Apparently, there was no civilisation in Western Africa when the Portuguese began enslaving people in the 1400s, only wilderness.

As the high school textbooks try to portray it, it seems Columbus ‘discovered’ America and there were no civilised people there at all, only “wilderness and savage natives”. And Terra Nullius was declared in Australia because the British did not recognise a people as civilised if they lived in harmony with their natural world. The hundreds of nations that existed here harmoniously, were intentionally portrayed and documented as nomadic tribes of sub-humans living in ‘bestial sloth’ in the middle of the ‘wilderness’.

These good Christian colonisers justified their actions and addressed the cognitive dissonance of calling themselves civilised, while enacting the epitome of barbarism by denying the humanity of societies because they had no civilisation to speak of. Looking back, we can easily understand how the denial and intentional omission of the extraordinary Indigenous Australian agriculture, as outlined by Bruce Pascoe in Dark Emu, was a tool used to ease the troubled conscience of the coloniser and justify the brutal genocides they carried out in the name of Queen and country. This was all intentionally left out of our education because it did not corroborate the narrative of Terra Nullius; they had to call the place “Wilderness” in order to colonise it.

This so-called wilderness in Australia, in the Americas, in the Kingdoms of Africa, are the homes and communities of people, their societies and their civilisations, but because it did not fit the coloniser’s idea of a city or town or kingdom, they deemed it as empty and its peoples as less than human. That is how they justified and glorified the enslavement of people, colonisation and genocide.

Still to this day, there are people living in harmony with their natural world, and still to this day colonisers are oppressing them, imprisoning them, assassinating them, destroying their homelands and invading to take the resources in the earth.

This is happening in the Amazon of Brazil, it is happening in Papua New Guinea by the Indonesian Government, it is happening in Canada, it is happening here in Australia, and a US-backed coup in Bolivia last year was again another example of the Western capitalist’s disregard for a people’s sovereignty because of a lack of respect for the wishes and way of life of the Indigenous peoples.

It is because those lands are considered as wilderness to the Western eye, that the lives and societies of those who live there are deemed worthless.

The World Bank published an article in February claiming that the Tibetan people should “sustainably invest” in their forests that cover 90% of their country because they only contribute 3% to their GDP. This commodification of the Earth’s natural resources, the colonization of the Earth’s people, and the Anthropocentric language which separates and delineates between “wilderness” and “civilisation”, according to Western colonial-capitalist standards, is at the root of all that is destroying our world; not the least of which is the issue of climate change.

 
After all that the world has lost and learned due to the anthropocentric way of thinking, to now have to hear Sir David Attenborough speak of “saving the world’s wilderness” in his latest documentary ‘A Life on Our Plant’, reminds me how colonisation is not carried out through violence and bloodshed alone, but also through language and ideas. This is why cultural genocide (the erasure of a people’s existing language and culture) was such an indispensable tool for the colonisers.

The oceans, and forests, the great plains and ice caps that Sir David Attenborough wants us to save and preserve is not “Wilderness”, we are looking at human societies and cultures and knowledge bases that have existed long before the Eurocentrism that blinds the people of the world today. Removing that anthropocentric lens of the capitalist consumer for just one moment, will show us how calling it Wilderness is what debars us from partaking of the wisdom of the First Nations peoples of the world.

We don’t need to “save the wilderness”, we need to stop calling it wilderness because calling it such is what allowed the white man to give himself permission to destroy it for profit in the first place.

For as long as environmental activists and advocates continue to call it wilderness, there will be someone who will justify destroying it for profit. It is time for those of us who dedicate ourselves to the work of climate justice, regenerative design and ecologically minded economics, to evolve our language and remove the counter-productive and in fact destructive language that has been passed down to us.

It’s time to recognise the violence and the momentum in the language that we have mindlessly used for centuries, deconstruct the subtext and reimagine new language if we wish to reimagine and redesign a global society that embodies the peace, justice and equity that we stand for.

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About the Author

Erfan Daliri is an author, poet, social change trainer and consultant with a Masters in Communication for Social Change. He has over 15 years of experience working with NGOs, community groups and government agencies in a diverse range of areas, including participatory development, cross-cultural communication, youth empowerment, education, mental health, settlement services, and social justice advocacy.

Erfan is the founding director of Newkind Social Justice Conference and programme coordinator of the National Unity in Diversity Conference. He consults and advises on communication and project design for organisations such as Amnesty International and the Australian Red Cross.

He is particularly passionate about empowering organisations and communities to address issues of social, environmental and economic justice and to help them build a more inclusive, cohesive, sustainable and equitable society. His most recent book Raising Humanity discusses the underlying causes of socio-economic injustice and covers the themes of ecology and economy, resilience, resistance and what it takes to be an effective changemaker.

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