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| T. Cole. Home in the Woods |
During the 19th Century, whilst in Britain Wordsworth, Byron and the Romanticists contemplated daffodils, frontier prospectors were blazing a trail across America. Like their English counterparts, Ralph Waldo Emerson & Henry David Thoreau were awed by the splendour of “the untouched wilderness”. These were the transcendentalists, to whom wild nature was divine, where man could reconnect with his spirituality by allowing his senses to envelope him.
John Muir, after travelling across the states, settled in his newly discovered « temple », Yosemite Valley in 1868, which was to become a National Park in 1890. In his view, spaces such as these should remain a wilderness, untouched by the hand of man so that its sanctity could shine through. A friend of his, Gifford Pinchot, viewed natural spaces differently, arguing in « The Fight for Conservation » (1909) for the management of natural spaces as a public service, harvesting its resources in respect of lieu. Muir and Pinchot became rivals when the mayor of San Fransisco proposed the building of a hydro-dam in Yosemite Valley. Pinchot backed the development, which was built in 1916, transforming the wilderness to a harboured resource.
As in America, natural spaces were cherished by artists and thinkers in France, in particular the forest of Fontaine Bleau, where painters and poets would take up residences, and whose works were presented as a collective during the 1920s. They too believed that nature should be left to its own devices, that trees should be left to fall and rot. Emeile Sinturel, a prominent painter at the time, stated that the forest be allowed to maintain its “sacred character” and that only those initiated in “artistic thought” should be allowed to visit since only they would appreciate its full “majesty and charm”. This view smacks of arrogance, but also of a naivety that these spaces have somehow remained separate from man.
In 1948 Fontaine Bleau was the site chosen to launch the International Union for the Preservation of Nature (IUPN). Here director general of UNESCO, Julian Huxley breached the divide between the two viewpoints by arguing that nature is a resource, but also a source of pleasure and beauty and that its management should take the two into account. But the time of the transcendentalists was coming to an end. Symbolically, the IUPN changed their name to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in 1956.
Today, the practice of ecology has to some reduced nature as a quantitative input/output based equilibrium, replacing the deep, romanticised and free wilderness. But a new wave of ecologists, the Ecocentrists, combine ecological know-how with an existential view of our place in the biosphere. I for one, am inclined to agree with them.
“Each human is part of a community which unites him with the soil, water, plants and animals. He must respect his ‘fellow members’ and the community they form together” Aldo Leopold
« At least in conserving nature we can liberate our consciousness, by performing an act of reverence to the world which created us. Until man feels a sense of respect for nature, he will be unable to overcome the difficulties of maintaining life on planet earth » Patrick Blandin
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