What are wilderness areas for? Tourism and political ecologies of wilderness uses and management in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

In global imaginaries, wilderness areas are considered to represent the last parts of “original” nature, untouched by civilization and modernization. In most cases, this is misleading as wilderness environments have been exploited, explored and also converted into administrative units in various protected area networks. Indeed, most wilderness areas have been a part of human–environment interactions for a long time and they have been influenced and modified in that interaction. As a result, wilderness is constitutively a cultural and politically loaded idea. While the Western notion of wilderness as a place where “man himself is a visitor who doesn't remain” represents the global hegemonic conservation thinking, it does not necessarily work with different local realities, meanings and use values of “the wild”. In addition, in recent decades, the tourism industry has placed an increasing interest on nature-based and adventure tourism products creating new kinds of ideas and use needs for the remaining wilderness environments. This paper analyzes empirically how wilderness environments and their roles are seen in the context of new and traditional anthropogenic uses and meanings of wilderness areas. More specifically, the paper uses a political ecology approach to evaluate the use and management priorities in the Finnish Wilderness system.

KEYWORDS:

• Wilderness management
• Anthropocene
• Indigenous people
• nature conservation
• political ecology
• governance

Acknowlegements

The author would like to thank the Guest Editors Mary Mostafanezhad and Roger Norum and the anonymous peer-reviewers for their constructive comments. M.Sc. Outi Kivelä prepared the map. The study is part of the Academy Finland’s RELATE Centre of Excellence and Resource Extraction and Sustainable Arctic Communities (REXSAC) Nordic Centre of Excellence in Arctic research, funded by Nordforsk.

Additional information

Funding

Academy of Finland, RELATE Centre of Excellence [project 307348].

Notes on contributors

Jarkko Saarinen

Jarkko Saarinen is a Professor of Geography at the University of Oulu, Finland, and Distinguished Visiting Professor (Sustainability Management) at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His research interests include tourism and development, sustainability in tourism, Indigenous and cultural tourism, tourism–community relations, tourism and climate change adaptation and wilderness studies. Over the past 20 years, he has been working extensively in the rural and peripheral areas of northern (Arctic) Finland and southern Africa. His recent publications include co-edited books: Tourism Planning and Development (2018), Political Ecology and Tourism (2016) and Cultural Tourism in Southern Africa (2016).