An improvement on a paragraph

The wilderness can be easily misunderstood if one does not have the right perception about it. This is evident in Jon Krakauer’s story Into the Wild, the main character Chris McCandless was longing for a sense of adventure so he ventured out into the Alaskan wilderness but “the wilderness surrounding the bus – the patch of overgrown country…scarcely qualifies as wilderness by Alaskan standards” (350). Chris originally thought that he was in the wild but Krakauer’s use of the word “patch” indicates that where Chris was staying was not even wilderness. The place Chris inhabited was only a thirty miles away from Alaska’s George Parks highway. Chris’s lack of experience with the wild has misconstrued his understanding of how vast wilderness can be. David Abram attributes this lack of experience in his essay “The Ecology of Magic”. Abram argues that because humans now live in a world in which “We consciously encounter nonhuman nature only as it has been circumscribed by our civilization and technologies” (21). The word circumscribed means “to restrict within limits” (OED). By restricting humans from perceiving the real nature and the wild first hand, humans have become oblivious to what the real nonhuman world is; they cannot comprehend wilderness or get past the prevailing thought of it being dangerous and to some extent not even survive in it. In essence the human version of nature has been reworded as a place for resources. Charles Siebert claims that this obliviousness humans had on nature is what caused one of nature’s creature, the elephant, to fight back. In his essay “An Elephant Crackup?” Siebert describes how after poaching elephants for their ivory for years, “…the elephant is not going out quietly. It is not leaving without some kind of statement,” (528). The world is not a place where humans are in control and animals have to fight a losing battle. Since humans have treated the wild as if it was a stockpile of resources as a result, wilderness is fighting back. Therefore it is not that wilderness itself is a dangerous place to begin with rather than how human’s looked at nature in the first place. This can be attributed to how humans grew up and as a result they held the preconceived notion of wilderness being an unknown and scary place.