Part 2: The aesthetic project of “the wild”

I first heard the term “rewilding” relatively recently, a year ago maybe, and it immediately fascinated me. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that—I’m certainly no restoration ecologist or scientist. What business do I have being captivated, transfixed, totally mesmerized by this term? Now, upon reflection, there are a few reasons. Right off the bat, it’s got that prefix that I find so puzzling: “re-,” meaning again or back. It’s also got “wild,” evoking a vivid yet unspecified type of landscape; and it’s got “-ing,” too, which implies intervention, the doing of something by someone or something to another thing. It’s a process, in short, that involves the past and involves landscape. Color me intrigued.

The Fens in fall. Photo by author, 2020.

The most basic definition of rewilding sounds innocent enough: the return of land to a wilder and more natural state.[1] Over the first ten or so years, after the term was coined as a restoration strategy in 1990, it has encompassed a handful of approaches. There is the “three Cs” approach, which holds that carnivores be introduced to cores and corridors. There is the approach that calls for the replacement of the Pleistocene ecosystem, which was structured around mega-fauna like tortoises and horses. There is also taxon substitution and naturalistic grazing.[2] What united these early approaches was the total absence of human involvement of any kind in the rewilded landscapes.[3]

But the term has since expanded. The rewilding scholar Dolly Jørgensen describes how “ecological conservation and restoration actions which were previously labeled with more discrete terms such as animal reintroduction, reforestation, or habitat restoration, are being subsumed under rewilding.”[4] Going one step further, Jonathan Prior and Emily Brady suggest that human involvement in rewilding be thought of as a sliding scale, rather than a simple binary, which further expands the term to include approaches that do involve human management and maintenance.[5]

The expansion of the term “rewilding” is emblematic of our ongoing tussle with the idea of wilderness. As Jørgensen asks, rewilding brings up questions like, “what does it mean to be wilder? Wilder than what? What does it mean to be more natural? … When and where does rewilding refer to?”[6] Here she is illuminating what William Cronon would refer to as “The Trouble with Wilderness.” In his 1996 paper of the same title, his central aim is to deconstruct what he sees as a troubling binary between wilderness and civilization. Wilderness, he writes “is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization.” Rather, he claims, wilderness is “a product of that civilization.”[7]

As a product of civilization, wilderness is, according to Cronon, a powerful image that is positioned as “the ultimate landscape of authenticity.”[8] He describes how the idea of wilderness developed from a Biblical image of a desolate and savage place, the place to which you were only sent against your will, “in fear and trembling.”[9] These wildernesses are wastelands, barren and terrifying, unhuman. Already, in this Christian concept, the canker is in the rose: the wilderness is seen something other, something non-human, something outside ourselves.

The religious origins of the image of the wilderness lasted into the eighteenth century and shifted, slowly, into rhetoric of the sublime. The sublime was physically manifested in vast and powerful landscapes, where mere man could sense his own mortality and, perhaps, glimpse god. But still, wilderness was something separate from humanity.[10] Romantic poets wrote of majestic mountaintops; painters painted views of valleys covered in fog; there was a degree of wistfulness in the Romantic gaze on the natural world. They embraced nature, exalted it, even, but in a somewhat plaintive way. Roussau, perhaps surprisingly, also regarded the past with a degree of ruefulness in his idea of the noble savage positioned the past, and specifically the wild past, as a simpler, better time. [11] [12] Through the nineteenth century, this notion persisted: nature was heralded as the best cure for modernity.

The Rousseauian concept of primitivism was clearly compelling to Europe’s aristocratic elite. In the years following the Enlightenment, this concept of wilderness as the sublime solution for modern society was manifesting in the aesthetic pursuits of landscape designers. As Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch describe, “wilderness gardens” and “Rousseau islands” proliferated on English estates spread across Europe.[13] Playing on themes of the picturesque, these landscapes showed a tamed nature that, although it was not “real wilderness,” nonetheless offered respite from modern, smog-filled industrial cities. The work of Humphrey Repton perhaps best epitomizes this moment. The babbling streams, shaded groves, and wildflower-strewn meadows he designed and recorded in his “Red Books” evoked wilderness—but a downright pleasant one.[14]  

Repton’s proposed design for the main view from Ferney Hall. He advocating removing a paved pavilion and high brick walls to open up the view to valley, knolls, and “wooded glen.” Humphry Repton, 1752-1818, The Red Book of Ferney Hall [1789]. Pen and brown ink and watercolor on paper. Binding: 8 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches (216 x 292 mm). Gift of Mr. Junius S. Morgan and Mr. Henry S. Morgan. 1954.17.

The aristocratic aesthetic trends of a tamed wild were brought to cities in the form of urban parks. Of course, the most famous practitioner of manicured urban wilds is Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed parks in the biggest and smoggiest of American cities: New York, Boston, Detroit, and Buffalo. The open spaces he designed were positioned as remedies for poor air quality, the lungs of these cities, places where humans go to find relief from modernity.[15]  He also developed some proto-ecological practices at the Boston Fens, as Anne Whiston Spirn documents, where he incorporated some naturalistic water filtration systems that addressed human health and environmental well-being at the same time.[16]

View of the Riverway section of the Muddy River. Image downloaded from The Frederick Law Olmsted Papers Project, Volume 8. https://www.olmsted.org/the-twelve-volumes/volume-19/volume-8

But more importantly to this present argument was Olmsted’s knack for designing parks that seemed to have always been there: preserved slices of pre-modern land. Walking through Central Park’s Ramble, for example, evoked meandering through woods; visitors were surprised and charmed by unexpected views over the Lake to the south. Along the Muddy River in Boston, citizens could step out of the city and into a wooded glen and feel a world away. Olmsted’s wilderness is thus both an experience and an image: something to engage with and something to observe. It is its dual definition that makes Olmsted’s nature powerful and lasting: it is a version of nature that has been specifically designed for the optimal experience.[17] It’s a human intervention that is made to look natural. Without these aesthetic trappings, Olmsted’s projects look much more like a modernist “improvement” project than harmless little slices of nature.

The Riverway being constructed, and looking rather exposed, bare, and unnatural. Downloaded from the Muddy River Restoration Project https://www.muddyrivermmoc.org/restoring-olmsteds-vision/ (Collection of the National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, Brookline, Massachusetts.)

From this brief history of the aesthetic project of “the wild,” a gripping story emerges. Our protagonist, nature, finds itself in constant competition with the antagonist, modern civilization. Thus rewilding is a story of a hero’s return. It represents a denouement: at the point we thought all hope was lost and that our cities would be left vulnerable to the ravages of rising seas and stronger storms, the hero is here to save us. The trouble is, our hero isn’t entirely what it says it is: nature “hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural.” [18] Enchanted as we are by this gripping story, we might not think to look for other ones—but indeed there are other stories to be told, and they can be uncovered, I think, by looking at some old maps. 

[1] “Rewild | Definition of Rewild by Lexico,” Lexico Dictionaries | English, accessed May 10, 2020, https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/rewild.

[2] Jamie Lorimer et al., “Rewilding: Science, Practice, and Politics,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 40, no. 1 (November 4, 2015): 39–62, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-102014-021406. This is likely the most thorough overview of the various versions of rewilding.

[3] Richard T. Corlett, “The Role of Rewilding in Landscape Design for Conservation,” Current Landscape Ecology Reports 1, no. 3 (September 2016): 127–33, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40823-016-0014-9, 128.

[4] Dolly Jørgensen, “Rethinking Rewilding,” Geoforum, 65 (Oct 2015): 482-488, doi://10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.11.016, 486.

[5] Jonathan Prior and Emily Brady, “Environmental Aesthetics and Rewilding,” Environmental Values 26, no. 1 (February 1, 2017): 31–51, https://doi.org/10.3197/096327117X14809634978519, 35.

[6] Jørgensen, 486; Ibid, 482.

[7] William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (January 1996): 7 – 28, https://doi.org/10.2307/3985059, 7.

[8] Ibid, 16.

[9] Ibid, 9.

[10] Ibid, 10 – 13.

[11] Surprising insofar as Romanticism as an aesthetic and ideological movement was positioned in direct opposition to the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment.

[12] Cronon, 13.

[13] Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch, “Rewilding cities,” in Rewilding, Nathalie Pettorelli, Sarah M. Durant, and Johan T. du Toit, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 282, citing an exceptionally good book: Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

[14] “Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design,” Exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, 2010. https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/romantic-gardens

[15] “CENTRAL PARK.; The Lungs of the City.,” New York Times, April 9, 1909, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1909/04/09/101876603.html.

[16] Owens and Wolch 282; Anne Whiston Spirn, “Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, William Cronon, ed., 1st ed (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1995).

[17] Interestingly, some rewilding projects do not embrace this idealized, beautiful image of nature. Prior and Brady (2017) observe that in some rewilding projects “there are likely to be practices that encourage less conventionally ‘pretty’ or ‘beautiful’ landscapes.” (Prior and Brady 2017, 14) In spaces that are not actively managed, “there will not be practices in place to preserve aesthetically-valued qualities.” (Prior and Brady 2017, 14) While we might still appreciate and engage with these newly non-human places, Prior and Brady argue that this form of rewilding is “aesthetically challenging” both because it is unscenic and also because there are few panoramic vistas that an unmanaged, forested wilderness affords.

[18] Cronon, 7 (emphasis added).