Originally published by Akiko Busch in The Boston Globe on September 30, 2025
My visit on a July morning to Mass Audubon’s Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary, on the slope of Lenox Mountain, is an arcadian idyll. I find my way through meadows of milkweed and mountain laurel, past rocks sheathed in moss and lichen, and through a forest of ferns that opens suddenly to a wetland with phragmites and cattails. When I get to the beaver pond, the animals aren’t in view, but their sturdy lodges attest to their engineering virtuosity. Beyond that are woodlands of ash, oak, maple, hickory, some gray birches; along with a natural cathedral of white pines, they create a sense of quiet refuge.
Through watchful stewardship, one trail has been closed due to recent flooding, but elsewhere planked walkways lead visitors through the marshes, stones arranged just so across the stream for easy passage. A few fallen trees have been cut to clear the path, but most are left resting on the forest floor. The plants here include wild bee balm, woodland sunflower, New England aster, joe pye weed, goldenrod, and mountain mint, all flourishing in a pollinator garden designed to nurture native plants. Trees have been blazed with discreet yellow and blue circles to prevent visitors from losing their way. The sense of haven here is restorative in a manner captured in Wendell Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things.” The poet, in the presence of the wood drake, the great heron, and the still water, feels “above me the day-blind stars / waiting with their light. For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
Three centuries ago, it would have been absurd to link the words “wildlife” and “sanctuary.” For European settlers in what they assumed was the new world, wilderness was not a place of grace but one of unfamiliar terrors, a frontier to be subjugated and tamed. Oblivious to how indigenous people had found ways to live in accord with the landscape and cycles of the natural world, early colonists preferred to view the terra incognita as a challenge both physical and spiritual; such fabricated primitivism offered an antidote to the stifled order of European manners. And in facing the unknown perils of alpine forests, desert canyons, and dense grasslands, the early pioneers understood themselves to be personifying the courageous, resourceful, and independent spirit of the emerging nation itself.
When John James Audubon catalogued the birds of America in the mid-19th century, it was not just to document their ornithological splendor but to introduce them to a public unfamiliar with the extravagant beauty of both the species and their habitats. Already industry was encroaching on agricultural traditions; mills for lumber and textiles, mining, the growth of urban areas, and westward expansion in general were beginning to generate interest in the conservation of natural resources.
These concerns were articulated more explicitly a century later by novelist and naturalist Wallace Stegner. In his 1960 landmark letter to Wildland Research Center, Agricultural Experiment Station, at the University of California, Berkeley, Stegner advocated for “wilderness as opportunity and idea, the thing that has helped to make an American different from and, until we forget it in the roar of our industrial cities, more fortunate than other men. For an American, insofar as he is new and different at all, is a civilized man who has renewed himself in the wild.”
Widely read, his letter helped to pave the way for the Wilderness Act. Signed into law in 1964 by Lyndon Johnson, it was meant to ensure federal protection for designated wilderness areas that were valued not just for what they offered human visitors who might want to renew themselves but for their own right to exist distinct from human use.
Since then, our common understanding of wilderness has evolved from ideas of untouched and imposing terrain to areas that are themselves threatened by rampant human presence, commercial exploitation, extreme weather, invasive plant species, and diminishing biodiversity. And thus they have become managed landscapes that ask for human intervention, cultivation, and maintenance. If wilderness was once something from which we felt we needed protection, today we ourselves are charged with protecting it.
And yet. Across the interior landscape, wilderness continues to be a place of more elemental apprehensions and fears. In the popular imagination, ideas of the wild continue to have primal associations with disruption, psychic lawlessness, unknown chaos. The word “wilding” implies uncontrolled and aggressive behavior. Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild” documents a teenager’s search for solitude and seclusion — which deteriorates into social estrangement, mental decline, delusion. “The Wilderness,” by Samantha Harvey, is a novel about memory loss, cognitive decline, and dementia.
“Democrats in the Wilderness” was the title of a recent newspaper article lamenting the party’s confused efforts to find an ideological center. In contemporary fiction, the wilderness metaphor has been applied to everything from teenage depression to marital collapse to the anguish of addiction — in other words, different conditions of losing it completely. We are a long way from the peace of wild things.
