Audrey Stuart, Liza Tungangui, Blake Slattengren
Background
According to the Wilderness Act of 1964, wilderness is described as “A place untrammeled by man; where man is a visitor who does not remain”. Although this term is widely misused, interpreted into many different ways, applied to many different spaces, and is a generally abstract idea, this is the official definition referred to in America today. However, wilderness still means different things to different people. So to address a couple of central questions in ENVS 220, like that of boundaries and situated context, we set out to examine and explain the personal definitions of wilderness and where the boundaries lie around this environmental term within the Lewis & Clark community, as well as Portland, Oregon in general. Not only did we want to find a concrete definition of wilderness to the LC student body, but we also wanted to explain how these trends and perceptions came about and what that means in relation to their personal importance of its existence, but also the community’s as a whole. Through follow up interviews to the survey we conducted last week, we pieced together the narrative of LC students’ relationship to wilderness and found some explanatory data in what they said and did not say, that will help us conclude these questions and apply them to greater concepts.
Chart 1: Interest of “Wilderness” by City
Procedure
For this lab, we conducted follow up interviews to the survey conducted last week. The interview subjects that were chosen tended to have a more extreme characteristic to their answers, but ultimately turned out to be a little random in who actually managed an interview, with a total of four. The questions presented attempted to explain their history and relationship with wilderness as well as how they constructed their personal definition of wilderness. After gathering all the data and transcribing the interviews, we created a word cloud with the interview. This allowed us to easily and visually recognize the most used terms within the interviews. Further analysis into the interviews, then, included a juxtaposition of those keywords from the descriptive questions to the explanatory questions. This is where we found a lot of the trends and corresponding explanations behind these trends.
Results
Chart 2: Most Popular Words Concering Wilderness From Interviews
Chart 3: Example Responses and Analysis
Chart 2: Usage of Various Words by Interviewees
As the table demonstrates, there were vast discrepancies in the word choices of the different interviewees. In particular, the word ‘go’ was used 8 times by one student and zero times by another student. The student who did not use the word ‘go’ indicated that they grew up spending a lot of time in wilderness. This may reflect the idea that they are surrounded by wilderness and have not needed to go and actively seek out wild areas. The word ‘interact’ was only used by one of the subjects. This student also said that wilderness was more important to them as an individual than to the overall community. This may show that their concept of wilderness is largely based on personal experiences and interactions.
There was not a discernibly relationship between experiences in wilderness growing up and current definition of wilderness. There was a range of backgrounds in wilderness, with one student saying they spent about 75% of their time growing up in wilderness. However, among those who spent similar amounts of time in wilderness, there were differences in whether they considered to be wilderness and how important they thought it was for themselves and for the community. Two students did say that their experiences in nature shaped their definition of wilderness, and these were the two students who spent the most time in wilderness growing up. Many students replied with questions because the interview was so open-ended. When asked how much time they spent in wilderness one student replied, “If I’m there is it wilderness?”
Discussion
This lab has shown the lack of a common definition of wilderness is. When asked to give their own definition, the responses were incredibly varied. The interviewees seemed to agree that it was a difficult concept to define. A particularly interesting trend that was found was that of the subjects relationship and history with wilderness, and then consequently their view of its importance personally and to their community. We can almost see this as a cause and effect. Those subjects who spoke about their relationship with wilderness as considerable, then affirmed that wilderness is important to them. Then, the subjects who often questioned whether they can even say that they have a relationship with nature, then were tentative to say whether it was important or not. Another general trend in the answer to if nature was important to their community, was that the answer was often more negative. This is interesting because we found that Google ranked Portland sixth as the city with the highest search volume for the term wilderness. From that statistic alone, it appears like wilderness is important to this community, but the subjects seemed to think otherwise. This would be an interesting question to follow up on.
Another interesting trend to notice is that of the reasons given that shaped the subjects’ definition of wilderness. Three out of four of the reasons given explained that their personal experience with wilderness shaped what they defined as wilderness. Only one subject explained a more objective view of their definition of wilderness, explaining that a more denotative version of the word lead her to this definition, but the others all talked about where they grew up in relation to nature or wilderness. We think this is an important point to consider, that wilderness was often described from personal relationship standpoint.
It is also interesting to note various words that were not used by the interviewees. Looking at various definitions and depictions, popular words include: purity, frontier, ideal, value, modern, and future. This might suggest that purity and frontier are maybe more outdated words to describe wilderness. The lack of ideals or values shows that people do not usually consider ethics or morals when thinking about wilderness, yet researchers often do. Finally, the lack of any time-based words, like modern or future, show that the concept of wilderness is often detached from any specific time; it may seem eternal.
The one interviewee who stressed that the idea of wilderness was not important to the community nor individual level was actually an ENVS major. On the surface it may seem like someone studying the environment would place much more emphasis on wilderness. However, it is likely that this student has learned in their classes how socially constructed the concept of wilderness has become, and is therefore hesitant to use it. This student did say that the ideas of conservation and stewardship had shaped their definition of wilderness, so there is likely a link between their focus on environmental responsibility and their choice of major.
This lab could be built upon by getting a greater number of interviews. A key challenge was subjects not replying to emails or not showing up for interviews. This could be mitigated by initially inviting more students to come in for interviews and then counting on some being unable to. Overall, this lab has provided intriguing reports and could be explored further. A question we might add in the future is would be why people had a negative view of wilderness’s importance to the community. Also, this survey only asked about the amount of time spent in the wilderness but did not ask about hometown or geographic region. To make analysis easier, we could give a clear definition of wilderness and then ask people again how much time they generally spend in wilderness. This would reduce the discrepancies due to different definitions. By tweaking our methods we could explore the trends, or lack of, that we found on a deeper level.