Our problem is not that we have lost touch with nature, with the wild, but that we imagine our selves to be separate from nature in the first place. As long as we maintain a concept of wild, it must always be separate from us, and we will always feel alienated, since it is our consciousness itself that we see as separate from the wild, and it is this same consciousness that, necessarily, always does the perceiving.

In other words, our problem is not our selves, but the lies we tell about ourselves. The beauty of this is that we need not change the world in order to be content; we need only to see it differently. What we need, then, it not to develop a closer relationship with nature, not to spend more time in the wilderness, but to develop a new worldview that eliminates the conceptual distinction between nature and human consciousness entirely. Transcending the nature/culture divide within us means transcending the divide without as well. It is not about achieving a closer or more balanced relationship between humans and nature—as Michael Pollan observes in The Botany of Desir (2002), to have a relationship with something means standing apart from it. Rather, it is about dissolving the division between humans and nature altogether, so that we are able to acknowledge that all of our actions are part of nature, such that it is redundant to talk about a realm of distinct nature altogether.

The fiction of the natural sustains the fiction of the artificial, the extra-natural. It makes us believe that anything we create can be (and usually is) unnatural, artificial. It gives us the illusion that we possess a power to defy, escape, or transcend the laws that govern “natural” processes, that we can stand outside of or above the rest of the universe. It is both cause and consequence of our arrogance to believe that we can dominate, and alternatively save, nature.

So, in the final analysis, we find ourselves confronted with a counterintuitive truth: As long as we need wilderness we will never be free.