The time has come to dispose of the notion of wilderness as the last zoo, as an exalted, beautiful picture, as a precious, exotic landscape, or as a storehouse of tomorrow's resources. Some wild things require vast spaces; our ancestors occupied home ranges of hundreds of square miles. Wildness, not wilderness, is the state against which we assess the weaknesses as well as virtues of civilization and its correlates — mass society, the use of fossil fuels, growth-oriented economies, monocrop agricultures, and the technologies of control resulting in dysfunction and pseudomastery that conceal our limitations with glut, comfort, and entertainment in a world of virtual reality. Although we seek therapy in the wilderness as though it were relief from real life, the effort to recreate, to study or appreciate the balm of wilderness, to compose a journal of self-discovery are, culturally speaking, merely palliative. Public concern over the increasing rate of extinctions and the worldwide diminishing of biodiversity is, in the end, not altruism, ethics, or charity, nor has it to do with the paintings of John Martin and Alfred Bierstadt, the photographs of Ansel Adams, the journals of John Muir, or the adventures of Sir Edmund Hillary. Wild species, not an illuminated Nature, are the components of wilderness. Animals and plants are correlates of our inmost selves in a literal as well as metaphoric sense….

Not all searches and quests are hunts, for the hunt deals with the intense emotional and philosophical problems raised by the act of killing and of facing one's own death. It is not a problem for us simply as predatory carnivores, but as the occasional prey, and as an omnivore whose closest kindred species are also omnivorous, conscious, sentient beings like ourselves. It is right to kill and be killed in this "game" of the hunt so long as we understand the transformations of life and death as a natural consequence of the gifting cosmos where one receives and gives and in the final hour finally passes the gift on. When that clarity is lost the hunt becomes monstrous, along with the rest of nature, and we remove the killing to a butcher's abattoir.

Today we cannot become hunter/gatherers as a whole society, but we may recover some social principles, metaphysical insights, and spiritual qualities from their way of life by reconstructing it in our own milieux. The hunt brings into play intense emotions and a sense of the mysteries of our existence, a catharctic and mediating transformation. The value of the hunt is not found in repeated forays into the outback but in a leap forward into the heart-structure of the world, the "game" played once by rules that now illuminate our real selves.