[WhompingWindows]

Non-sequitur. You want to be crushed to death in 900 F heat on Venus? Or frozen in no atmosphere on Mars? I doubt many people reading the journal Nature would view "the wild" and "wilderness" as referring an extreme environment or another planet. It's not like we're talking about the Marianas Trench or the inside of a volcano crater here either.

It's about wilderness areas where people hope to see pristine nature, and how humans have tramped all over the world including what we now think of as "pristine".

[mc32]

Aren't there vast tracts of quite pristine nature in large swaths of Siberia? It may see a trapper or two in the Winter but I think that qualifies as pristine.

[fsckboy]

>Non-sequitur. You want to be crushed to death in 900 F heat on Venus? Or frozen in no atmosphere on Mars?...

non sequitur? You certainly spilled a lot of words seriously engaging with it, you gave it a lot of consideration, though you seem a little closed minded about the idea that other readers of Nature might not share your precise interests.