A New Geography of Hope
In a warming world we’ll discover that wilderness continues to sustain us.

Feature Articles

To Protect Wild Places, We Need to Shift to Clean Energy

The Sierra Club wants to do for renewable energy what Muir did for wilderness.

Wilderness in the Anthropocene

In the “Age of Man” we’ll need wild places to hold steady the sanity of our species.

“Guardians, not Gardeners”

Of all the sweeping conservation laws of the 1960s, the Wilderness Act most expanded the boundaries of conservation thinking. Olaus Murie, a biologist and president of The Wilderness Society, said our...

Roger Kaye

In Praise of a Place

A Letter from the Yaak Valley

To Our Readers

Wild at Heart

Scientists and crop breeders are racing to identify the wild ancestors of domesticated plants before they disappear.

Bill Giebler

Talking Points

Local News from All Over : Autumn 2014

The Big Wide OpenVictory in Chile Environmentalists in Chile scored a major victory in June when Chile’s Committee of Ministers (the country’s cabinet) unanimously agreed to cancel a plan to dam t...

Journal Staff

Parks in Peril

In July, the US National Parks Service released a report confirming that 289 of America’s parks and historic sites are feeling the brunt of climate change. Parks are getting hotter, enduring more se...

Journal Staff

Earth Island Reports

The Power of Storytelling

Sacred Land Film Project

Ending America’s War on Wildlife

Project Coyote

Meet the 15th Annual Brower Youth Award Winners

New Leaders Initiative

Journal Staff

1000 Words

More than Just a Pretty Picture

Nature’s Best Photography

Journal Staff

Reflections

The Heart of Wilderness

It’s fair to say that we each have our own relationship with wilderness. For me, wilderness has touched me in very special ways: I once scattered ashes of a dear friend in the Arctic National Wildli...

A Buffalo Soldier Speaks

“Mountains and Forests Rise Within Us”

Shelton Johnson

A Wild that Leaves Us Speechless

photo: Beth Shapiro Lab, Penn State Paddling into a breeze, I marveled, our backs pulling such small blades against such a mighty river. The Colville, on the north slope of the Brooks Range, is Ala...

The Night Sky: A Wilderness Obscured

photo: © Joe LeFevre / NBP/ Wilderness We guard our homes and cities with light – first fires, then candles, then whale oil lamps, then Edison’s incandescent bulbs, and now (if you’re feelin...

What’s in a Name?

A few years back, while researching a book called Conservation Refugees about Native peoples who had been evicted from their lands to make way for parks or preserves, I was interviewing an Ojibway wom...

A Much Trammelled Wild

I was almost crawling. One foot forward, a hand out in front. The other foot searching around for a firm setting to keep me moving along the arete. It was exhilarating, yet, if my eyes strayed over th...

Don’t Tell a Soul

Cave lovers worry that sharing their passion might just kill it.

Wilderness Next Door

Following the same route over and over has become a kind of walking meditation.

The Wild Line

When the dust settles after years of meetings and disputes and intellectual navel-gazing and studies and horse-trading and lies, the administrative act of preserving American wilderness is, in concept...

Coloring Outside the Lines

photo by Flickr user Travel Garden Eat On one of the coldest winters on record, the 2014 polar vortex swinging down across the brow of North America, I set off across frozen Lake Superior in northe...

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Ticket to Ride?

The Wilderness Act is clear in its prohibition against road-building, “motor vehicles, motorized equipment or motorboats” and “landing of aircraft.” It also prohibits “other form[s] of mecha...

Journal Staff

Conversation

National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis

Jon Jarvis, Director of the National Park Service, had a childhood seemingly tailor-made for a career in public lands conservation. His family’s farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley backed up to t...

In Review

Debunking Straw Man Definitions of Wilderness

Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth
Edited by George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist, and Tom Butler
Island Press, 2014, 248 pages

Barefoot Biologist

Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island
By Will Harlan
Grove Press, 2014, 307 Pages

Voices

Black & Brown Faces in Wild Places

I grew up in suburban Chicago. My mother was a nurse with the Girl Scouts and I’d often go to camps with her and stay in cabins in wooded areas near the city. Somehow, even as a child, those trips w...