Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 15

mechanical ideas that had separated nature from its observers. His was
an organic view of the connections between people and nature. 27 In his
Natural History , Thoreau celebrates learning by 'direct intercourse and sympathy' ,
and advocates a scientific wisdom that arises from local knowledge
accumulated from experience, combined with the science of induction and
deduction. However, he still invokes the core idea of wilderness as
untouched by humans, even though his home state of Massachusetts had
been colonized just two centuries earlier and had a long history of 'taming'
both nature and local Native Americans.
Nature is something to which we can escape as individuals. Thoreau
celebrates the rhythms of walking and careful observation. He:
. . .looked with awe at the ground. . . Here was no man's gardens, but the
unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, not mead, nor woodland, not lea,
nor arable, not wasteland. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth,
as it was made forever and ever.
The important thing to note here is that the elegiac narrative of connect-
ions and intrinsic value had a huge influence on readers; and perhaps it
is a small price to pay that Thoreau focused on the 'unhandselled globe'
and the 'fresh and natural' to the exclusion of other constructed natures.
For these woods were, of course, shaped in some way by previous peoples
- they are an outcome of both people and nature, not a remnant of
primary wilderness until he happened along. 28
The question 'is a landscape wild, or is it managed' is perhaps the wrong
one to ask, as it encourages unnecessary and lengthy argument. What is
more important is the notion of human intervention in a nature of which
we are part. Sometimes such intervention means doing nothing at all -
leaving a whole landscape in a 'wild' state - or perhaps it means just
protecting the last remaining tree in an urban neighbourhood or a
hedgerow on a field boundary. Preferably, intervention should mean
sensitive management, with a light touch on the landscape. Or it may mean
heavy reshaping of the land, for the good or the bad.
So, it does not matter whether untouched and pristine wildernesses
actually exist. Nature exists without us; with us it is shaped and reshaped.
Most of what exists today does so because it has been influenced explicitly
or implicitly by the hands of humans, mainly because our reach has spread
as our numbers have grown, and because our consumption patterns have
compounded the effect. But there are still places that seem truly wild,
and these exist at very different scales and touch us in different ways.
Some are on a continental scale, such as the Antarctic. Others are entirely