The Wilderness Experience: The Reconnection To Nature is the Reconnection to the Primal Human Condition

The relationship between man and wilderness has been a complicated situation for as long as the Homo sapien became advanced enough to desire comforts aside from their wild and natural habitat. Most of us have lost touch with where our species comes from or the fact that we are just as animal as the bears and elk that wander these mountains. Although, the majority of us have somehow become contented with cramming ourselves in relatively tiny quarters within manufactured boxes far removed from our natural residence in the wilderness, some of us have a deeply rooted connection to the ancestry in which forced the human to evolve into what we have become today.

Although Wilderness, today, is a far cry from what we had before we exploited its resources, over extracted its commodities, and polluted its character, it is still the next best thing for the modern human to receive a taste of what it was like in the great before. All of us go out, or in, to the Wilderness for a variety of personal reasons; however, the core reason can usually always be traced to one fundamental purpose. To put it simply, it’s the need and desire to reconnect with nature. To put it in more technical terms, the reason we feel the need to go to the wilderness is due to our deep instinctive draw that none other than our genetics and ancestry promotes. After hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution in the wild, the instinct for all things natural is still so very present, and you can not eliminate that instinct so easily.

The Wilderness Experience is an important factor in our lives. It is as significant a necessity as love, belonging, and compassion. Evidence is clear that people are happier and healthier when they are surrounded by nature. If you need proof, just look around you, your in Missoula. The Wilderness provides us a chance to test our fit conditions as well as skills and abilities to survive in a self-reliant arena. Reconnecting with nature is actually more of a reconnection to our human condition. This is our nature as biological beings with instincts and reactions to conditional stimuli. When a human presents them self in nature or a wilderness situation, the individual is experiencing sensations that our instincts trigger from our ancestry. It is important for us to be able to feel those sensations because we are in fact animals. Just as an animal captivated in a zoo, humans are not as happy in captivity. Wilderness endures the genuine human element.

Varying conditional factors in the wild promote the Wilderness experience. Extreme conditions from all points on the spectrum are responsible for the human instinct to take over rational thought. We have all experienced this. It is instinct that tells us that we need to get the hell out, and it is instinct that helps us get the hell out when we’ve already gotten ourselves deep into a jam. The success of enduring an extreme situation in the wilderness proves that the individual is fit enough to persist and eventually pass on the desirable gene.  Yeah, its pure evolutionary biology that we are experimenting with.

The human brain receives pleasure from the successful completion of a survival situation because they know that they are fit to survive another day. This is one of our many biologic reactions in which aided in our evolution. Since humans own a more tame environment, the best way to mimic this pleasurable sensation is through Wilderness recreation. When we climb a mountain, float a rapid, or run on the trail, we are pursuing the fundamental human condition. This could be why many of us recreationalists are confident with our alpha status. The constant exposure to this type of survival situation builds up the character of the individual.

The Wilderness experience is a very personal and individual based subject. The human brain is complicated, but the essence of wilderness and our response to its stimuli is simple. We all have our own take on the subject but it can be agreed that the sensations that we feel out there are beyond a human’s capability to manufacture or reproduce. This is what makes preserving and protecting Wilderness so important to the continued existence and evolution of mankind. Without wilderness we are in danger of losing the essence of our species. Wilderness is the only hope we have for humanity. Support wilderness for our species’ sake.