1 Forthcoming in Environmental Politics From Wilderness to WildCountry: The power of language in (2007)

Content Provider	CiteSeerX
Author	Pickerill, Jenny
Abstract	A wild language Love the Wild? Help keep it Wild (John Muir Trust flyer, 2006) Wild people (colonisers) make wild country (degrading, failing) (Rose, 2004 p.4) Environmental campaigns worldwide are often framed as conserving wilderness and preventing exploitation of natural resources. Organisations lobbying for protection of vast tracts of Alaska, Canada, and Australia employ an emotive language using words such as pristine, untouched, undisturbed, intact expanse and wild frontiers to rally support. Photographs of lands empty of people or any human structures often accompany these words, see Figure 1. This approach has proved successful in arguing for the need to place legal boundaries around tracts of land through World Heritage Status or as National Parks. Figure 1: The Wilderness Societys Wild Country logo Despite this, there is increasingly recognition not only that indigenous people have historic rights of possession to some of that land, but also that indigenous environmental knowledge and land management practices can be beneficial for conservation outcomes. This recognition and the legal changes that have accompanied it (such as the development of Native Title in
File Format	PDF
Publisher Date	2007-01-01
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text