New found land

On November 21, 1620, the Mayflower and its 132 passengers set foot in the New World. These passengers were not of the usual composition for a transatlantic voyage; most of them hailed from a dissenting religious group of Protestant Puritans called the Pilgrims originating in Nottinghamshire, middle England. After unsuccessful attempts in Holland, they courageously set their eyes on a new Promised Land to establish their utopia, but

[n]one of their expectations were borne out by the stark “reality” confronting them [...] wolves, a variety of feline predators, and worst of all, unpredictable peoples with incomprehensible languages, customs, rituals, and beliefs. A dismal, dark, howling, and hideous wilderness indeed!³

These settlers were devout Christians, and very much in touch with Biblical worldviews; within this, the notion of a “wilderness” is persistently mobilised to describe places at the fringe of civilisation, a moral counter-world host to the devil and evil influences, where temptation confounds man’s route to God. It is this unruly and barren hinterland that Moses had wandered, guiding his people through the desolation, where some fell to worshipping false idols, and where Christ had endured Satan’s temptation during his forty-day sojourn in the wrath of the desert. And into the punishing wilderness went Adam and Eve, when they fell from grace from the Garden of Eden.⁴ Cast out from this cradle, redemption must be earned through labour and pain, its corollary being that the wild land must, too, undergo transforma­tive work to finally become a garden or orderly city.

Three quarters of the Puritan migration from 1630 to 1650 consisted of older settlers, who behaved as carriers of experience of the Old World into the New. They tended to hail from East Anglia–a region much like New England and dominated by fens and marshlands at the time–where there were clear distinctions between what was arable land and untamable territory. There was a seeming atmospheric malevolence about these landscapes invoking a supernatural shadow, and the setler’s existing folktales which spoke of hauntings, hags, boggarts and witches were projected with ease onto their new environs.⁵ Further to this, the relationship between the New England Puritans and the Native Americans was a complex one; their culture had grown far from the “revelation” of God and, in its strangeness and difference, reinforced the Puritan idea that the prim­itives shared an affinity with Satan. While there could be exchange and commerce between the populations, even religious conversions, peace steadily deteriorated until finally a blood-soaked two-year conflict broke out. The Natives’ tactical forest war-faring, with stealth attacks and ambushes, was highly unconventional for the European colonists. Camouflaged in the thickets, they were perceived as collaborating with the supernatural wilder^­ness, together a revolting devilry intending to expel the colonial settlers. This only served to further prove in the minds of the colonists that they were on the frontline of a spiritual war against forces of darkness; but the war, exemplary of the worst of human passions, had likewise revealed the fallibility of the utopic Puritan project.

Through their gardens and labouring fields, Puritans manifested their spiritual war against wilderness. But in reality, they were grafting themselves onto an expansive pre-existing territory in which nature, landscape and Natives lived harmoniously. Much closer to Eden than they could have ever imagined, the co-extensive relationship Natives had established with their landscape was such that it was teeming with sustenance; between winter game and rich rivers, village gardens of maize, squash, beans and wild berries, there was little to want for. A large network of native settlements managed fires, main­tained open forests, and were responsible for thriving agroforestry, earthworks, nomadic fields–even great grasslands, savannahs and tropical rainforests were tended to in some capacity.⁶ However these motifs of long-standing human presence, transient and impermanent by design, were soon recovered by vegetation after “The Great Dying”.⁷ This event, an effect of the myriad diseases and massacres brought as early as the arrival of Europeans in 1492, saw the population of Native Americans, estimated around 40 to 80 million initially, shrink by 90 percent.⁸ (It is now argued that the dramatic drop of CO2 in the atmosphere between 1570 and 1620 was caused by vegetal regrowth on these de-populated landscapes, which in turn triggered a dip in temperature remembered as the “Little Ice Age”, posited to be the start of the Anthropocene by certain scholars.)⁹ In the absence of its Native peoples and their cultivation, the environment appeared to return to a state of intactness, such that the notion of an evil wilderness would give way to a new myth: that of the “pristine”, an image of a virgin nature built upon willful erasure.

