Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 16

local: a woodland amidst farmed fields, a salt marsh along an estuary, a
mysterious urban garden - all touched with private and special meanings.
This suggests that wild nature and wilderness can exist on a personal
scale. If we find a moment's peace on an hour's walk across a meadow by
the river, does it matter that this is a shaped nature, and not a wild one?
Wilderness is an idea, and it is a deep and appealing one. Some shaping
of landscape can be so subtle that we hardly notice. Nigel Cooper asks
how natural is a nature reserve, and identifies a range of places where
conceptions of nature are located in the British landscape, including
biodiversity reserves, wilderness areas, historic countryside parks, and what
he calls 'companion places'. In our almost entirely farmed landscape, where
nature is as much a product of agriculture as it is an input, the efforts to
recognize and conserve biodiversity and wilderness are varied. All of these
are as much treasured by the people who make or experience them as those
who gaze upon the wildest forests, savannahs or mountains. 29
In all of these situations, we are a part, connected; we affect nature and
land, and are affected by it. This is a different position to one which
suggests that wilderness is untouched, pristine, and so somehow better
because it is separated from humans - who, irony of ironies, promptly
want to go there in large numbers precisely because it appears separate.
But an historical understanding of what has happened to produce the
landscape or nature we see before us matters enormously when we use an
idea to form a vision that clashes with the truth. One idea may be that a
place is wild, and so local people should be removed from it. Another idea
is that a place is ripe for development, and so a group of people should
be dispossessed. The term wilderness has come to mean many things,
usually implying an absence of people and the presence of wild animals;
but it also contains something to do with the feelings and emotions that
are provoked in people. Roderick Nash takes a particularly Eurocentric
perspective in saying 'any place in which a person feels stripped of guidance, lost and
perplexed may be called a wilderness' , though this definition may also be true
of some harsh urban landscapes . 30 The important thing is not defining
what it really is, but what we think it is, and then telling stories about it.
Stories and Memories of the Wild
The landscape is full of stories and meanings that we have made of stones
or trees, of plants and rivers, memories that we have woven together with
beginnings and ends. This creativity gives extra life to nature and how we
react to it, and how we are shaped by it. But how good are we at still telling
these stories? Ben Okri, in his Joys of Story Telling , says of Africa: