The Concept of Wilderness

What has been lost from the wilderness and I think is essential if it is to be deemed a wilderness in human eyes, is people living there in a mutual relationship that lacks the desire to exploit and spoil. Today humans seek only a superficial relationship by walking through or, like us, by dipping into the surroundings, preserving what we find in the lens of a camera as the romantic artist did back in the day with painted images of the Scottish Highlands, a genre brought here by artists such as William Charles Piguenit, to trap a visual image as a moment in time which inevitably misses out so much of the changing reality.

This disconnect with the land may in some ways be a good thing, a laisse faire, leave well alone that will allow nature to continue to evolve but it also means there is a vulnerability for the state of the land that could well be exploited by governments with a solely commercial, self-serving policy. Passive tourism is better than physical destruction because it wants to admire what is there.

Other dangerous humans seek only to take, abuse and destroy and the setting up of the World Heritage Site excludes both the baby and the bathwater. Aborigines would like to return one day to live on their traditional lands and maybe one hope for the survival of this country is if they do. What do you think?