Status Updates From The Savage Landscape: An Ev...

Unlike classical concepts of beauty, the sublime landscape did not embody a sense of harmony, balance and careful composition, but, rather, a runaway emotion of the kind summoned by the Romantic poets and political revolutionaries of the time, an overpowering sensory experience akin to divine revelation at a moment when the validity of religious visions was increasingly rejected.

“Conservationists, after all, must arrive from cultures of destruction.”

…Without them, without that element of fear, however faint or unformed, our relationship with the land is incomplete.”

“Wilderness, in this way of thinking, comes not from the absence of humans, but from the presence of that which is incompatible with them. Wolves, bears, the wild beasts of all kinds: those that frighten us, thrill us, go bump in the night. It's what's missing, they say, from the tight-leashed land: those lamplight eyes in the dark…

“ we see an echo of the old psychology at play, that same polyphonic response: that unholy harmony of fear in the face of the monstrous unknown; the pulsing undertone of panic - from the Greek, Panikos, relating to Pan, the god of the woods and source of the sudden, mindless terrors that afflict us all when walking alone through the dark.”

The word ‘forest' itself, which came into common usage during this period, carries with it some of these connotations, deriving from the Latin foris, meaning 'outside or abroad'; it is from the same root that we derive the word foreign'.

What lends the wilderness its symbolic power is the conflation of place and emotion: the perceived 'mood' of the landscape rebounding upon the human figure within it. The desolate or deserted landscape sets the tone for every story ever set there, an inversion of Ruskin's pathetic fallacy, in which nature becomes not wild as a reflection of the person, but the person wild in reflection of the land.

In this way, we have, by a meandering logic, come to Aip that earlier conceptualisation of wilderness as the fearful, unboundaried space surrounding the Garden of Eden, a malevolent force to be conquered; today it is the wilderness we wall off, securing it against the encroachment of the garden.

Wilderness is a powerful, ancient concept, which lies at the intersection of landscape, philosophy and ecology. It is a place where the human is brought into confrontation with all that is non-human, and is challenged and changed as a result.
[…] Wilderness has been the scene of exploration, both physical and psychological, as well as a site of first contacts, privations, moral catastrophes and heroics.