Mary Allen
A wilderness is a remote place in nature. There are hardly any people to be found far and wide. Only a few campers or hikers can be encountered. Hardly anyone lives there permanently.
It is also usually difficult to get into a wilderness because the terrain is often impassable and there are no proper paths leading there. The opposite of wilderness is civilization: it means places that have agriculture, cities, major roads, and so on.
Nature in a wilderness has not yet been influenced by man in the same way as in civilization. It is also said that nature there is still “untouched”. In the wild, you can find animal species that no longer exist anywhere else. Some of these animals, like the Siberian tiger, depend on undisturbed life in the wild. They could not survive in civilization.
As more and more wilderness disappears, many of these animals are threatened. Some animals have even become extinct in certain places. The disappearance of wilderness also has an impact on climate change. If there are fewer trees, they can also bind less carbon dioxide.
In many countries, wilderness areas are protected by the state. Nature should remain as it is. One then speaks of a nature reserve or a national park. In the USA, the term “state wilderness” is also known as a national park.
Wilderness is found primarily in North and South America, Asia, Oceania, and Africa. In Europe, they are still mostly found in small parts of the Alps or in the far north, such as in Norway or Iceland. Otherwise, Europe is rather densely built. So you are never really far from the next town or a traffic route. One of the reasons for this is that Europe has been industrialized longer than other continents and is relatively small in relation to the size of its population.
It is not clear what exactly a wilderness is. An uninhabited natural area has to be fairly large to be called a wilderness. Exactly how large is determined by the state in which the area is located.