A plethora of falsified origin stories, omitting the presence of the Natives, would work in service of a supposedly untouched New World nature in its most iconic modern form. The idea of “wilderness” has been a necessary counterpart to societal order, in as much as it also caters to the divide between nature and culture. This separatism, which resides in an unstable Christian dualism, relies on the differentiation between humankind (made in the image of God) and the Nature they struggle against. (We later see the valency of these notions through its more modern permutation, its complete inversion: nature as an incarnation of God, and human­kind as a corrupting force.) Dualism is likewise the bedrock of our modern philosophical quandary which invites problematic thinking, dangerous in that it has permitted us to think of our relationship to nature in terms of simplisms and binaries: garden versus forest, civilisation versus wilderness, good versus evil. It is the stronghold of this very habit of mind that forced those that did not subscribe or align–namely non-Western or Native populations–into exile, eradication and erasure, as part of a moral program to restore an elusive “pristine”.

Romantic revolution

Eighteenth-century Europe brought new reflections on the concept of “wilderness”, where once again the land­scape was a veil for a formidable supernatural lying just beneath. Through the philosophical inception of the sublime, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schelling considered how landscapes possessed the ability to bring the human spectator to the edge of its conceptual powers; reams of literature describe a certain loss of self when overwhelmed by vast and ominous environments. Paralleling these developments, a similar re-evaluation of the “wilderness” took place in New England, one historically influenced by Puritan sensibility. The revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards is one figure through which we can connect Puritanism and the European Romantic concept of the sublime,¹⁰ exemplary in his appraisal of the shadow of the divine in the beauties of the world,¹¹ and his sermons speaking of a beauty in Nature unrivalled by man’s work. Here, we see the imaginary of a wild nature suffused with the divine beginning to take shape. This current of thought is evident in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal essay “Nature”, written eighty years after the time of Jonathan Edwards:

Standing on the bare ground,–my head bathed in the blithe air, and uplifting into empty space,–all mean egotism vanishes [...] The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.¹²

Henry David Thoreau, of Puritan heritage, would further develop Emerson’s transcendentalist thinking by drawing upon broad inspiration from sacred Indian texts, Roman­ticism and Deism–the idea that God encompasses everything, and can be seen and accessed through nature. In Thoreau’s morphing of the original Puritan doctrine, a new perception of a divine wilderness–one set up in opposition to the corrupting force of civilisation–is finally realised. As the next major figure of the wilderness movement, he would famously declare, “[i]n Wildness is the preservation of the World”. Imbued in his reference to “the World” is the range of ambivalent emotions associated with the sublime–alternations between bewilderment and dread, as described in his personal account of climbing Mount Katahdin, Maine, in 1864:

Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. He is more lone than you can imagine. [...] Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty.¹³

With its fanciful celebration by a host of renowned writers, the inhuman power of the wilderness was sought out by everyday adventurers, eventually becoming commonplace; it is as such that the sublime gave way to a domesticated Romantic feeling. By the second half of the nineteenth century John Muir–a mountaineer and influential environmental philosopher nicknamed “the father of National Parks”–would turn the wilderness movement into a popular phenomenon through his activism. His campaign to create the Yosemite National Park gave momentum to the preservationist movement, which would eventually lead to the founding of The Wilderness Society in 1937, and with it, the argument for greater separation between reserves and humans; the emergent field of ecosystem studies along with the concept of ecological restoration; and ultimately, the Wilderness Act, a decree that certain areas of land remain “untrammelled by man”.¹⁴ Integral to mounting support for these developments was Muir’s portrayal of time spent in nature as comfortable and pleasing, and nature therefore worth honouring and protecting:

These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God’s beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be. Drinking this champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breathing the living air, and every movement of limbs is pleasure, while the body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine…¹⁵

Parks as a sanctified domain for leisure can be said to have further introduced nature to the sphere of human culture in the West. But be that as it may, these notional differentiations between nature and culture are anyway non-existent in the practices of many indigenous socie­ties inhabiting what we perceive as “wild” environments. As the eminent anthropologist Philippe Descola describes, the Achuar–a horticulturist people from the Amazon practising agroforestry, amongst whom he lived for years–“are very experienced in the cultivation of plants, as can be seen from the diversity of species that prosper in their gardens (as many as a hundred in the best stocked ones) [...] twenty or so kinds of sweet potato and as many of manioc and bananas.”¹⁶ This expertise in agroforestry challenges our conceptions of the garden and farmland as a uniform, delineated space, distinct from the “wild”. In fact, most European forests are much less biodiverse than Achuar horticulture; forests we are familiar with are neither truly “wild” nor “pristine”, and only about 0.7% of European forests might be considered ancient or “primary” forest.¹⁷ Even the Amazon, the epitome of “wilderness” in contemporary imagination, is now understood to have been carefully managed over centuries during the pre-Columbian epoch, with large portions of its territory engineered by settlement networks that “rivalled the cities of ancient Greece in extent, population, and political and social organisation.”¹⁸ The very image of an untouched, autonomous nature is the result of palimpsest-like constructions and misconceptions, its layers forming a shifting ethics whose virtue is still uncertain.

