Partway up a blacktop driveway leading to a hotel called , you pass under an archway that says: “Welcome to Sportsman’s Paradise.� A coil of interstate on-ramps looms overhead, which, given the architecture just beyond, brings to mind a nest of mythically proportioned snakes protecting an unholy monument.

The generic-sounding name of the 103-room lodge doesn’t match the eccentric setting. The hotel exists inside a huge, black, stainless-steel pyramid that rises 321 feet above the flat landscape of Memphis, Tennessee, a city known far and wide for Elvis, , barbecued pork—and this bold architectural statement.

For this pyramid, sheer size is not the real superlative; Vegas, after all, has its own, even larger tetrahedral hotel. What sets it apart is the fact that its cavernous interior has been converted into an outlet of , the world’s largest hunting-and-fishing retailer, and the hotel rooms—set in the ring-shaped interior balconies that make up the pyramid’s two upper levels—overlook the store’s floor space. On the exterior of the pyramid, a 78-foot-tall re-creation of the company’sÌılogo, featuring the eponymous fish in mid-leap, glows green above the Mississippi River at night.

The stature of this landmark is suggested by the fact that it’s a rare retail store—the only one, so far as I can tell—to appear on a U.S. driver’s license. When Tennessee officials designed a collage of to use as the background of state I.D. cards, they thought: What could represent Memphis better than this inexplicable shrine?

“I never thought there’d be a more famous Memphis building than Graceland,� says Ryan Hailey, a local video editor and a self-described for the city. “And I sure never thought that building would be a pyramid-shaped tackle shop. But here we are. And for some reason, as a Memphian, that makes me very proud.�

Alex McDaniel, managing editor of the USA Today sports website ,Ìımoved to Memphis in 1994, when she was seven. “I’ll never forget crossing the Mississippi River bridge into the city and seeing the pyramid for the first time,â€� she says. “It was gaudy and gorgeous, and I had no idea what it was used for, but to this day, when I go back for a visit and see that pyramid, I know I’m home.â€�

It’s not just Memphians who are allured by this building. I know a couple who live two hours south of the city, in rural Mississippi, and drive up once a month or so for the sole purpose of visiting the pyramid, because the place is a kind of Disneyland, a fine way to entertain and tucker out the kids. Stopping in to buy a discount-bin trucker hat—and taking an Instagram selfie—has become a road-trip rite of passage.

But the building’s true grandeur can only be seen once you step inside. Beyond the gabled entrance portico, a massive timber structure meant to suggest an Adirondack lodge, lies a wilderness—or at least its shopping-mall simulacrum. The decor is heavy on fake rock and flowing water and taxidermy, with an emphasis on regionalÌıfauna: bears and feral pigs and white-tailed deer, scattered amid replica cypress trees.

According to Michael Rinehart, the store’s assistant general manager, the pyramid boasts the world’s largest stock of duck-hunting gear. The guest roomsÌıare outfitted with furnishings that would fit well in the backwoods manor of a Gilded Age robber baron. The rooms’ standout feature, though, are simple “back porchesâ€� (so called by the company) that overlook the ground-floor shopping expanse, which is designed to look like a swamp, complete with moss, waterways, and a host of stuffed and living creatures.ÌıWith two restaurants and three bars, a , a steamboat-themed arcade shooting gallery, and a spa—just the thing for weary spouses with little interest in hunting and fishing—a family could camp out within this 535,000-square-foot playground for days, perhaps whole seasons.

For my own expedition, I figured a single night would suffice. I’m not a hunter—just a writer who likes to spend time outside—but I’ve always felt drawn to this place.

