Wilderness triumphant: Beyond romantic nature, settlement and agriculture

Abstract

<p> Wilderness - though not nature itself - is socially constructed, for it gets its meaning through and in opposition to the agriculturalist's domus. As such it has been viewed both (and at the same time) as a threat and a resource to be exploited. Both attitudes inform the 'agriculturalist sublime' of domesticating wilderness. Against this sublime the Romantics responded with their own 'natural sublime', though this sublime was, in fact, driven by the same logic of domestication it sought to react against. The Romantic conception of nature involves, therefore, a form of self-deception of the kind paradigmatically represented by the Wilderness Preservation Area, where 'natural areas' are ultimately domesticated imaginings of nature, not the real thing. The ultimate irony of this effort to protect nature by domesticating it within the domus is that it produces an 'Anthropocene' wilderness that threatens human agriculturalist civilisation itself. </p>