I suspect that a MAJOR essence of the 21st century recreational wilderness is as a death encounter, like Disneyland.
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Do you mean human? Or any large enough charismatic mammal?
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even plant death is on display - but I think the (safe, pretend) encounter with one's own death is really important
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people are obsessed with "wilderness survival" and there's a trend of focus on allegedly spooky wilderness deaths even though most wilderness deaths are car accidents, heart attack, etc.
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suicide is another common cause of death in US national parks - basically everything EXCEPT exposure/animal attack
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This makes total sense. It is the natural place in some ways. In traditional Indian life-stage script, the 3rd stage is "vanaprastha" (give up worldly life and go live in forest). The last stage, "sanyas" (renunciation) often implied voluntary ascetic death while in the forest.
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In practical terms this makes absolutely no sense, since in the last stage (traditionally ages 75-100) you'd likely be in poor health and the best place for you would be heart of civilization where you could be cared for. I sometimes wonder how it actually worked in practice.
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In theory, yes. In practice, no community I've encountered has a death culture based on that kind of theory. Even post death, funeral cultures are often designed to bankrupt families/send them into debt (South African Zulu culture is this way iirc)
I was going to say this was a thing amongst the Inuit but according to Wikipedia that only happened during famines
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