The desert and the sown
Oliver Rackham
THE IDEA OF WILDERNESS by Max Oelschlaeger
Yale, £19.95, pp. 477
The term Wilderness, meaning, roughly, land never affected by civilisation, comes easily to the pen of an American. Oelschlaeger contrasts it with the 'human- ised' landscape which developed gradually in the Old World from Neolithic times onwards, and was (he assumes) created suddenly in the Americas by European settlers.
This book is a formidable display of learning. It relates how veneration for Wilderness grew out of the writing of Henry David Thoreau, the great American naturalist of the 1840s, and has developed its philosophy and its poetry; it is now among the leading ideologies of the United States, complete with a feminist wing and a fundamentalist wing. Many say that Wilderness is a source of human values on which the future of civilisation depends.
Oelschlaeger seeks to read the roots of the Wilderness idea back into European tradition, via the Ancient Greeks and Hebrews, to prehistoric times and even to the Palaeolithic. Here the European reader has to stop and ask what Wilderness is. We are not used to the word or to the thing itself. We have our cultivated landscape (fields, gardens, forestry plantations) and our natural roughland (woods, moorland,
chalk downland). Is roughland Wilderness in the American sense? It has been used by graziers and woodcutters for many cen- turies, and without such use it would not be what it is. But nor is it humanised. Nobody planted the trees or sowed the heather or the orchids; they come as a by-product of the use. There is wild Nature in roughland and also in cultivation, and even in the middle of London: inferior, no doubt, to the Nature of Wilderness, but wild Nature nevertheless.
For us, Wilderness (in the narrow sense) belongs to high mountains and faraway lands. Columbus and Vasco da Gama rediscovered Wilderness for us. Our own Wilderness disappeared far back beyond the memory of record or tradition, and has had to be reconstructed from the science of pollen analysis.
When the author moves into European philosophy, one thus has to beware of shift- ing definitions. When Aristotle or St Francis, Descartes or Gilbert White or Wordsworth thought about Nature, it was the wild Nature of roughland and cultiva- tion, which had long ago come to terms with civilisation. Few of them had seen Wilderness. When they did (for example on a trip across the Alps) they were not specially impressed by what they saw. (The author errs in asserting that the British Isles were 'covered with timber at the beginning of the Middle Ages'; nor was Sherwood Forest a 'patrician hunting pre- serve', nor was it covered with trees.) For Oelschlaeger, the fatal step, the 'fall from grace', came with the beginnings of agriculture, which shattered the concept of living in harmony with Wilderness present to the 'Paleolithic mind'. Here I have to ask, was there a Palaeolithic mind, and how can anyone now know what it was? Did everyone really worship the Great Mother, enact the Great Hunt, have a cyclical notion of time and not have private proper- ty? How, without writing or long-distance travel, could they have held together an ideology from Tasmania to Alaska and over a far longer span of years than all the rest of human history? The evidence that they did is mighty thin.
The assertion that pre-Neolithic peoples lived in harmony with Wilderness is more controversial than the author will admit. The weight of evidence is that they exter- minated the mammoth and many other great Pleistocene beasts. Oelschlaeger's contention that these animals died out when the climate got warmer at the end of the Ice Age lacks conviction: the beasts had survived the endings of previous Ice Ages. It is also more than likely that pre- Neal ithic peoples radically changed Australia and much of America by repeat- ed burning: they were practising land man- agement, maybe without realising it. (They might have done so in England if our trees had been more combustible.) For the English visitor to the United States, first impressions are neither of Wilderness nor of the humanised land- scape, but of something that Oelschlaeger does not mention: vast tracts of wild forest, broken only by the occasional road or village, but full of field-walls to show that they had once been humanised. Such a `post-humanised' landscape, the nemesis of Nature, is known to us — the Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows is a literary example — but in America it exists by the millions of acres. Thoreau must have seen the change beginning: did he anti- cipate how it would develop, and does the result count as Wilderness?
The American love of Wilderness is one of the chief strands in the world's conserva- tion movement. I too have seen Wilderness in America, and share that love. We British have much to learn from it: where we do have tundra and bogs which Americans might recognise as Wilderness, we nibble them away with footling ski-slopes, pine plantations and peat-diggings. This book is one of the chief expositions of Wilderness philosophy. Few of us will understand it fully: Wilderness itself is one of many terms where the author's meaning has to be guessed for lack of a glossary or illustra- tive examples.
Finally, I have to ask how much differ- ence philosophy makes. The mediaeval English practised woodland conservation, but seldom wrote about it; without field- work, scholars easily assume that conserva- tion did not exist. Conversely, the Traeth Mawr, the most beautiful estuary in Wales, was destroyed by a poetaster who effused about water-sprites.
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