What makes it wild? Visitors' constructions of wildlife and wilderness in the Greater Yellowstone Area

Pahre, Robert; Steele, Carie

Rather than seeing "wilderness" as associated with "wildlife," as is the case in some surveys, we trace a particular group's construction of the meaning of various species. That construction of wildlife, which can vary by location, sequence of sightings, and other conditions, affects the sense of place, and more specifically, whether they identify a future location as "wilderness." Wilderness is not merely "the place of wild beasts," as Nash (200 1) suggests, but the place of certain wild beasts - and different wild beasts at different times, in different places, for different people. This interactive construction of wildlife and wilderness falls within a broader social construction tradition in leisure research (Kyle and Chick 2007). That tradition distinguishes how people construct the meaning of a place (place identity) and the utility they receive from recreation in a place (place dependence). Here we examine both the construction of place identity (or sense of place) and the construction of wildlife observed at that place, with wildlife observations helping to construct the sense of place. As a result of this interaction between place and species, whether people see a place as wilderness depends on the sequence in which places are visited and the order in which they see particular species. Seeing a species first on the side of a road (see Figure 1) may make it "non-wild," while seeing another species first in a wilderness may make it "wild." Either way, early experiences change the definition of later experiences. Some of the factors that influence these meanings are (1) the species itself; (2) whether an animal was viewed from road or trail; (3) the context of previous sightings, whether sighted from road or trail; and (4) the ongoing group construction of each species' meaning.