Revision

As a result of the different perspectives of wilderness, it is easy to be judgmental of the environments that others live in without truly understanding the struggles it takes for someone who is lost in the wilderness. Krakauer received mail from several people about McCandless, many of them critical of McCandless’s trip. Krakauer recounted one letter saying, “Not only did McCandless die because he was stupid, one Alaska correspondent observed, but ‘the scope of his self-styled adventure was so small as to ring pathetic-squatting in a wrecked bus a few miles out of Healy potting jays and squirrels, mistaking a caribou for a moose (pretty hard to do)…Only one word for the guy: incompetent’” (358). The Alaskan correspondent clearly has a different view on wilderness than McCandless, placing the importance of wilderness in its proximity to civilization and focuses more on McCandless’s incompetence than towards the experience gained from living there. The correspondent’s view that civilization cannot be wilderness is contradicted by Eve Abe, who directly connects the perspectives of elephants and humans with the wilderness. As she is comparing the human and elephant orphans, she told Siebert of a conversation she had with a scientist in Kenya and “He said, ‘How come nobody has made this connection before?’ I told him because it hadn’t happened this way to anyone else’s tribe before” (534). Abe, herself, was affected by the wilderness that occurred when her tribe was forced to move due to war. Abe said that because of it, she sees wilderness in a way that nobody else could. The experience of living in the wild creates a perspective that seems foreign to those that have not been through the tribulations of being lost.

-Nelson