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Before Zion was a name for a national park, it was another word for Jerusalem. Eventually, it morphed into a metaphor,Ìıshorthand for the promised land. Its most famous description appears in the book of Isaiah: in Zion, the wolf “shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.â€�

As Emma Marris notes in her new book,Ìı, most of us interpret thisÌıas allegory.ÌıInstead we understand the opposite to be true: eat or be eaten—such is life in the wild. But at least a few people thinkÌıthat theÌıideal positedÌıin theÌıbiblical text is oneÌıworth striving for. The nonprofit , for example, believes we should reduce all kinds of animal suffering, even, perhaps, suffering due to predation. Is this a leap forward in ethical thinking, or softhearted nonsense? That’s one of the questions posed by Marris’s fascinating work, which examines our responsibility as humans towardÌıwild animals.

Though Marris is trained as a journalist, here she finds herself “doing philosophy,â€� as she puts it early on. Don’t imagine thatÌıshe holed up in a library carrel, though; this is the kind of philosophy that involves “getting coveredÌıin mud [while] checking petrel burrows, sitting around campfires, touring genetic laboratories, and checking rat traps.â€� It’s hands-on philosophy, in other words, put to test in the real world.

The most famous philosophical works on animals—like Peter Singer’s , a central text in the veganism movement—have focused on pets and domestic livestock. As for all the lessÌıthanÌıtamed creatures, our ethical obligations “are often presented as being straightforward: we should simply leave them alone and protect their habitat,â€� Marris writes. Wildness is a synonym for the nonhuman, right? So our presence can only muck things up.

This has led to an obsession with purity. We want landscapes “untrammeled by man,� as it’s put in the , a seminal 1964 law that protected nine million acres. We want wolves that are wolves—wild beasts, their bloodlines undiluted.

Marris describes a recent case in Washington State in whichÌıa blackÌıwolf was impregnated by a domestic sheepdog. One animalÌıwas an endangered species, the otherÌısomeone’s property; each is enmeshed in an entirely different legal infrastructure. What would the pups even be? State officials had a clear answer: a threat. The hybrids might taint the genes of nearby wolf packs. So the expectantÌıwolf motherÌıwas captured and spayed.

The ethical logic of this situationÌıfeels something like a snake eating its own tail. In order to keep the wolf wild and separate, humansÌıhad to capture the animal and performÌıan invasive medical procedure. To Marris—and to many readers, I’d expect, myself included—there is something cringeworthy here. Not that it is inherently wrong; it’s just that our guts and our intellects begin to collide, which is, as Marris points out, a sign that we’re engaging in genuine moral reasoning.

The book begins with a tour of animals’ many capabilities—to , to feel emotions, to feel pain, , to outperform usÌıintellectually, even. (A squirrel can’t count to ten, but it will “beat the pants off us when it comes to remembering the hiding places of thousands of nuts,â€� Marris notes.) Next is a surprisingly readable history of how philosophers have conceived nonhuman beings, beginning with ancient cultures and proceeding to Singer and beyond. Thus fortified for the journey to come, readers are dropped into a series of philosophical riddles. Is it justifiable to hold wild creatures captive, as pets or in zoos? (No, not really, according to Marris.) Can hunting be justified? (Not just justified but recommended, she writes,Ìıso long as it’s done in a way that reinforces our reciprocal relationship with the nonhuman world.) The bulk of Wild SoulsÌıis occupied by our efforts to protect threatened species,Ìıfrom genetic modification to the active slaughter of invasive species. (It’s a tangle; you’ll just have to read the book.)

Marris believes that our idea of wildness—our obsession with purity—is misguided. No animal remains untouched by the human hands. And not just because we’ve entered the Anthropocene. Yes, sure, our fossil-fuel economy has completely reshaped the landscape (Marris notes that one of the most obvious steps we can take to help wild creatures is to fight to keep the atmosphere as cool as possible), but even thousands of years ago, Indigenous people were grooming and cultivating nearly every corner of the earth. To call something wild is not just to indulge in romanticismÌıbut also to engage in a “colonial power play,â€� as Marris writes: “Our ‘wildernesses’ are just places where colonialism left the trees standing.â€�

