The Singing Wilderness

Every summer, I spend time with one of my favorite authors, Sigurd Olson. For me, Olson is a guide, a person whose words transport into the power of wilderness.

Olson spent his life exploring wilderness, becoming one of the leading spokespersons in the drive to preserve it. Living from 1899 to 1982, Olson grew up in a time when many people saw wilderness as an obstacle to progress and development. Wilderness was something to be conquered. Most people celebrated when forests and waterways were replaced with sawmills, mines, cities, factories, and highways. Olson was one of those who realized that when wilderness is lost, it is generally lost forever.

Although Olson could write as a scientist, he is most often identified as a conservationist. But for me, Olson is a spiritual philosopher of the wilderness, someone who was never happier and more fulfilled than when he was immersed in nature or writing about it.

Olson knew from experience what scientists are now recognizing, that wilderness offers healing. He was not talking about the healing properties of plants, but rather the healing that comes to humans when we are immersed in nature, in wildness. His first book, The Singing Wilderness, is well-named, for it invites readers to not so much study nature as to listen to it.

Olson has convinced me of one of his main beliefs, that humans are evolutionarily attuned to wilderness, meaning that wilderness offers balance in our lives. Olson can be accused of being nostalgic about wilderness, of wanting to turn the clock back, but that is unfair. He understood that human development would mean industry and urbanization; he accepted the role of TV and modern communications, and had he lived to see it, would have accepted the internet. But he also understood that many of us feel that modern life is out of balance. Wilderness, and wilderness alone, can restore that balance.

Olson’s belief that wilderness offers healing can sound abstract. What does he mean, especially for those of us who live in towns and cities and spend hours each day staring at one screen or another?

What Olson shares in his numerous books—all worth reading—is his understanding that in modern life, we tend to see nature and wilderness as something to look at, study, and visit on vacation. Ironically, the closest many of us get to the wilderness is in the waiting rooms of dentists or doctors, where scenes of nature are frequently on the walls. Consider also that many of our screensavers display scenes of nature or wilderness.

For Olson, these glimpses of the natural world aren’t enough. They are teasers, not the real thing. Until he became too old, Olson spent most of his summers guiding groups into the protected wilderness in the Boundary Waters Area of northeastern Minnesota and the vast wildernesses in Canada. What he observed in the people he guided was that they changed. People from harried lives in modern cities found a new rhythm. Instead of focusing on doing,

they let themselves be. They weren’t visiting the natural world; instead, they were part of it. And in that experience, they recovered the balance that they’d been missing.

We might think that we’ll never have these experiences because we live far from wilderness. Olson, however, suggests that wilderness can be found in city parks and even in our backyards. His words beckon us to sit outside in the natural world doing nothing, worrying about nothing, planning nothing. He invites us to sit in silence and hear the natural world singing all around us and in us.