Opinion piece 2, 2023

The problem with wilderness

I have rarely felt greater joy than the journeys I have been privileged to make into places I thought unblemished by civilization, realms I casually called wilderness. Victoria’s Mounts Bogong, Feathertop, McDonald, Cobberas and Howitt. South Australia’s Wilpena Pound. Western Australia’s Stirling Range. Tasmania’s Walls of Jerusalem, Mount Anne, Frenchman’s Cap and Tyndall Range. The Budawangs, Kanangra Deep and Snowy Mountains of NSW. New Zealand’s Darran Mountains. Nepal’s Annapurna Sanctuary. Indian Kashmir’s Zabarwan Range. Slovakia’s High Tatra. The Pirin Mountains of Bulgaria. Kenya’s Mount Kenya. Mount Sinai in Egypt. For years, I was an uncritical devotee of the wilderness idea. Throughout the 1980’s I described my documentary imagery as ‘wilderness photography’.

Wilderness is a popular moniker for denoting earth’s least modified places for good reason. For over a century as a land-use concept (and photographic subject) it has helped garner public appreciation and support for the legislative protection of undeveloped environments across the world. Wilderness is the benchmark of unmodified pre- and non-human nature, the archetypal crucible of biodiversity and uncommodified space. Before the industrial era, the poles, most of the world’s high mountains, hot deserts, precipitous canyons, temperate rainforests and open oceans were wilderness by any measure. However, I now approach the idea more critically.

Historian William Cronon exaggerated when he bemoaned wilderness as an “illusion”, a symptom, not a solution to our alienation from nature, but he had a point. We now know global climate and biota has been subtly changing due to human activity for thousands of years before the industrial revolution and modernity. We also now understand that, as on the other continents except Antarctica, wilderness in Australia is largely a colonial falsehood effacing millennia of active indigenous management in constructing and maintaining its rich ecological mosaic. Writers like Bill Gammage, Bruce Pascoe and Michael-Shawn Fletcher have argued convincingly that careful selective burning, native-species cultivation and aquaculture flourished for thousands of years, that is, a genuinely enduring ecological husbandry was not only widely practiced but integral to creating and maintaining the beauty and biodiversity of much of what settler society, and most conservationists, have naively deemed ‘wilderness’ on this continent. In Australia, as in many colonized places, the descriptor ‘wilderness’ unwittingly perpetuates terra nullius: the colonial legal lie of indigenous non-possession.

In addition to nature preservation, wilderness is a byword for outdoor recreation. For some of its devotees, wilderness is a venue for playing out fantasies of empowered autonomy, the patriarchal script of the colonial frontier: think Robert Baden-Powell or Bear Grylls. For others, it facilitates temporary reprieve from the social strictures, gendered roles, economic imperatives, technological distractions and sensory cacophonies of everyday contemporary life. For others still (myself included), wilderness offers immersion in place uncontaminated by evidence of modernity: a stand-in for an imagined lost animist world before the plough and the city, in which to experience a sense of belonging to country.

That visiting, superintending and naming every sliver of their habitat was (and is) vital to indigenous peoples’ sense of belonging as well as survival is absent from the purist conception of wilderness. In fact, it could be argued rarely visited, untended, thinly-named country—wilderness—is perennially in danger of becoming geography without meaning, a territory unloved. To establish and deepen meaning in (and love for) country, each part of it—that crook in the creek kept free of snags so the eels gather, that stony rise where the sun alights each morning, that grassy field fired each spring, the old tree featured in an ancestors dream—has to be actively ministered and thickly suffused with memories and names, again and again, with each traverse and passing generation.

Sadly, the unrestrained humanism and predatory capitalism rendering the idea of wilderness necessary in the first place is unlikely to tolerate the permanent exclusion of any profitable resource from exploitation. We now know global warming is unravelling most of terrestrial nature, wilderness included. There is no question wilderness has been (and remains) a useful concept, a legitimate, potent land-use ideal with proven conservation value. But it is also a relational mask, a psychological compensation offsetting the tragedy of our alienation from nature. Little, if any, earthly nature is or is likely to remain much longer, genuine wilderness. To treasure wilderness, to the extent it ever did or still exists is understandable, but I concede it’s unwise now, if it ever was, to hold to the idea of it too tightly.