I first came across Henry David Thoreau’s famous line — not in a book, but on the glossy page of an outdoor catalogue, set in bold above a photograph of outdoor gear being used in spectacular country. “In wilderness is the preservation of the world”. It’s a good line for connecting with people who value being out in nature. It says that out there, somewhere far from us, is a thing worth protecting.
Which brings me back to Thoreau, and the words he used. In wilderness, I suspect, the preservation of the world will never be found — a place we leave alone — and one in which we can only ever hold the line. But in wildness — in our small, everyday actions, repeatable things we might do with and for the nature we love — perhaps as we join them up they might just be part of the preservation of the world?
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But I later found out it’s a misquote. What Thoreau actually wrote was “in wildness is the preservation of the world”. Wildness rather than wilderness. A difference you might almost not notice.
But the change matters more than it looks. Wilderness is a place — a refuge, a sanctuary, somewhere set apart and, by implication, set apart from us. It carries a quiet dilemma inside it: if the world is preserved by wilderness, and wilderness is what survives in our absence, then the most useful thing we can do for it is to stay away.
But wildness is something else entirely. Wildness is not a place you go. It’s a thing you do. And it’s a difference that’s worth a closer look.
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The catalogue’s adaptation of Thoreau fits neatly with a story Aotearoa New Zealand tells very well — that nature is much more itself in the places where we’re not. It’s a way of understanding nature that has done real good: a great deal of our public conservation lands exist because enough people believed those places were worth protecting forever, even if only a few venture there.
But wildness points somewhere different. It isn’t found in the distance we might build between ourselves and the nature of this country. Rather it’s found in all the connections we have with it — a life lived with and withina place rather than passing through, where our actions are shaped by nature and, in turn, feed it. Anthropologists Tim Ingold and Terhi Kurttila put it well: it is “the very activities of inhabiting the land that bring places into being and make people local”. You don’t belong somewhere because you’ve seen it. You belong because of all you’re doing there.
And here’s the part I find genuinely hopeful: wildness, unlike wilderness, is something we can all do. It can be learned. It can be shared. And it can grow.
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On the Barrytown Flats, on the West Coast just down from where the sea beats against the Pancake Rocks at Punakaiki, there’s a small remnant of coastal rainforest — the kind that once ran the length of this country’s coasts but now only survives in a very few places. It’s less than a hundred hectares, but within it can be found some spectacular old rātā, and growing in their branches a whole crowd of other species.
Beside it sits seventy hectares of a former pilot mining site. On paper the land wasn’t that promising — disturbed, industrial, a vehicle shed and not much else. A few years ago WildLab developed a design for it: the Punakaiki Living Lab, a way of sharing Conservation Volunteers New Zealand’s native planting project with a much wider audience. The vision was that one day this ground could become part of the neighbouring Paparoa National Park, directly delivered through the positive environmental impact that people themselves bring — by inviting both locals and travellers passing through to come and help grow the national park.
The design didn’t picture a finished state. As I mentioned in an earlier article its forms were deliberately provisional — prompts for action rather than a finished plan. Protection — wildness rather than wilderness — in this thinking was an activity, undertaken plant by plant, out of the practices of growing and restoring and making. An ecological restoration whose facilities were to be built by volunteers, for volunteers.
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But we don’t need a national park next door to activate the wildness in us all.
Going wild can be as simple as interplanting natives along the back of a suburban section, so a thread of forest can find its way through the neighbourhood. It might be turning up to a community planting day and getting your hands in the soil beside people you’re meeting for the first time. It could be taking a few kids into the bush for a day and letting them tip over logs to see what lives underneath. And it might be picking a stretch of beach near you — and keeping it clear of rubbish, year upon year, as you get to know its many moods and the things that wash up on it. Mostly small acts of wildness, but together combining into something more: behaviours shaped by a place, and our giving back to it.
Perhaps what we need to most seek out is our own inner wildness. Experiences with nature that are about being wild rather than simply being in the wilderness — the kind of wildness in which we actively help to restore and strengthen a place, and let it look after us in return.
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Which leaves me with a few questions.
If walking is what we mostly do in nature, but protecting is what we say we value the most — how can we close the gap between the two, in our own days out, with our own hands?
What are the forms of wildness — the planting, the trapping, the growing, the noticing — that we join in with others we meet along the way?
And how could our public conservation lands take on a deeper quality? Where they’re not just the places to explore, but are also the places where we discover new ways of being wild: a training ground for the wildness we can then take back home, into our daily life.
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Which brings me back to Thoreau, and the words he used. In wilderness, I suspect, the preservation of the world will never be found — a place we leave alone — and one in which we can only ever hold the line. But in wildness — in our small, everyday actions, repeatable things we might do with and for the nature we love — perhaps as we join them up they might just be part of the preservation of the world?
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