Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

What is Wilderness? (Part 6)

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“At its heart ‘wilderness’ is a value judgement.

“As poor old Hawking had to concede nothing is destroyed, it just changes appearance.

“Wilderness is an appearance which is judged by some to have a superior aesthetic to the appearance of things which have had the human hand upon them. In this respect the ‘wilderness’ issue is a small but still substantial element of the global warming debate, which has its essence in an assumption of natural superiority.

port lincoln 021 copy.jpg
Beyond Port Lincoln, South Australia, May 12, 2007. Photographed by Jennifer Marohasy. Guided by Phil Sawyer.

“But ‘wilderness’ is more than saying that nature is superior to humanity; it is also saying only a superior human can appreciate that nature is superior. That is, no matter what sophistic context you place on the meaning of ‘wilderness’ you can never get away from the fact that an aesthetic of ‘wilderness’, and indeed nature as a whole, can only be realised from the disconnected reality of a civilised vantage point which has kept ‘wilderness’ and nature at arm’s length.

“Humans who live according to the survival dictates of ‘wilderness’ have no time for generating an aesthetic about it beyond paganest invocations. For the primitive, ‘wilderness’ would be designated out of fear rather than decadence.”

Posted by: cohenite at May 28, 2008 01:51 PM

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part 1 http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/000797.html
part 2 http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003015.html
part 3 http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003044.html
part 4 http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003104.html
part 5 http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003112.html

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. Jennifer says

    Thanks Cohenite.

    And for the link to the photographs of the great buildings.

    I am usually more in awe, and also at peace, with the view of a natural landscape than a cityscape.

  4. Libby says

    The Ramasseum is obviously not included in the alternative vistas. “Ozymandias” reflects an individual’s and a civilization’s rise and fall, illustrated in the enormous, beautifully carved homage to Ramasses II, now crumpled amidst the remains of his glorious shrine. It is an ode to mankind’s hubris. It says something about our sense of place in the natural world and in a way relates to wilderness and our perception of it, such as we are discussing here. For the moment, extinction is the lasting evidence when the monuments have returned to dust, but with a little help from molecular biology, perhaps not even that will be permanent at the hands of modern pharaohs.

    Percy was a vegetarian, writing “If the use of animal food be, in consequence, subversive to the peace of human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice and the barbarity which is exercised toward these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery”.

  5. rog says

    Why is that Jennifer? after all appreciation of beauty is a acquired taste. I wonder if ancient aborigines held the same views on what is beautiful or peaceful – the Cotswolds has been given the somewhat pompous official title “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty” yet in no way is it natural as it has been intensively lived in and shaped for 4,000 years.

    Architecture can be as confronting or as peaceful as you want it to be. I know there are those who hate shearing sheds, memories of unremitting hardship still linger whilst for others they can be a source of entertainment.

  6. rog says

    I can look at a building or civil works and see the ingenuity and skill and hard work of man – or the lack of it. Why do people look at ancient ruins when modern works can be more compelling?

  9. Jennifer says

    Rog,
    I am much more at peace when I am at a beach, on a farm or in a national park. … and of course with a full belly.
    I lived in Brisbane for 16 years while my daughter got a good education with all a city has to offer in this regard.
    But now I am living on the edge of national park in the Blue Mountains I wonder how I survived Brisbane for as long as I did.
    This year I have visited New York, Auckland, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Bribane and enjoyed my time in each of those cities… but I really like returning to Katoomba and to walk into the national park here every afternoon.

  11. wes george says

    Nature is indeed “superior” to humankind. Just as the river is superior to the fish held there within, the biosphere in which Sydney sits is, by definition, superior to the city.

    Trees that fall in the forest are well heard by forest denizens, regardless of whether we are there to listen or not. We are of a piece of nature, but unnecessary to the essence of the whole of nature. The reverse doesn’t hold true.

    Wilderness can be thought of as the nature’s cathedral. The autochthonous spiritual authority of wilderness does not mean that it cannot be improved upon from a human value perspective. Yet pure nature, like a deity, was always superior at all times and places in human cultural history, even if that superiority is inhuman and threatening.

    http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/friedric/p-friedrich4.htm

    Now that the great wilderness cathedrals of the continents (save one) are all in ruins, the story is about terra transforma, the new humanscape. The ancient gods, monsters and spirits have been driven out, the landscape demystified and made habitable. Today we stock the land with gods, monsters and spirits of our own design.

    The aesthetic superiority of nature is a recent re-invention in the West, (note that China and Japan were on to the aesthetics of nature much earlier.) Romanticism is a nostalgic longing for an extinguished and thus idealised nature, rather than for wilderness as a reality.

    http://www.clemson.edu/caah/history/FacultyPages/PamMack/lec124/scenery.html

    There is no wilderness for the primitive because the primitive is the wilderness. Without the town and village, the warmth of the home hearth, there is no such thing as wilderness.

    Sadly, the reverse is true, without the wilderness the warmth of the home hearth, the town and the village, lose their essence.

    http://arthist.cla.umn.edu/aict/images/ancient/pre/512/202.jpg

    What would it mean to be a human if there were no wilderness beyond the last black stump?

  12. Ian Mott says

    But who could say that this fellow is not a very rich man indeed. http://search.live.com/images/results.aspx?FORM=MSNH&v=1&MKT=en-au&RS=CHECKED&GO=GO&q=Yunan%20rice%20terraces#focal=63aca740dd27d7ad12b9e45112be98d1&furl=http%3A%2F%2Fi.cnn.net%2Fcnn%2F2002%2FTECH%2Fscience%2F04%2F04%2Frice.genome%2Fstory.vert.terrace.jpg

    Do you think he yearns for wilderness?

    And what was that about all human modifications are ugly? http://search.live.com/images/results.aspx?FORM=MSNH&v=1&MKT=en-au&RS=CHECKED&GO=GO&q=Yunan%20rice%20terraces#focal=6ad8091c25b94e59cb73b434bbe38763&furl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fis.unipr.it%2F~coisson%2Fimages%2Fai1301.jpg