This is a continuation of a comments thread on the linked Alex Roddie’s post; I decided it’s too long to dump on someone else’s blog (and also too importand, to burry in a comment).

The romantic perspective on nature is all about aesthetics and recreation, and not much more. European romanticism gave birth to this idea of ‘wilderness’ as some sort of an ideal, perfect, state of things defined by the absence of humans: humans do not belong, are an unwelcome intrusion (the irony is, the romantic self is always, by some mental sleight of hand, excluded from this).

As an ecology this is logically incongruous: the declaration of a species (any species) as ‘not species’ requires an authority external to the ecosystem, and in the Western/European romanticism this comes from the Judaeo-Christian concept of imago dei. Alas, nature thus construed doesn’t exist, and it is worth reflecting on the fact that this view of nature is recent and purely Western/European in origin, it is alien to other human cultures.

Nevertheless, this perspective permeates today’s outdoor space, and we are continuously conditioned to think on those terms (not unlike good little members of a religious cult) so it becomes hard to see it for what it is. As a result we continue to confuse aesthetic preferences with genuine environmental concerns, e.g., we are offended the sight of a phone mast in a remote place, but get upset about a ban on making fires in a place where foraging for firewood on scale means huge ecological damage; fire makes us feel authentic, phone masts spoil selfies (to just pick up an example from a current discourse in Scotland).

Browsing the romantic paintings of Scottish landscapes in the National Gallery not long ago, I was struck by an uncanny resemblance to contemporary Scottish landscape photography, in that neither tells us anything about what the place was/is really like. It is, again, a particular subjective aesthetic elevated above all else.

Rewilding has taken the romantic idea of wilderness and human-non-belonging to a new level; on basic level rewilding is just a marketing term for depeopling, it all hinges on the idea that if only we take the humans out of nature, it will reach the putative ideal state. This is demonstrably not the case, nature, humans included, is opportunistic, and hence not self-balancing (and so rewilded land is, yet again, land carefully managed, and to cover it up the language of ‘native species’ and such, gets deployed, which, again, doesn’t withstand a closer scrutiny).

The fundamental problem with all of this, and why it matters to me so much, is that it is not possible to build a viable ecological model based on this understanding of nature for a world with 8 billion people in it. Also, historically the humans/nature separation has enabled large scale environmental destruction, for we set the ‘parks’ aside for nature, and so all is good. Indeed, one of the reasons why rewilding is so popular with the urban populations, and the outdoor influencers, is precisely because it asks nothing of us other than some monetary contribution, it all happens out there in the ‘wilderness’ that is of no personal existential consequence to us (but, surprise, is to others); our urban life can cary on as it has, we can have all the gear we want when we want it, and then go and get our brief emotional fix out there.

None of this is, of course, new. The problems with the romantic view of nature have been well understood for a long time, a classic treatment of it is the 1990s ‘Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature’, while a useful case study on how artificial the idea of ‘wilderness’ is can be found in ‘A Storied Wilderness: Rewilding the Apostle Islands’. But in the outdoor space this is a taboo subject, the muirian orthodoxy has hallmarks of a fundamentalist religion, and its questioning is unwelcome.