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When we consider concepts of nature, it seems that our culture is stuck between the enlightenment view of science from the museum and the romantic view of homogenised geographies from the media. Neither of which is in complete disagreement. Even those rapidly diminishing areas that are classified as 'pristine wilderness' no longer offer the experience of a true wild. Our concept of 'wilderness' implicates a space and time without people — that of the solitary experience of nature, the individual conceptually within, but physically outside the wild place, alone and apart from her fellow species. Through technology, our culture has rendered what may once in our history have been possible, obsolete. |
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These mediated experiences of nature are for many people, their only experience of a wild and uncontrolled form of natural environment. In a very real sense we have lost something through our evolutionary track from primate cousin in the African savanna to global 21st century human. To me, it seems that we desperately need this thing that some biologists call 'biophilia' (the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other organisms, see [5] for example), and that a mediated, virtual, terrifying, but ultimately safe representation of nature is to the majority of our society, an acceptable and palatable replacement. |
