In Michael Nelsons article he made a generally persuasive argument about the way in which we treat the term wilderness and how we should go about dealing with this debate in the future. I like how he thinks we should more clearly articulate the nature of the criticism of the concept of wilderness. Furthermore I agree with him that conceptual analysis is the best fighting ground to ultimately arrive at a more shared understanding of what the “wilderness” means for us not to us. It seems to me that we need to move towards thinking of what this wilderness means for us not simply what it means to us. Before we move towards an understanding of this sort, I feel it is necessary to include humans in the varied concepts of wilderness. We are as much a part of a city as we are a part of the wilderness. We build a house and live in it, but we don’t only have a relationship to that house. We have a relationship to the wood that it is made of and more broadly to the place where that wood comes from. Although we are not in that forest in Oregon or Washington we are there. Not there in person, but there in that we have taken from it without really ever thinking about it. Nelson makes a similar point. He says that Leopold is as good a foundation for a conceptual analysis of our wilderness because of the communal properties he argues for. Nelson cites the example of people of one nation feeling this lack of connection with the people of another who have the bomb dropped on them in a distant land. This is not because those people are worth less or deserve it but rather because they are not their neighbors. I mean to evoke a similar quality within the human condition, a communal relationship with the wilderness on a whole new level. Like Nelson I am not sure how to do this, but I sense it has started on some level already. My parents always use to get excited when they saw a product was made in the USA. Economic issues aside, the communal aspect is there. If people became more aware of what individual impact that had on the environment, and how they could make small changes I bet people would start to make those changes. The hope is that overtime people would be able to proudly say I got this wood from a forest in New York at a smaller carbon footprint and with greater care to the ecological environment there. Ok that’s a stretch, but you got to aim somewhere if you’re going hit the target.