Audrey Stuart, Liza Tugangui, Blake Slattengren
Introduction
The notion of “wilderness” holds vastly different meanings for different people as shaped by our cultural influences. In recent years the concept of wilderness has been criticized by various environmentalists for lacking any scientific basis. For example, in the days of the American frontier the term used to have negative associations and brought up an image of an inhospitable landscape. The trend has moved in the opposite direction and wilderness is now highly romanticized. Various stories and artworks portray wilderness as a pristine area where one can connect with nature. This lab explored these differences in perceptions and sought to understand what Lewis and Clark students would view as wilderness from a set of random examples. As a campus like Lewis and Clark that is focused on the environment, it is interesting to see how well students can define the notion of wilderness.
Procedure
In this lab, we first created a survey on the Fulcrum website, making sure our questions were descriptive and explanatory. There were questions that explored the individual’s personal boundaries of what constituted wilderness and what did not, like “Do you consider Lewis & Clark campus as wilderness?”, as well as questions that explored possible explanations behind what could have caused these different perceptions, like “Where did you grow up?”. Once the survey was complete, we took a convenience sample by walking around campus and asking Lewis & Clark students to complete the survey. After an hour, our sample size was forty-one. We then entered the data onto a Google sheet and coded the data that was not already nominal. Any of the answers that were textual, like the hometown question that was answered in “Rural, Small Town, Suburban, and Urban” were given ordinal numbers. We then conducted Comparison of Means Tests along with Independent Sample T-Tests on the data and here are our results.
Results
Figure 1: What Lewis and Clark Students Consider “Wilderness”
This chart shows what Lewis and Clark students consider the most and least wilderness. Most people consider Mt.Hood to be wilderness, followed by Tryon and the ravine. LC Campus and the rose garden were most often considered not wilderness.
Figure 2: Correlation of Various Variables Concerning Wilderness
Figure 2 summarizes a series of bivariate correlations that were run with the dataset. The most significant correlation that was found was between the average time spent in wilderness and how important they consider wilderness to themselves. There was also a very strong correlation between those who viewed the ravine as wilderness and those who viewed the campus overall as wilderness.
Discussion
Figure 1 demonstrates an interesting relationship between what is considered wilderness on the Lewis and Clark campus. For example, the ravine and the glade lawn were both more often considered wilderness than LC campus as a whole, but the rose garden was less often considered wilderness. This shows that parts of a campus can be considered more or less of wilderness than the whole campus. Interestingly, the rose garden was considered wilderness the least often, showing that maybe there is something about its planned structure that makes it seem less wild than even the whole campus. Surprisingly, the glade lawn was considered more wild than either the garden or the campus. This could be due to people not knowing what the glade was, which we noticed many people ask about.
One feature that stands out is the lack of correlation between those who considered the campus wilderness and those who considered the rose garden wilderness. The same lack of relationship was found between the view of campus as wilderness and the view of the Glades as wilderness. This was unexpected considering that the rose garden and the Glades are both part of campus, so they logically should be just as “wild” as campus as a whole.
In the comparison of the personal importance of wilderness with an individual’s hometown, there was no significance found. This was incredibly unexpected because the question we presented allowed us to examine how much wilderness was incorporated into their native community, with terms like rural and urban. Although there were many individuals who identified with growing up in rural areas, there was not enough of a significant correlation to conclude that their more formative years spent in a rural area had an impact on their perception of the importance of wilderness. However, the comparison of time spent in wilderness per month with personal importance of wilderness, did show a positive, significant correlation. So what we can conclude from these two tests are that it looks like the individual’s current relationship with wilderness impacts their perceptions more than where they lived in relation to wilderness for their formative years.
This data showed us large-scale trends, some of which were surprising. A more focused, intensive method such as an interview may possibly explain these surprises. A valuable question for follow up is what each person’s definition of wilderness is. This may explain why an area such as the rose garden is not considered wild. There is a chance that students’ perceptions have been shaped to not view cultivated areas like gardens as wilderness. There is also a chance that the language used, the word “garden,” sounds very tame and controlled.