"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.
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."
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
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?