Where Does Wilderness Lie?

Do you have to hug a tree to connect with wilderness? Do trees have to exist for you to be able to connect with wilderness? Where is wilderness?

In these questions, the words "wilderness" and "nature" are almost interchangeable, but only if, in using "nature" you imply the essence of "wilderness."

Ever since moving to Montana in 1989, nature and wilderness appeared in my philosophical musings. Environmentalism is pervasive here, in a variety of aspects: economic, political, academic, scientific, spiritual, physical. I had already begun the profound change in consciousness that reading Barfield had set in motion, and this change has much in common with phenomenology. I asked the question: What is wilderness? What is nature? How do I know? Why does my mind work differently when looking at text than when looking at the mountains?

So I started asking some very weird questions, which took me to some very weird, tentative conclusions. Like: Why do I feel a longing when I look to the mountains, but when I get up to the mountains, I still feel the longing? If the longing was evoked by looking up to those peaks, why wasn't it satisfied by going to the peaks?

More later...