Concord is a town in N.E Massachusetts,
and it was there that Henry David Thoreau
(1817- 1862), emerged as one of an Anglo- American group of nineteenth-century
Romantics who were the first great environmental subversives of modem times. The
Romantic approach to nature was fundamentally ecological in that is was concerned
with relation, interdependence, and holism. Thoreau
wrote about the lands around his
home in Concord, and the ways they had been altered by two centuries of European
colonisation. In these meditations on history and place he was one of the first
Americans to articulate a philosophy about the value of environmental heritage and the
need for its conservation.
His musings were concerned with identifying
landmarks as the remains of former
interactions of human social systems with ecosystems. People add notional
attachments to these landmarks based on ideas generated by coming into contact with
them. These random collisions between place and imagination illustrate the inevitable
creative stimulus of combining wildlife and people. This important intellectual outcome
illustrates the progression of civilisation carried forward by myth and legend attached to
landmarks such as marshes, ruins, and churchyards. These thoughts in place are
expressed as writings and art works. They are creative elements of personal knowledge
systems about the values of cultural heritage and the need to inject these values into
systems of conservation management. Most of us, when we think about it, realize that
after our own direct experience of wildness, art and literature, myth and lore have
contributed most to our love of wild places, animals, plants, even, perhaps, to our love of
human wildness. For here is the language of imagination that we so desperately need in
order to articulate the true meaning of conservation and have the medium so necessary
to communicate a shared vision.
Thoreau's thoughts about the juxtaposition
of wildness and economic development
highlight the importance of notional values created by the people who have day-to-day
contact with places they wish to conserve. What is unsettling is that these people, who
have led a life of intimate contact with nature at its wildest– a halibut fisherman plying the
currents of the Gulf of Alaska, an Inuit whale hunter, a rancher tending a small cow-calf
operation, a logger with a chainsaw–are perceived as the enemies of preservation.
The friends of preservation, on the other
hand, are often city folk who depend on
vacations in wilderness areas and national parks for their (necessarily) limited
experience of wildness. The difference in degree of experience of wildness, the
dichotomy of friends/enemies of preservation, and the notorious inability of these two
groups to communicate shared values indicates the depth of our muddle about
wilderness and wildness. It suggests again and again the increasingly desperate nature
of our struggle. At the heart of the dilemma is the fact that urban human beings are no
longer residents of wild nature, hence we no longer consider ourselves part of a
biological order.
The two cultures can only be bridged through
an education in moral naturalism; an
education that incorporates conservation and economic development as the two pillars
of applied knowledge for a sustainable future.
