Wilderness part deux

 I'm watching Simon Reeves in the Congo jungle he's looking at Bonobos 

I'm happy to see them.

The jungle looks uncomfortable with biting insects

and swamps

Someone, a friend from Hungary

Said she'd gone to live in a rainforest

I volunteered today on a disused railway track near Shepton Mallet

It was a bit of a wilderness

Oak trees growing

Just nice to look at the trees with moss on them

We put up a dog fence to stop them running into the private forest

Which you can look at but not touch

I wonder if we create these private wildernesses

Here, where you need to have money to own or experience 

wilderness

For myself to have the privilege of experiencing it

I must volunteer for free

To build a road essentially for people to pass through the wilderness

Probably because we need to walk in nature

More than anything else

We need to do it

But essentially Wilderness in this country is privately owned

I think that essentially I'm part of a middle class attempt

To declassify the countryside

But really it is a reclamation

of an industrial road

It had a societal or manufactural function

It also had a commuter and tourist function

It brought communities together.

Whether there was any true wilderness there,

I don't know

It was probably all farmland for hundreds of years

what makes a wilderness?

That it has never been in contact with humans

Because certain tribes have contact with deep jungle territories

Therefore it is not wilderness

However, that it is not in contact with the wider world

Perhaps is more the point