“Wild” is a challenging word.

“Wild” is used to describe a misbehaving child, a kick-ass party, a city with traffic congestion problems, a piece of salmon that hasn’t been designed in a chemical lab, a backyard overgrown with too many weeds. In the same breath, wild is a parcel of land or sea that seems to resist human control. “Wild”—its etymology tells us—signifies something that is self-willed. Relatedly, “wilderness”—arising from a combination of “wild,” “deor” (deer or beast), and “ness” (promontory or cape)—is a place that abides by nothing but its own will, a nonhuman will. But if things were that simple, we would be remiss in calling “wild” challenging. What makes the word “wild” semantically treacherous is its lack of formal policing.

If you google “wild Galápagos,” National Geographic, the Travel Channel, a 3D IMAX movie come up. They all call the Galápagos “wild.” No surprise there. But so does a company called “Wild Planet Adventures,” which has a vested interest in selling its cruise package. Others do the same. If they want to sell us a well-kept resort town, they call it “wild.” It doesn’t end there. The world is full of places that seem wild on the surface.

Wild Dolomiti is the name of a book promising to reveal the Italian Alps’ most “pristine” trails. “Wild” is a playground in New York City’s Central Park. “Wild Adventures” is a theme park in Georgia, in the United States. “Wild and Natural” is the name of a Cosmetics company that operates on the island of Ibiza, Spain. How can a word be so loose that it can be coupled with anything or anyone? How can it be so generous and so undiscriminating, so cheap and yet still so enticing? Sure, lexical law enforcement is not exactly a thriving business, yet the word “wild” seems more promiscuous than most.

In response to this semantic anarchy, we could establish some clearly demarcated boundaries to protect a true and objective meaning of wild. American legislators attempted to do this when they passed the US Wilderness Act in 1964. For them, “wild” was a land that had a distinctly wild “character”—that is, “untrammelled” land that appeared “to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man substantially unnoticeable;” land that had “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation”; land that was “at least 5,000 acres” or was “of sufficient size” to make its “preservation” practical; land that contained “ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value”; in other words, land that was—though they never did mention it—Indigenous land.

Alternatively, we could choose to do what many governments around the world have done: heed the specifications of the world’s most influential environmental NGO, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (better known as IUCN). In doing so, we could define “wilderness” as “protected areas” that are “usually large unmodified or slightly modified areas which retain their natural character and influence without permanent or significant human habitation and which are protected and managed so as to preserve their natural condition.”

Problem solved, right? Well, only if we are willing to ignore that these two definitions offer no clarity whatsoever on their most important qualifiers. Who determines whether a place is truly unmodified, only slightly modified, or sufficiently modified? What is a “natural character”? When is human habitation “significant”? Above what threshold is the impact of humankind “substantially noticeable”? What constitutes “primitive” recreation? And who has the power to consider something recreational? Hunters? Landscape photographers? Ski resort developers? Hikers? Does a place have to be protected to be considered a true wilderness? If so, isn’t the very management that ensures protection a violation of a place’s natural (i.e., nonhuman) character? How can something be wild when it has fences around it and surveillance cameras installed at its gates? Above all, whose opinion and perspectives on all this counts?

Excerpted with permission from In the Name of Wild: One Family, Five Years, Ten Countries, and a New Vision of Wildness by Phillip Vannini and April Vannini, with Autumn Vannini, 2022, On Point Press, an imprint of UBC Press, Vancouver and Toronto, Canada. For more information go to www.ubcpress.ca.

*****

Learn more about In the Name of Wild:

Five continents. Ten countries. Twenty Natural World Heritage sites in five years. In the Name of Wild is the story of what happened when one family set out to learn what wildness means to people around the world. What draws us to seek out wild places? Do they mean the same to everyone? Part travelogue, part ethnography, this book takes us on a journey into the lives of the people who call places such as Tasmania, Patagonia, and Iceland home. They reveal that wildness isn’t about the absence of people. It’s about connections, kinship, and coexistence with the land.