Wilderness Babel (Version 1 PDF)

In 2013, the Environment & Society Portal and Marcus Hall published the virtual exhibition, “Wilderness Babel” as a collaboration with the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich.” Version 2 of this virtual exhibition [June 2020] implements the Environment & Society Portal’s new responsive exhibition template. A PDF version of the original 2013 exhibition is presented here for archival purposes.

Wilderness Babel: What Does Wilderness Mean in Your Language?

What does wilderness mean in your language? Listen to words for “wilderness” and learn about their political and historical meanings in different regional contexts. “Wilderness Babel” is a collaboration with the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich, edited by Marcus Hall and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg. Its international contributions are still growing.

This version 2, published in 2020, includes minor updates to the original 2013 virtual exhibition (view PDF here) and applies the Environment & Society Portal’s responsive layout.

Marcus Hall and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, eds.

About the author

Hall, Marcus

University of Zurich (UZH), Switzerland

Marcus Hall has written about the wild, wilderness, and rewilding in his books, Earth Repair: A transatlantic history of environmental restoration (2005), and Restoration and History: The Search for a Usable Environmental Past (ed., 2010). In pursuing these and other research projects, he has now lived in Europe (mostly Italy and Switzerland) almost as many years as he has lived in the United States, where he has become even more appreciative of how environmental messages depend on the languages in which they are expressed. Trained in biology, history, and environmental studies (Stanford, BS; Wisconsin MA, PhD), he teaches at the University of Zurich’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies.

Hardenberg, Wilko Graf von

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany

Wilko Graf von Hardenberg is a modern historian focusing on socio-political aspects of nature perception and management in Europe and the history of the environmental sciences. He holds a degree in history from the University of Torino, Italy, and a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Cambridge. He was a postdoc, funded by the Autonomous Province of Trento, at the University of Trento, Italy, a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany, and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. His most recent research projects focus on the history of nature conservation, management, and rhetoric in the Alps and on the development of the idea of mean sea-level.

orcid.org/0000-0002-8704-6997