AIW, Italian Association for Wilderness, birth and development of the world Wilderness movement.
The wilderness philosophy and its concept of conservation have purely American origins. It is not clear what were the causes of the movement but, probably, the lifestyle of the Red Indians, the great wild spaces in which they lived and the spirit of the frontier that became typical of the white colonizers is at the origin of the a choice that led some enlightened people to discover the values of wild nature, to worry about its loss with the advancement of human civilization, and finally to fight for its conservation. The term wilderness, of ancient Gaelic origin (place where deer live), translated into Italian literally means "wild and uninhabited nature, not cultivated and not altered by human intervention". In the initial decades of the nineteenth century it was above all the philosopher Henry David Thoreau who was the first to speak of this environmental aspect, but also of a territorial one, as of a value for man also under the aspect of spirituality; the first to understand that a part of his country deserved to be preserved as wild as it had always been. Towards the end of that century it was then John Muir, the son of Scottish emigrants, who, literally in love with the great wilderness of California and Alaska, began to understand how important it was for the administrative and political authorities to issue measures to safeguard at least the most beautiful places in that adopted country. He was the promoter and the main architect of some of the most famous American National Parks, such as Yosemite and Sequoia, for the protection, respectively, of the famous valley and the most beautiful forests of the millenary and gigantic trees of the same name; which then led him to found the Sierra Club, one of the first environmental associations in America, so that the people most sensitive to these natural beauties could fight together for their protection. Meanwhile, on the other side of that continent, in the very civilized New York, the commitment to safeguarding that great wild area known as the Adirondacks Mountains was growing which, largely acquired by the State, were by law dedicated to a preservation that would maintain them "for always wild ": forever wild was the coined term; a term that eventually became almost a slogan for the future movement for the preservation of the Wilderness.
But it was in the new century that the more specific process aimed at officially recognizing the value of wilderness for some areas and proposing their protection as such began. In 1924 the forester, biologist, and hunter, Aldo Leopold, who later wrote what is considered the bible of American and world conservationism (A Sand County Almanac), inspired by a thought of a landscape architect, Arthur Carhart, made in so that the first Wilderness Area in the world (Gila Wilderness Area) was established, in the State of New Mexico: it was the first of a very long series, now extended to other countries as well. Thus was born that concept of conservation linked to the philosophy of wilderness which was later summarized as the Concept of Wilderness. In the thirties of the last century the wilderness movement then ended up consolidating through a union of people interested in the problem of wild nature: another character, Robert Marshall, like Aldo Leopold also an official of the United States Forest Service. America, which was fighting to expand the network of Wilderness Areas designated by the Service on which it depended, decided to create an association that was, precisely, "A union of sensitive people". Thus it was that in 1936 what is still today the Wilderness Society, the first association of environmentalists with the objective of approving a new national law, which laid the foundations for a more uncompromising and perpetual safeguard of wild nature as a value of for itself. The partnership arose as a result of the increasingly frequent conservation problems that occurred in the so-called "protected areas" of the National Parks, where the wilderness was modified to make it available for increasingly intense tourist use. Howard Zahniser, one of the founders of the association, drafted the law that would later go down in history as "The Wilderness Act".
Then definitively approved in 1964, this law establishes that any area of land belonging to the federal state that had been designated Wilderness by a provision of the Congress (the American Parliament) must be absolutely removed from urban development and the exploitation of a large part of its renewable natural resources. , and in particular of forests; the law also prevents all those management initiatives of an economic nature that characterize many National Parks. With this severe legislative norm, which has never undergone changes, practical application was given to the theory of "Wild Nature", first philosophized by Henry David Thoreau and based on the maximum protection of environments not frequented by man, on the non-consumption of resources present in them, on the spiritual values that man draws from them and on the respect for the ancient rhythms of nature, experienced by man as an integral part of it (it is for this reason that hunting is also allowed). Another fundamental characteristic, distinguishing the form of constraint applied to these areas, was that of perpetuity, that is, a provision of protection that was guaranteed for as long as possible in terms of a democratic legislative system. Thanks to this law, today, in America, there are almost seven hundred Wilderness Areas, for a total of over fifty million hectares. In practice, this is the strictest law in the world ever passed by a state. With it, some well-defined wild territories are removed forever from the normal management of the various Ministries and their public bodies and become directly managed by Parliament: in fact, they represent the antithesis of urbanization programs: an absolute ope legis commitment of non-urbanization ( in any form) and forest exploitation and, in many cases, even mining.
Subsequently, other nations also followed this path, either with provisions of public bodies or with real parliamentary laws, as was the case of Finland in 1991. Today Wilderness Areas or laws or regulations that provide for them exist in numerous countries, almost all of Anglo-Saxon language and culture: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Sri Lanka, Scotland, Finland and Italy. Worldwide, a great push to spread this great Idea was given by the South African Ian Player, a former Ranger of the Parks of that country until his recent death (2014) known as one of the major leaders of the current world environmentalism, who, through the initiative of the World Wilderness Congress (World Wilderness Congresses) he extended the philosophy to the whole world.
(11 June 2015)
Italian Association for Wilderness (AIW)