Wilderness in a human world
I have been traveling recently through the green fields of Brittany, down the miles of curvy rural roads that crisscross northern France. The countryside is absolutely gorgeous, lush agricultural fields bordered by little strips of oaks, which meld smoothly into old stone village centers. For an American, this pastoral landscape seems a little sad because there's so few forests, so few places that feel wild. It is almost entirely an anthropogenic landscape.
American landscape ecologists do not really like to study such landscapes, for the tradition in our field is to study the interplay of natural patterns and processes in national parks and other big chunks of habitat. Perhaps because of this, there's been a relatively slow acceptance of the clear ecological reality that- between land use change, global warming, atmospheric N deposition, and many other factors- there is no place that is really 'wild' in the sense of pristine. European landscape ecologists, in contrast, have always taken the agricultural fields and other anthropogenic land forms as their focus. They thus have little problem admitting the absence of the pristine. In fact, they sometimes sadly take this realization too far, and dismiss the whole concept of natural areas as worthy of protection.
Despite being firmly trained in this American school of landscape ecology, I am beginning to come over to the European point of view. Given the ecological reality of "the end of nature," American landscape ecologists need to move from studying passively landscapes toward active landscape planning, in consultation with urban planners, landscape architects, sociologists, and others. While the need for this transition has been apparent for a while to us, it has proven enormously difficult. Most ecologists got into this field because we loved that taste of wilderness, and so we are all psychologically afraid to let that concept go in any meaningful way. Perhaps the only way to convince most ecologists to go through this transition is to find a way to bring together the American love of wilderness with the European love of the anthropogenic. We would all do well to remember the great contribution of the 19th century generalists like Frederick Law Olmstead, who could embed something akin to wilderness in a human world.