Once you toss out the fetish for the “natural,â€� new options emerge. We could, for example, build a high-tech Zion, a world where we feed tigers cutlets of cellular meat that’s been raised in labs. Or if we can’t end predation, we might temper it,Ìıplanting sedative pellets under animals’ÌıskinsÌıso that when the kid is seized by the leopard, a sensor can note that it’s time to release the drug. Marris, though, after conjuring this vision, concedes that it’s “faintly disgusting.â€� Humility matters, even if purity doesn’t. She’s not convinced humans are smart enough to pull off such a grand intervention without making ugly mistakes. Instead sheÌıcounsels readers to rethink the word “wild.â€� What matters is not purity but autonomy. Wildness can be reconceived as creatures doing what they want to do. This leaves room for humans to have a meaningful relationship with nature, so long as it’s by mutual consent.

Marris told me in an interview that she was terrified of philosophy until she moved in with a philosopherÌıand the discipline began to unravel for her over dinner-table conservations. (Her husband, Yasha Rohwer, teaches philosophy at the Oregon Institute of Technology; in March, the couple copublished a .) But she realized the questions we face in the Anthropocene are not just scientific. They are ethical, which is to say they demand the tools of philosophy.

It’s an approach that leads Marris to a provocative argument: perhaps we need to stop worrying so much about entire species. The category of “speciesâ€� is more human construct than biological reality—a leaky bag, as the half-wolf, half-sheepdog pups would haveÌıdemonstrated—and a snapshot in time, too, as every species is gradually evolving into something new. Some may need to change to survive in a hotter world. Rather than saving whole species, Marris encourages conservationists to focus on individual beings and their autonomy.

Here, then, is a shortcut to ethical thinking: If you were reincarnated as an endangered species, what conservation strategies would you submit to? Some people might be willing to have their genes enhanced, though as Marris writes, current ethical guidelines forbid the use of CrisprÌıtechnology on human beings. But few people would want their baby killed because its genes were deemed impure. If a blackÌıwolf wants to mate with a sheepdog, so be it. That’s what wildness means.

To grant to every animal this kind of autonomy requires a grand act of imagination. According to one estimate, there are more than a hundredÌıbillion wild vertebrates on land alone. I try to think of each as an individual flicker of life, but the number is too big, really, for me to hold in my mind. And that is part of the problem we face. To get to the promised land—or at least the future I hope for, where the earth stays cool and an abundance of animals survive—the science isn’t the hard part. The real challenge is the ethics, the act of imagining our appropriate place in that world.

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Wilderness spaces across the country are—like so much else—in crisis. Last weekend, Cleveland National Forest, outside San Diego, set usage records at two trails. The superlative is bittersweet: on the one hand, it’s encouraging that Americans seem to be reconnecting with their local landscapes. On the other hand, the crowds caused “rampant illegal parking,â€�Ìı, noting that several visitors had to be airlifted out for unspecified reasons.

Those trails are now closed, as are other park systemsÌı andÌıÌıCalifornia. This weekÌıa spate of national parks, from Yellowstone to Hawaii Volcanoes to Great Smoky Mountains, also closed, following the guidance of national and local officials aiming to halt the spread of COVID-19.Ìı

Yes, nature is pleasurable, and being outside is necessary relief. But by now, amid this pandemic, the ethics of wilderness travel should be clear: don’t go—at least not to the crowded trails and parks. You are putting yourself and others in danger of infection. You are putting pressure on already-strapped medical resources in remote gateway towns.

But don’t think of this as a prison sentence. Instead, it could be the chance for the reset we need. A chance to remember that we are always in the wilderness, which deserves our care everywhere.

The Trouble with Wilderness

What is wilderness? According toÌı, at least, it’s “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.â€�

Bill Cronon’s seminal essay “â€�—which this year marks its 25th anniversary of rankling outdoors lovers—helped upend that definition, at least among historians. When white settlers first arrived on this continent, untrammeled land was a waste,Ìıa missed opportunity to, as the Bible commanded, “subdueâ€� the earth. Not until after the Civil War, as cities grew crowded, did the “community of lifeâ€� become something worth admiring. Wealthy Americans began to buy up Adirondack camps and pay for guided hunts through the Rocky Mountains. In 1916, the elites’ desire to find pristineÌılandscapes outside the city led to the creation of a system of carefully protected national parks. Thus, the modern idea of wilderness was born.

