Feralness: A Sibling of Wilderness

Abstract

In North America, the classic voice of colonial peoples' connectedness to nature and a wellspring of distinct new identity has been the romantic individualist writing of affinity for wilderness. The truth is, however, that wilderness account makes North Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders culturally blind to an emerging split between wilderness as a land management concept and the state of the wild characteristic of the lands near the cities where 80 percent of us now live. To say land is wilderness, one has to imagine a static systemic context creating conditions that, if it were not for the colonizing project of land conversion, population implantation, mineral exploitation, the land would forever reflect. What about land that runs away from past colonial domestications? What about land that has hybridized with colonial escapee species? Thoroughly worked over lands are fallow on the edges of cities, and new kinds of wilds are emerging upon them. Let me propose that the time is ripe for the sibling of wilderness and for cultural forms exploring and reflecting its stories, for how can you preserve what you cannot name or the culture has never helped you to categorize?

Notes

1 “If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it”; Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks at the Signing of a Bill Establishing the Assateague Island Seashore National Park,” September 21, 1965; see Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=27265, May 5, 2017.

2 R. J. Hobbs, S. Arico, J. Aronson, J. S. Brown, P. Bridgewater, V. A. Cramer, P. R. Epstein, et al., “Novel Ecosystems: Theoretical and Management Aspects of the New Ecological World Order,” Global Ecology and Biogeography 15, no. 1 (January 2006): 1–7, Environment Complete, doi:10.1111/j.1466-822X.2006.00212.x.

3 Peter Bridgewater, Eric S. Higgs, Richard J. Hobbs, and Stephen T. Jackson, “Engaging with Novel Ecosystems,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 9, no. 8 (October 2011): 423, Environment Complete, November 15, 2014.

4 Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jane McQuitty

Biography

Jane McQuitty is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary and a lecturer with the School of Critical + Creative Studies, Alberta College of Art and Design, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She holds an MFA in Studio Painting (2007) from the University of Calgary. Her interest in the conceptualization of landscape began in 2000 when an 184-acre reserve of green space adjoined by local suburbs was taken back for development by its institutional owner. This prompted a long consideration of the role played by science in the operationalization of land preservation policy and by the cultural appreciation of landscape as the driver of demands for new preservation arrangements.