In attempting to define what constitutes a wilderness area Aldo Leopold once wrote, “By ‘wilderness’ I mean a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages or works of man.” It’s an O.K. definition in my opinion. I loved it at the time——in fact I first came across those words while reading from A Sand County Almanac on a pack trip of my own in the Sierras during college. But I’ve since come to think otherwise. First off, I disagree that trails make a place “un-wild.” Many species make and use trails. The careful, trained eye of a naturalist has no trouble seeing that California chaparral is one big maze of grey fox, skunk, and rabbit trails. In Amazonia, the sheer size of the adult tapir necessitates trails through the understory, and they cross rivers at the same locations time and time again, entering from and disappearing on the other side back into an established trail network all their own. And so I don’t see why human trails should be viewed as categorically distinct. But the main reason I write today is because this definition of Leopold’s came to mind when I was reflecting on the size of Amazonian wilderness. The ability to absorb a two-weeks’ pack trip perhaps suffices for wilderness in the lower 48 states. But I am currently in a forest that is (still) large enough to absorb the endless wanderings of entire cultures——to absorb the religion and song, the gardens, the childbirth, the burials, the migrations, the sacred spots, and the perpetuity of entire human languages as they play out and evolve beneath the endless canopy and up and down the myriad forest streams and rivers. Now I say “(still)” because this fact is nearing its end. The encroach of the global economy is hemming this all in to a smaller and smaller area from all sides. I’m sure Leopold’s definition will always suffice for certain areas of South America, no matter how far deforestation progresses. A two-weeks’ pack trip through tropical rainforest would only require a pretty small parcel of land relative to what exists here to this day. But there’s something else that needs defining. If land sufficient to absorb a two-weeks’ pack trip is “wilderness”, what the hell is this thing I’ve stumbled upon down here in Peru? Pack trips for us westerners come and go. But the hunter-gatherer-farmer of Amazonia is on a pack trip of some one-hundred thousand years that began in the African Rift Valley, arced up through the Bering Straight (by foot or animal-hide kayak) and came all the way down to land in the great tropical forests of South America. The greatest pack trip in the history of our species continues to the current day in the remaining parcels of this world’s roadless forests. And the irony is that these people by and large don’t use packs. It’s a mostly pack-less pack trip. The men move from site to site with their bows, arrows, or blowguns in hand, and the women will carry a child too young to walk in a sling upon their backs, but there is little to carry when the forest is your pantry, your library, your church, your medicine cabinet, your workshop, and your hardware store. I only call it a pack trip to tie these cultures in with the closest experience to this that any of us westerners have had. Pack trips have been some of the greatest experiences of my life. To imagine one that would begin for me one day and never end, not in my life or in the lives of my children or grandchildren, is to come the closest I can come to imagining the life of the (mostly) nomadic hunter-gatherer-farmer. But you’d also have to imagine the pack that you started with dissolving over time. You’d have to imagine its contents becoming increasingly unimportant as you learned to fabricate them yourself. You’d have to imagine the clothes that you started off with eventually failing over time, and, at least in tropical rainforest, quickly being seen as more of a nuisance than a blessing. The human skin, naked to the forest, sheds water and heat and fungus more or less perfectly. And so you began with a pack and swishy tech-pants but are eventually naked with only a couple vital belongings carried by hand from place to place. That being said, all of us, even the greatest of botanists, lack the medicinal and tactical knowledge of the forest to actually initiate this endless pack trip from scratch. And that’s the great tragedy of it all: it was a pack trip that succeeded only in its continuity. Only in its slow transition from one ecotone into the next. And only in its great and precious storehouse of knowledge passed down successfully through the generations. And let us also remember that there was no single day in the Rift Valley in which this all began. We made the epochs-long transition from one form into the next, and by the time we could have properly been called Homo sapiens we already had a cognitive storehouse of environmental knowledge. It comes to us from the deep past and would take lifetimes to recover.

I fear most of all that there is no re-starting the nomadic lifestyle (or pack trip as I’ve been calling it for literary sake) once it ceases. Once the thread is snipped, the culture falls from the great ceiling of its ancestry to the floor upon which the modern world now dwells, and I’m unsure how, even if it wanted, a group would successfully turn its back on the global, hyper-specialized order, and walk back into the brush. At least I’ve not found any examples of such an event taking place. Perhaps the maroons of Suriname represent the closest case study to the situation I’m failing to imagine. However, its believed that the maroons (escaped African slaves that fled into Caribbean and Amazonian forests and successfully founded their own forest-dwelling cultures) joined with already existing indigenous groups in many cases, so those indigenous groups would represent the continuity of the vital thread I have just described——the continuity of the environmental knowledge required to allow culture to flourish independent of the global economy. And so I remain unconvinced that the nomadic existence can be reinvented by the lost and disillusioned children of the global order. I await an example that proves me wrong and thus could be a source of hope.

All of this is to say that I can’t imagine a greater cause than protecting not only the forests, but also the cultures within them that still represent humanity’s initial relation to the Earth. I want the great pack trip to continue alongside the strange experiment currently being run by modern civilization. I am skeptical of modernity’s prospects for longevity, and think that it is therefore vital we allow the 100-200 groups still remaining in an un-contacted state to continue weaving the vital thread of our initial relation, generation by generation, on into perpetuity as not only cultures equally viable and rich (and therefore deserving) as our own but also as a control group to the western experiment. These groups have proven the longevity of their ways, and we in the west have not. Every decade for us is a dance upon the brink of destruction and our society, within a single human lifespan, becomes unrecognizable to those on their deathbed who remember it from their childhood. This is a crazy game being played by the 8 billion of us involved, and there is not only a moral argument to be made for the protection of the remaining un-contacted groups, but also an existential one. If the global order fails and all descends into chaos, it won’t be the redneck doomsday preppers who serve as the seeds of our species’ recolonization of the globe. The preppers are only prepping for a few decades, and soon their bullets will all have been shot and their rice eaten and they too will perish, for in their prepping they opted for stores of grain and guns instead of field guides. Rather, the seeds of our species’ recolonization will be those still in contact with the only environmental relation that has every proved itself viable in the longterm.

The more I think about it, the more I think there is not actually a term that works for these areas that contain the wandering tribes. “Wilderness” works for those who live outside of it and see it as a patch of earth to be entered and enjoyed, and then left. But if your culture roams within one of these zones to which I am namelessly referring, “wilderness” is simply the world in which you inhabit, for there is no non-wilderness to which your world can be compared. For my own sake, and for lack of any better term, I’ve been (delightedly) thinking of these forests as simply the place of the endless pack trip.