Of course, the North American wilderness was never untrammeled. Native people had already lived here for thousands of yearsÌıand had always consciously shaped the flora and fauna. In our wilderness parks, the landscape we regard as pristine and timeless is really just a snapshot of what white people saw when they showed up. And once land became “wilderness,â€� it could only remain so through vigilance. Human beings, at least the ones not on vacation, had to be kept out. (John Muir, the naturalist whose writings helped sparkÌıthe wilderness movement, wanted NativesÌıout of his beloved Yosemite. More recently,Ìımany outdoorspeople have claimed that immigration might lead to overpopulationÌıand therefore despoiled lands.) Other species had to be sustained or evicted, depending on their provenance, which is why today the wilderness is actually filled with technology: radio collars tracking bears, microphones recording birdsong, chemicals killing off unwanted plants—allÌıattempts to “restoreâ€� the landscape back to the moment of its original discovery, an arbitrary standardÌıat best.Ìı

Venturing deep into the woods is, for many, a spiritual, transformative experience—which is partlyÌıwhy the closure of our beloved parks hits so hard. But science suggests that if you’re seeking the health benefits of nature, you don’t need awe-inspiring or pristine landscapes. Sunshine, natural stimuli like plants and trees, and movement will do. So it’s OKÌıto call these parks what they are: playgrounds, dressed up to resemble a certain nostalgic ideal. Wilderness, meanwhile, is all around.

Backyard Wilds

Historian Roderick NashÌı of the word “wildâ€� to the idea of will.ÌıSo the wild is anything with its own will—anything that grows and changes without human control. That includes the weeds in the street and the masses of bacteria inside us that keep us alive.Ìı

The greenest patch near my house in New Orleans is a man-made pile of earth, a publicly owned levee with a trail on top, squeezed between the Mississippi River and a canal, that serves as a de facto city park. When I walk there I see ibis and herons (and unleashed dogs and men catching catfish). This is what finding wildness looks like in much of America, far from the carefully preserved state and national parks out west: it’s in the tattered edges andÌıthe culverts where trash accumulates—but where plants grow fierce and feral, too.Ìı

Now, as cabin fever sends my neighbors out on daily walks, that levee feels as crowded as a California trail. So I’m off in search of other islands, places where I can find nature and still maintain my six feet of distance.

What does that entail? For meÌıit means walking along quieter patches of industrial riverfrontÌıor biking to empty lots where trees are taking root. I’m trying to look with the , for whom a flower is something to marvel at, wherever it grows. You can do this, too, even if you live in an apartment in Manhattan. Go find an overgrown lot and count the different kinds of leaves you see.

It means getting down on my knees to pick the trash out of my front-yard shrubbery. It means setting plastic pots in the backyard to house the peppers gifted to me by my neighbor. Their presence has made me attentive to the kinds of nature I ignored before: Where is there sunlight, and where is there shade?

My partner went online to look up topographical data, examining how water drains through the yard, so when the time comes to put the plantsÌıin the ground, we’ll know the best spot. (You could also, as the science writer Emma Marris suggested to me, trace the larger contours of your watershed: If you pour a glass of water into the street in front of your home, what path does it follow to the ocean?) This attention has yielded delicious benefits. I’ve lived here for two years yetÌınever realized that the tangled tree at the back of the lot is a blackberry bushÌıor that the creeping vine along the fence is a neglected fig tree. Even if you don’t have a yard, you can go find dandelions, the perfect beginnings for a .

I’ve been on how to recognize my backyard birds. Even hearing the birds is a breakthrough, to be honest. My partner and I, in an effort to make our house arrest feel more like a cabin-camping excursion, have kept the doors and windows open as much as possible.

