January 02, 2004

Re-thinking wilderness

The previous post on wilderness and this one over at junk for code indicate the challenge to the traditional conception of wilderness.

This is the one traditionally associated with preventing the building of the Franklin Dam in Tasmania in the 1970s and allowed Tasmania's rivers to continue to flow free. This romantic conception continues to be deployed in campaigns to save Tasmania's old growth native forests from being clear felled for wood chips for the Japanese market. It has underscored the preservation activity in Australia and the US that saw the creation of national parks, and been used to criticise the massive species extinction currently happening in Australia.

Thus the conception of wilderness is contested. We can meet the challenges by rethinking wilderness in terms of the ecosystem: wilderness is an ecosystem (an interconnected community of life) that has been minimally disrupted by the intervention of human beings. In responding to this conception of wilderness philosophy extends ethical concerns to non-human beings. It challenges the assumption that right behavior is exlusively a question of human relationships, works up an account of intrinsic value and a land ethic, and grants moral status to animals.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 2, 2004 05:44 PM | TrackBack
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