Back in late 1800s Europe, an appetite for alternatives to the stifling cultural codes of European society engen­dered a specific movement in Germany and Switzerland which took the form of an aesthetic return to an outside. The Lebensreform–translated as “reform of life”–was a multi-faceted movement that called for a reconnection with nature and the simpler life of former men, one relying heavily on a doctored image of agrarian societies. It paved the way for a host of health practises still of usual occurrence today, such as outdoor nudism, vegetarianism, and organic farming, posed as remedies to ailments caused by rapid urban­isation. It was around this period of time that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, no doubt encouraged by Lebensreform, would frequently retreat to a tranquil Swiss town, in hopes it would soothe his debilitating migraines. It was there, in direct contact with natural landscapes of extraordinary beauty, that he would be moved to write his best known treatises. Enlivened by the spirit of the Romantic sublime, Nietzsche relayed in a letter to his friend Peter Gast: it is the birthplace of my Zarathustra, I just found the first outline of my thoughts [...] written Early August 1881 in Sils Maria, 6000 feet above sea level and far higher above all human concerns.”¹⁹ Anecdotes of this kind participated, and still participate, to a narrativised ideal of nature that arouses bliss, tranquility and inspiration. The salient point this retelling of Nietzsche makes, however, has to do with the dissolution of binary thinking, insofar as thoughts and experiences are here understood as the “continuation of the landscape by other means”.²⁰

Primitivity and aesthetics

The Romantic sublime was not the sole constituent of the idea of a sacred wilderness. The Romantic attraction to primitivity was also essential to a perspectival shift of wilderness–once hostile, now desirable–but it is one which is aesthetically appropriated and deployed selectively in service of particular ideological agendas. Following the pristine myth, the idea of raw nature had taken on moral qualities; in turn-of-the-century America, this vision took the shape of the “myth of the frontier”. As Theodore Roosevelt had put it, the “fine qualities” of the “rough-rider of the plains” were disappearing, and with it, the rugged individualism of wilderness-living, a lifestyle liberating those marginalised in civilised life into frontier freedom.²¹ The subtext of these writings also inferred that civilisation was a threat to wild masculinity, with the domesticated man at the mercy of the feminising tendencies of civilisation. The wilderness, with its hunts and bloodsports, became a tool for the regeneration of masculinity through nature, with this simulated frontier often reserved for elites who conceived of it as idyll recreation.²² These associations are said to have accessed a collective imaginary originating in Ancient Europe–the “black blood” of the boar or stag would run in the veins of the hunter in autumn, a dangerous and potent source of power nourishing the Jagdfieber (German for “hunting fever”). This would transform men into raging beasts, who would leave civilisation to partic­ipate in the great hunt.²³

The becoming-animal of the hunter points to a bio- regressive fantasy, one energised by the momentary return to wilderness and a search for its yearned-for origin: the cradle of humanity. This drive would, in its maturation, help to forge another cultural and aesthetic current–that of twentieth century Modernity and Modern Art, which took exotic artforms from distant countries and colonies as a great source of inspiration. But even so, many European academies still conceived of these societies as inferior or underdeveloped, their creative expressions degenerate, and stuck in some enchanted primaeval past (the “father” of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud would famously conflate this condition of theirs with his fascination for artefacts and archaeo­logical finds). As it has been noted by art historian Hal Foster, significant Modern artists like Pablo Picasso tended to be “drawn to this regression, for it seems to promise subjective release as well as artistic innovation: it is a regressive realm that might be put to transgressive use.”²⁴ Relating primitivity to an early or prior stage of development is an attitude we might see as confluent with that of the early Puritan settlers of the 1600s, who believed that Native Americans navigated natural territories with ease because they were kin of the wilderness, and thus able to conspire with it. Nonetheless, motivated by a charged attraction to the foreign Other, the appeal of the primitive influenced forms and representations at the crucible of a Modernity which sought to communicate a universal human nature, as well as the search for continuity between ancient and contemporary man.