The Value of Nature

None of this is to say that we should stop protecting large tracts of nature. Indeed, the emergence of COVID-19 gives new urgency to their preservation: scientists believe thatÌıhabitat loss is a ;Ìıas human beings and wild animals encroach on one another’s spaces, there’s an increased exchange of zoonoses. But there is a difference between sustaining wildlife habitats and romanticizing humanless nature.Ìı

A genre of tweets has begun to circulate amid the pandemic: photos of dolphins swimming in boat-free waters, deer returning to empty parks to eat the flowers. “We are the virus,� these tweets declare. This is wilderness misanthropy at its worst. (Some of the posts, including the dolphins, are also .) Emma Marris is the author of , a book about the new science of conservation that’s emerging as we rethink old notions of the wild. She pointed out to me that these tweets depend on an absurd binary. They declare that humans, despite being animals, are entirely split from nature. If this is the case, it seems we have two options: we can pollute the world, or we can die.

There is another option, of course. We can rethink nature. It’s not a “touristic destination that you go to and then look at as a pretty piece of entertainment—like Netflix, except outside,� Marris says to me. “This is an opportunity to set up more interactive, mutually positive relationships with other species near your house.�

Yes, our economic system has damaged the planet. But no moral person could believe that the cure should be an epidemic that may leave millions dead. Many cultures and peoples—often the same people who have been evicted from our “wilderness�—have managed to live alongside other species productively. We can do the same. But in order to get there, we have to recognize that, in every moment of our lives, we are interfacing with the wild.

A Wild Weekend

I had planned on biking along the Gulf Coast this weekendÌıand spending the night in a small resort town. A little lockdown escape. ButÌıthe possibility of bringing the virus, and contributing toÌıoverwhelming a small-town hospital,​​​​​​Ìı. So my partner and I settled on a new plan: a dinner of local produce and a tent pitched in the yard. We will wake up with that wilderness feeling, having slept beyond the boundary of walls. What birds or insects will be singing at midnight? I have no idea, but I’ll learn.

There will also be the honk of late-night traffic and the clatter of passing trains. These signs of humanÌıwill alongside the self-willed can feel like interruptions. But they can also be a reminder that nature persists, everywhere, and that nature is fragile, everywhere. We can be, and should be, inspired by nature and worried about it at once.

If you want to think of wilderness as the place without people—or, really, without other people—then in this moment we’ve all found ourselves in the wild. We have become a nation of locked-down, solitaryÌısix-foot bubbles. It’s not a place I want to stay long.

Of course, this is the wrong way to think about wilderness. The only way out of this viral outbreak is to embrace the noblest idea embedded within the love of wilderness:ÌıPreservation, at its best, is an act of submission. It is a recognition that we are all connected—to one another, to nonhuman nature—and those connections are worth, in certain times and in certain places, keeping ourselves inside the lines. As you stay there, pay attention. You might find that there is more to wildness than you knew.

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On March 10, Waffle House cook and National Guard veteran Joey Camp arrived at Georgia’s Hard Labor Creek State Park. Camp had tested positive for COVID-19, but after four days in the hospital, his symptoms had abated, and he was relocated to a 26-foot RV trailer in the park for . Camp was the first beneficiary of a novel idea being tested in Louisiana and Georgia: state parks being turned into refugesÌıwhere infected patients can recover in peace.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp Ìıthat a one-acre section of Hard Labor Creek State Park, which is about 45 minutes east of Atlanta, would be secured as a location for “the isolation and monitoring of patients.â€� Camp elected to be sent to the park, because he was worried about going home, where he might infect his roommate’s infant son. He spent the next five days alone in a Jayco fifth-wheel RV, watching movies on his cell phone and dining on local takeout that wasÌıdelivered to his door by state health officials. Camp was initially required to stay inside the RV, he told ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø, before being allowed to stand beneath its exterior awning. Once he was symptom-free for seven days, he was released.

