the.com/wilderness
land that doesn't know your name and was doing fine without it.
means A wild, uncultivated region untouched or barely touched by human settlement, left to grow on its own terms.
from From Old English wildēornes, literally 'the place of wild deer' — wild (untamed) plus dēor (animal, especially deer, the same word that narrowed into our modern 'deer') plus -ness. So buried in the word is a whole landscape: not just empty land, but land that belongs to the beasts. The same dēor lives on in German Tier, 'animal.'
- legal status
- US wilderness areas ban roads, vehicles, even bicycles
- shrinking fast
- Wild areas vanished from 10% of Earth since 1990
- word root
- From Old English meaning place of wild beasts
- mental medicine
- Time in wild spaces measurably lowers stress hormones
- vast emptiness
- Antarctica is Earth's largest untouched wilderness
amazon rainforest — 5.5 million square kilometers spanning 9 countries, largest tropical wilderness on earth
siberian taiga — 13 million square kilometers of boreal forest across russia, largest continuous forest wilderness
australian outback — 2.5 million square kilometers of arid interior desert, covers 35% of australia
congo rainforest — 2 million square kilometers spanning congo, cameroon, gabon; second largest tropical rainforest