Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 14

These connections are woven into the Dreamtime, or the Dreaming, which
in turn shapes the norms, values and ideals of people within the landscape.
Each Aboriginal group has its own stories about the creation of their
land by their ancestors, and these stories connect people with today's land.
Such land is non-transferable. It is not a commodity; therefore, it cannot
be traded. Events took place here, and people invested their lives and built
enduring connections - so no one owns it; or, rather, everyone does. As
Bennett also says: 'those who use the land have a collective responsibility to protect,
sustainably manage and maintain their “country”'. How sad that those who came
later showed so little of this responsibility and little collective desire to
protect what was already present.
Wilderness Ideas
The idea of the wilderness struck a chord during the mid 19th century,
with the influential writers Henry David Thoreau and John Muir setting
out a new philosophy for our relations with nature. This grew out of a
recognition of the value of wildlands for people's well-being. Without
them, we are nothing; with them, we have life. Thoreau famously said in
1851: 'in wildness is the preservation of the world'. Muir, in turn, indicated that:
'wildness is a necessity; and mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as
fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life' . But, as Roderick
Nash, Max Oelschlaeger, Simon Schama and many other commentators
have pointed out, these concerns for wilderness represented much more
than a defence of unencroached lands. 25 They involved the construction
of a deeper idea - an imagination of something that never really existed,
but which proved to be hugely successful in reawakening, in North
American and European consciences, the fundamental value of nature.
Debates have since raged over whether 'discovered' landscapes were
'virgin' lands or 'widowed' ones, left behind after the death of indigenous
peoples. Did wildernesses exist, or did we create them? Donald Worster,
environmental historian, points out for North America that 'neither adjective
will quite do, for the continent was far too big and diverse to be so simply gendered and
personalized' . 26 In other words, just because they constructed this idea
does not mean to say it was an error. Nonetheless, they were wrong to
imply that the wildernesses in, say, Yosemite were untouched by the human
hand; these landscapes and habitats were deliberately constructed by
Ahwahneechee and other Native Americans and their management
practices in order to enhance valued fauna and flora.
Henry David Thoreau developed his idea of people and their cultures
as being intricately embedded in nature as a fundamental critique of