“I enjoy the solitude and isolation,â€� Camp says. “It was just like an extended camping trip.â€� An avid outdoorsman, Camp saysÌıhe would have been just fine had he been told to pitch a tent and sleep on the ground.

Not everyone was so sanguine. The that local officials did not know about the quarantine zone until they saw the news on social media. One local circulated a petition demanding that the quarantine zone be closed so as not to expose the surrounding community to the virus. State officials emphasized the small size of the quarantine area—one acre amid a park of more than 5,800. The rest of the park remains openÌıand is safe to visit. (Currently, there are seven RVs on-site, and one patient has arrived since Camp’s release.)Ìı

Amid an epidemic that demands six feet of distance from fellow humans, what role should parks play? While Illinois has and many states have closed campgrounds and lodges, ÌıÌıare promoting themselves as the perfect place for social distancing. Brandon Burris, the director of Louisiana State Parks, saysÌıthat his agency’s mission—“to provide the people of the state of Louisiana opportunities to recreate in the outdoors, a place for them to go and forget about what’s going on,â€� as Burris paraphrased it—is more important now than it was ten days ago. “We’ve got tons of elbow room,â€� he says.Ìı

Eighteen of Louisiana’s 21 parks remain open, including to campers. The other three, like Hard Labor Creek, have been designated as “â€�—a polite termÌıfor quarantine zones. Two of the parks, one in central LouisianaÌıand another in the northwestern corner of the state, near Shreveport, are currently unoccupied. But at Bayou Segnette State Park, a strip of wetlands and RV sitesÌı20Ìıminutes from downtown New Orleans—a city that’s a hot spot for the virus—ten patients infected with COVID-19 are staying in cabins that float atop the park’s namesake waterway (this count was as of Wednesday, according to a press conference held by governorÌıJohn Bel Edwards that day).Ìı

Nearly all of Bayou Segnette’s’s 16 cabins and 98 RV sites were occupied by vacationersÌıwhen employees began to knock on doors before sunrise on March 14 to notify everyone of the need to evacuate. Despite a line of more than 50 trailers waiting to discharge waste at the dump station, the park was cleared by midday. Burris saysÌıthat most campers understood the need, though not everyone was happy to leave. (The parks department has offered full refunds, among other compensatory options.) The first patients arrived the next morning.Ìı

According to the the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services, which is managing the site, the isolation area at Bayou Segnette is intended for those who are awaiting test results for COVID-19 and cannot be sent home—either because they have no home to go to or because they live alongside other individuals with high infection risks, such as in a nursing home. Patients will be released if they test negativeÌıand,Ìıif they test positive, will beÌıheld until they are cleared by a medical professional. To secure the area, Governor Edwards said, 150 National Guardsmen have been deployed to the park.

These quarantines are, in some ways, a return to the original intent of state parks: promoting public health. Both Ìıand Ìılaunched their park agencies in the 1930s, toward the end of the Great Depression, when there was a sudden wave of park-building across the country—the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal work-relief agency established by Frankin D. Roosevelt in 1933, helped build 800 state parks from the ground up over nine years. “This work in nature was a way of rejuvenating these young men who had been really hurt by the Great Depression,â€� saysÌıhistorian Neil Maher, who wrote , a book about the corps. The workers were often malnourished when they arrived. One worker at Hard Labor Creek wrote in his memoir that at his first meal at the work camp, he ate enough for three men.Ìı

“The idea of public land has always evolved,â€� Maher notes. OnceÌıit was just land the government was holding until it could be soldÌıto private owners. By the end of the 19th century, sites like Yellowstone were preserved as wild but hard-to-reach retreats, largely accessible only to people with the time and means to travel. State parks “put the public in public lands,â€� Maher says, by establishing recreational spaces that were situated, when possible, close to cities. ThereÌıthe masses could escape the “grime and gritâ€� of urban life and find a healthier space, he says. NowÌıthat proximity is helping to spark the latest—and hopefully temporary—iteration of public lands.

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