It is within this scene of tension and ambivalence that design historians Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley intercede with the following summative analysis: that the Modernist project presented a new human, one which behaved as a “supercharged version of the very oldest human. Modern design was a double movement, connecting the future to its deepest past, as if the species was simply rebooting itself.”²⁵ Later in the twentieth century, this primaeval focus would proffer a Modern toolkit of essential, fundamental and supposedly constant concepts–such as “human need”, “human scale”, “human nature” and “human body”–which would go on to become the foundations of human-centred design. The very idea of identifying age-old features and introducing them as permanent, testifies to a modern conception of humans as at once ancient and developed. The aim of Modern design is then the defence of this human nature and its originary qualities, as it becomes assailed by the rapid expansion and complexification of technology and urban life. And as such, argues Colomina and Wigley, “[d]esign is defence”.²⁶ If ecological conservation is in practice a mode of design–aesthetic, purposive and planned–can it too be said to be an act of defence?

Global initiatives were largely inspired by American wilderness reserves, but these approaches, which relied heavily upon the extreme ring-fencing of parks, were criticised for their “fortress conservation” tactics. This highlighted the fact that the then-dominant American breed of conservation was not easily exportable, and that local and geographical specificity in conservation projects was paramount.²⁷ And the idea of nature as “an independent domain of intrinsic value, truth, or authenticity”²⁸–a wilderness that needs safeguarding–continues to pervade the aesthetic values of conservation. But it is worth nothing that policy-making in the last decades has evolved such that the United Nations advocates for forest governance by indigenous and tribal people in Latin America and the Caribbean,²⁹ and community-based conservation has become integral to most international initiatives. Remnants of wilderness-type ideals such as the pristine myth can be found in the motivation of ecological restoration to recover “a historical landscape or ecosystem state temporally located before a human-induced form of degradation of disturbance has occurred”.³⁰ These objectives are often brimming with aesthetic-ethical value claims about the authenticity of a state of a particular landscape, and the extent to which it is deemed historically accurate, which can feel tenuous or arbitrary. Such narratives also center upon a particular image of the primitive, a “bio-cultural narrative of pre-agricultural humans moving through and hunting–but not settling–in the landscape”³¹ and leaving no trace, but these are severely lacking in criticality.

Nonetheless, conservation thinkers have long argued that aesthetics should be kept in mind in any intervention, at least on the level of its communication. In a time of almost ubiquitous natural catastrophe, being able to preserve some degree of aesthetic relationship–such as an inclusive notion of naturalness, or the ability to foster environmental care–seems like an absolute requirement. Between solastalgia³² and a widespread, diffuse anxiety in the face of destruction promised by climate change, the retention of aesthetic values are thought to provide comfort and motivation for humankind. Medical service such as “nature prescriptions” are on the rise, which recommend immersion in a natural environment fort mental health benefit, resounding practices of the Lebensreform. While eco-aesthetic fantasies liberally draw upon notions of the wild, the primitive, the everlasting human for their expressions, they likewise signal the presence of an interior wilderness, whose drives and interests are disorderly and abound with contradictions and paradoxes.

Although the presiding idea of Modern design is often regarded as well-intending in a world of doubtful technology–insofar as it is sensitive to the user’s needs and nature, its ergonomics and scale, and promises extensive planning–it nonetheless epitomizes anthropocentricity. With these recursions in mind, it is poignant to acknowledge that “wilderness” has been a context-driven, malleable phenomenon, anthropomorphically adapted. If design is in defense of the human, the enemy here has never quite been clear. How, then, can we devise new practical paradigms for conservation in the age of the Sixth Mass Extinction?³³

Ethical uncertainty

When attempting to identify ethical frameworks, it should first be said that most of Western history and culture has evolved within the confines of Anthropocentrism, as is case-in-point with the inception of Modern design. In this, the flourishing of humankind is a priority justifying all means, while nature merely holds instrumental value in the human assignment. Contesting long-standing human dominion over nature, several strands of alternative approaches have come to the fore; pathocentrism, which denounces animal suffering and strives for species compassion, justice and equality; sentiocentrism, in which sentience³⁴ is paramount and a qualification to joining the moral community. Both tend to rely on the notion of gradualism–that nervous system complexity occurs on a gradient such that, as the argument goes, complex creatures should be protected over simpler ones as they have evolved to display observable interest or pain.

