In his essay Walking, published in The Atlantic in June of 1862, Henry David Thoreau writes one of his most famous lines, “in Wildness is the preservation of the World.”
But this line is also one “that is still misquoted as a defense of untouched wilderness,” writes Deagan Miller. For some reason, Thoreau’s ‘Wildness’ is often interchanged with ‘Wilderness’ when quoted. And not just with this quote. Another famous line of Thoreau’s from his book Walden, “We need the tonic of wildness,” is often misquoted as “We need the tonic of wilderness.”
Miller, a historian of American environmentalism, argues that “…there is perhaps no way Thoreau has been more misunderstood than as an advocate for humanless wilderness, and such misunderstandings often branch from this concept of his — the wild.” This is because “wildness, a quality, and wilderness, a place, are not the same things.”