17/04/2020
“When we visit a wilderness area, we find ourselves surrounded by plants and animals and physical landscapes whose otherness compels our attention. Enforcing us to acknowledge that they are not of our making, that they have little or no need of our continued existence,they recall for us a creation far greater than our own. In the wilderness,we need no reminder that a tree has its own reasons for being, quite apart from us.The same is less true in the gardens we plant and tend ourselves: there it is far easier to forget the otherness of the tree. Indeed, one could almost measure wilderness by the extent to which our recognition of its otherness requires a conscious, willed act on our part. The romantic legacy means that wilderness is more a state of mind than a fact of nature, and the state of mind that today most defines wilderness is wonder. The striking power of the wild is that wonder in the face of it requires no act of will, but forces itself upon us–as an expression of the nonhuman world experienced through the lens of our cultural history–as proof that ours is not the only presence in the universe.” - Getting Back to the Wrong Nature
•
•
