Is Wilderness Over? By Paul Wapner, reviewed

By Simon Cocking, review of Is Wilderness Over? By Paul Wapner available from Barnes and Noble here and Wiley here.

Wildness is over, right? 
 
Wrong, argues leading environmental scholar Paul Wapner. Wildness may have disappeared from our immediate lives, but it’s been catapulted up to the global level. The planet itself has gone into spasm – calving glaciers, wildfires, heatwaves, mass extinction, and rising oceans all represent the new face of wildness.  
 
Rejecting paths offered by geoengineering and de-extinction to bring the Earth under control, Wapner calls instead for ‘rewilding’. This involves relinquishing the desire for comfort at all costs and welcoming greater uncertainty into our own lives. To save ourselves from global ruin, it is time to stop sanitizing and exerting mastery over the world and begin living humbly in it.

Is Wilderness Over? By Paul Wapner, reviewed

This is a short book, but discusses an important concept. Many have advocated, from John Muir onwards, Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, EarthFirst and many more, that nature needs to exist and be protected simply for it’s own sake, not ours. If we can manage to do this however it does also yield many benefits for us too. We don’t lose by having untouched, wilderness areas, we don’t need to build roads and houses everywhere. We lose, both physically and spiritually if do so.

Wapner definitely grasps and engages with these issues, though at times, in a text of 126 pages, this feels like a whistlestop tour of these issues. While he is definitely aware of what is important it can be hard at times to discern what he actually thinks and advocates in this book. This book is good, as far as it goes and the discussions on Rewilding and Wild Ethics are important.

It would also be nice if the author was actively advocating these ideas, beliefs, and his call to action. For such an important book this feels like a missed opportunity. He has little to no profile online as evidenced by the fact that his university profile says his latest book was published in 2010 ->

Faculty Profile: Paul Wapner | School of International
https://www.american.edu/sis/faculty/pwapner.cfm

Paul Wapner is the author of Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics (SUNY, 1996) and the editor of Principled World Politics: The Challenge of Normative International Relations (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). His newest book is Living through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism (MIT, 2010).

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