enlightenment ! exploiting the the idea 'wilderness'

A good, early morning challenge  for a still sleepy mind. Time to wake up - in many ways. Celebrate the festival of lights with a little bit of Enlightenment  - of a challenging kind. One that challenges the commercialisaton, the commodification of everything. Diwali included. 

Great article !

In the course of “preserving the commons for all of the people,” a frequently stated mission of national parks and protected areas, one class or culture of people, one philosophy of nature, one worldview, and one creation myth has almost always been preferred over all others. These favored ideas and impressions are at some point expressed in art. And it is through art that our earliest preconceptions and fantasies about nature are formed.

The mystique of Yosemite, for example, was largely created by photographers like Charles Leander Weed, Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston, all of whose magnificent images of the place are completely bereft of humanity or any sign of it having been there. Here, they said (and they all knew better) is an untrammeled landscape, virgin and pristine, not a bootprint to be seen, not a hogan or teepee in sight.

Here in this wild place one may seek and find complete peace. They and their friends who sought to preserve an idealized version of nature called it “wilderness,” a place that humans had explored but never altered, exalted but never touched. It was the beginning of a myth, a fiction that would gradually spread around the world, and for a century or more drive the conservation agenda of mankind.

They all knew better, the portrayers of wilderness; in fact, Adams assiduously avoided photographing any of the local Miwok who were rarely out of his sight as he worked Yosemite Valley. He filled thousands of human-free negatives with land he knew the Miwok had tended for at least four thousand years. And he knew that the Miwok had been forcibly evicted from Yosemite Valley, as other natives would later be from national parks yet to be created, all in the putative interest of protecting nature from human disturbance.

“Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural,” he says. By glorifying pristine landscapes, which exist only in the imagination of romantics, Western conservationists divert attention from the places where people live and the choices they make every day that do true damage to the natural world of which they are part.

So the removal of aboriginal human beings from their homeland to create a commodified wilderness is a deliberate charade, a culturally constructed neo-Edenic narrative played out for the enchantment of weary human urbanites yearning for the open frontier that their ancestors “discovered,” then tamed, a place to absorb the sounds and images of virgin nature and forget for a moment the thoroughly unnatural lives they lead.

So What is Wild?

What counts as wilderness is not determined by the absence of people, but by the relationship between people and place.

—Jack Turner, philosopher

The truth is that much of what the rest of us know about nature and have incorporated into the various sciences we use to protect it—ecology, zoology, botany, ethnobotany—we learned from the very people we have expelled from the areas we have sought to protect.

http://www.guernicamag.com/features/human_nature/