INTRODUCTION

Wilderness may or may not exist. If it does, naming it, confining it within a net of law words, may or may not obliterate it. In any event, the places called “wilderness areas” are not only places where the abstract or symbolic quality of “the wild” resides. They are also places where wildlife lives. As Paul Gruchow paddled through the Boundary Waters he encountered other beings – loon, woodpecker, sparrow, moose – in their worlds. And, as we also saw, the maintenance of biodiversity has become one of the prominent arguments in favor of wilderness preservation. Wildness is embodied in the nonhuman, nondomesticated inhabitants of wildlands. But when we consider wildlife in its own terms, other figures of nature come into view. While the nature of wilderness is often of an almost spiritual sort, the emphasis on life more clearly implicates ecological and biological understandings of nature. Then too, wildlife is by no means confined to wilderness areas. Insects, birds, fish, amphibians, and mammals, large and small, common and rare, live all around us, right in our own backyards. And some of these animals – and plants – it is argued, would not exist for long if they were not caught in a web of legal meanings. Particularly important are the meanings associated with the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and related laws. It is, arguably, law that keeps them wild by helping to maintain the material conditions of their existence.