Confirming the Spiritual Value of Wilderness

Recognition of the spiritual dimension of wilderness has a long history, especially in the last 150 years or so. Following in the footsteps of the Romantics were a number of authors in the United States such as transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and John Muir (1838–1914). Both Thoreau and Muir were among the early naturalists and pioneers of environmentalism in that country who recognized that experience of nature could cause spiritual revelation, Thoreau’s and Muir’s writings becoming “something of a bible for the spiritual side of environmentalism,” – at least in North America (Timmerman 2000, p. 362). Other prominent wilderness writers such as Wallace Stegner and Sigurd Olson have also extolled the spiritual benefits of the wilderness experience (Hendee and Dawson 2002).