Ecophenomenology and the Resistance of Nature

In his justly famous essay “Walking,” published after his death in 1862, Henry David Thoreau wrote that “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Thoreau penned these words at a time when Americans were enacting their vision of “manifest destiny,” displacing the indigenous peoples from the western half of the continent and hacking down its ancient forests to make way for orchards, cattle pastures, and industrial progress. A century later, Thoreau’s remark became a clarion call for the modern American environmental movement in its effort to preserve our remaining “pristine” forests and natural areas. “Wildness” had become, in the minds of many, equivalent to “wilderness,” defined by the 1964 Wilderness Act as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.