Thoreau never set eyes on Cal Poly Pomona. The wildness of which he wrote, though, was not the uninhabited grandeur of the Sierra Nevada, or even the Maine woods. It was a pond on the outskirts of a major metropolitan area. In that pond he saw the cycle of the seasons, the lives of creatures not human, the slow transformation of rock to soil. He was no stranger to cities, and in fact spent most of his life a city-dweller, but he knew what the city could do to the human spirit: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Wildness is no stranger to Cal Poly. Within the boundaries of the campus are areas untouched by urbanization, marginally impacted by agriculture, areas that follow not the academic calendar, but rather the sun, the rain, and the wind.

These pages are a celebration of the wildlands, and a warning, and a memory. These lands touch us, whether we acknowledge them or not. We touch them, whether we intend it or not.