The umbrella term of these two mains ecological paradigms is biocentrism, which has emerged in the last three centuries as an appeal to multi-species kinship, for the benefit of all living beings on earth. At the more radical end of the spectrum, some deep ecology movements argue for extending intrinsic value to all living beings, and it is here that the familiar issue concerning the definition of life recurs.³⁵ Take, for example, the struggle to ethically situate viruses and pathogens, who nearly satisfy all our criteria for life, but whose reproduction and survival is predicated on harm to other organisms. If in conservation natural processes should be given primacy, we seem to struggle with the aspects of predation, parasitisation, and other forms of animal-on-animal violence it entails. Across levels of sentience and complexity, a huge amount of bloodshed occurs, perhaps nowhere more questionably than in the story of human politics. With respect to the unlikely places strict moral duty can take us, some authors have highlighted the following absurdism: that if our single, ultimate aim is to eradicate suffering, we would in turn have to annihilate all life on the planet.³⁶

The closest example of an attempted return to a “pristine” prior is the technique of rewilding, which introduces new challenges to aesthetic perceptions of nature. Rewilding is specific in that it proposes human intervention with a view to recreate conditions of a stable and biodiverse ecosystem; examples of this include reintroducing lost predators, removing fences and dams, or controlling invasive species. The ecosystem is then given relative autonomy for regeneration or novel evolution, the process and results of which directly confront traditional aesthetic goals of park conservation and biocentric ethics. Rewilding brings with it vast impenetrable bushes, stagnant waters with foul odours, fallen trees, dying vege­tation and rotting carcasses, a state far from the pleasure garden or family park. In the Dutch reserve Oostvaardersplassen, a prominent and controversial example of rewilding in Europe, deers along with de-domesticated ponies and cattles are left to starve every winter but, while their carcasses are unscenic for wanderers, they in turn provided food to the rest of the ecosystem.³⁷

A true leap in the conceptualisation of conservation objectives was brought about in the 1980s with the advent of biodiversity. It rose to prominence with the success of conservation biology, then a new field for scientific inquiry, one dubbed “a science of crisis”³⁸ and “emergency management of the planet”.³⁹ Biodiversity would prove to be a useful metric, one successfully adopted by most conservation initiatives in the ensuing decades. The moral, aesthetic, and often racialised prin­ciples of traditional conservation would slowly be replaced by “ecosystem science” (though one must still wonder how much ecosystem science has quietly inher­ited insidious old rationales), a comparatively more objective and rational approach deemed better equipped to respond to what is now unfolding as a full-fledged Sixth Mass Extinction.⁴⁰ One ethical framework seems suitable for this dilemma, and that is ecocentrism, which recognises the intrinsic value of ecosystems as wholes, and advocates for their preservation. Following the notion of the sum being greater than its parts: care extends to all living and non-living beings within the spatial remit of a community, with respect to the specificity of their relationships and interactions, including the predation, death and suffering that comes with it. But as an ecological disaster swiftly brews, it is with urgency that we must reassess the meaningfulness of our ethical frameworks to extinguish the remains of an insular anthropocentrism or limited biocentrism, towards an ecocentrism where humans might have a place.

Rise in computing power and artificial intelligence have allowed for the processing of vast amounts of data at hitherto unimaginable speeds, accelerating studies in animal behaviour and climate-ecosystem interaction. And thus, more challenging technological interventions for conservation are set to appear. The rise of genetic science and new tools for modifying the genome of living beings are opening onto curious ethical horizons for conservation. In the 2000s, cloning technology helped scientists to resuscitate or “de-extinct” the last Pyrenean Bucardo named Celia, whose cells had been sampled.⁴¹ While Celia’s clone lived a mere 10 minutes, and would not have been able to kickstart a new population on her own, other projects have set their sights on more daring ambitions. Colossal Inc., for example, is a company raising funds to bring back charismatic megafauna like the mammoth through the careful editing and assembly of its surviving DNA traces.⁴² In their vision, said mammoth would revert the now-forested Siberian environment back into carbon-trapping steppes... but how much these “pet projects” are fueled by capitalistic self-interest, or self-aggrandising visions of supreme control over nature, remains a relevant question.

More important is to recognise that environments are inherently complex living networks, and any sort of ecological intervention, rewilding or otherwise, will naturally involve “ecosystemic uncertainties” that are set to be inherited in myriad unpredictable ways. Try as we may, aesthetic focuses are therefore short-sighted imaginaries impossible to render in actuality, and should not be an end goal. The effects of yesteryear’s environmental attitudes are still as of yet unfolding, and we are only now beginning to find this palpable in today’s precariously changing climate. And while certain strains of conservation rebuke technological intervention, it is only with the aid of new technologies and scientific advance that we have been able to quantifiably assert the gross immensity of our situation. Acknowledgment of this has resulted in the idea of “non-equilibrium ecology”, which critically questions our ability to simply turn back time and return to the “pristine” state, while debunking outmoded views that ecosystems were at some stage homeostatic, that is, developing in predictable linear and stable ways.⁴³ To usher in yet another shift in the notion of wilderness, we would like to posit climate change as an absolute alterity, a new form of haunted or hostile wilderness and one of unrelenting uncertainty. It is impossible to ignore the apocalyptic character of our present ecological state, which has been interpreted as divine retribution for civilisations’ will to growth, strongly reminiscing Puritanical readings. If little else is certain, climate change, with the entropic quality of its feedback loops and entangled interactions within our Earth system, poses a threat like no other.

Providing the public with well-researched speculative testbeds for this complex of ecological concerns is a vital role of art and design today. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, the pioneer of Synthetic Biology and Design⁴⁴ has, for example, imagined a scenario in which we employ “biodiversity off-seting”. Echoing current carbon strategies, the twist here is that the species reintroduced to foster biodiversity would be entirely synthetic.⁴⁵ It is with similar goals of provocation and public awareness in mind that Arthur Gouillart–along with a team of designers and engineers–developed Augmented Nature,⁴⁶ a speculative work utilising existing technologies that is effectively implementable now. In it, biotags are used to communicate with “ecosystem engineers”, the term given to animals critical in creating and maintaining habitats for the rest of the ecosystem.⁴⁷ Through this communion of animal-machine-human, creatures such as the humpback whale or collared peccary could be subtly directed out of manmade danger zones such as shipping routes or poaching territories, and driven towards areas requiring restoration, where they can initiate processes which improve biodiversity. The loss of some animal autonomy for the promise of novel ecosystems, however, tends to be a trade-off strongly opposed by those who believe technological auxiliaries interfere with animal wellbeing, and pose a threat to their “authentic wildness”.

Even more deeply embedded in an ethical grayzone is the integration of organic life with robotics; take for instance technologies able to remotely control insects through their nervous systems, or genetically modify their sensory organs for the purpose of data collection.⁴⁸ Though one can speculate on how such technologies might be deployed in conservation for the utilitarian “greater good” of biodiversity and ecosystemic health, for now they reignite thorny debates on animal welfare and the threat to “wildness”.

Recognition of an artificial divide between nature and culture, and by extension animal and machine, have led some to tout the rise of an “Age of Man Environmentalism”, wherein humans are the steward of biodiversity and expected to introduce technological designs for ecosystems.⁴⁹ These demiurgic interventions may verge on optimistic solutionism to dissimulate their exploitative undertones, but technological means should not be entirely repudiated on the basis of moral-aesthetic fantasies of a “wild” and “virgin” nature, here shown to be no less narcissistic. And if the autonomy of nature (or the ideal of wildness) should continue to be contested terrain, it should at least be understood in terms of gradation to avoid categorical, binary thinking. Essentially, ecosystem design is always ambiguous where it is confronted with the question of an authentically wild nature. All attempts, interventionist or not, are sure to grapple with this same problem of a “fake nature”, if nature can only be regarded as relative to the untouched one we imagine preceded us.

While we argue for messiness, nuanced positions, blurred boundaries, and disrupted simplisms to help us to unbind the nature-culture divide, we must likewise remember that the potential scale of impact caused by our paradigms is itself an ethical horizon. We must think carefully about how our well-intending conservation efforts might provoke cascading effects, with the power to instigate even more unimaginable uncertainties than the wilderness of our current climate disaster. It is worth reflecting on the complexity of our organic and inorganic systems in this time of ecological emergency to consider how far are the far-reaching consequences of our so-called solutions. Ultimately, we must ask ourselves: what is the value of constructions of an “authentic” nature in times of catastrophic collapse, and how equipped are we to partake in its design?

Bibliographie