ABSTRACT
It is 150 years since Henry Thoreau penned these words, words that resonate perfectly with our time. Despite a broader awareness of environmental issues and the threat to society posed by climate change, we ride roughshod over the planet’s last remaining wildernesses. Rainforests continue to be logged, the Arctic tapped for its fossil fuel reserves, the deserts mined for their mineral wealth and the oceans overfished. All of this is being driven by population growth and the wholly understandable desire for a better life. Malthus, Hardin and the Club of Rome aside, it seems that there might be no place for wildness in the landscapes of tomorrow where every little bit of the Earth will be settled, farmed, logged, fished, mined or otherwise exploited for human benefit. While such a world might just be sustainable, it will be poorer for it and highly susceptible to external forces of climate change and natural disasters, as well as those of our own making such as economic boom-bust cycles and war. A better vision of the landscapes of the future is that which is based around a much closer relationship between humans and nature, one that is mutually beneficial and one where, as Thoreau’s dictum suggests, life depends on the continued existence of wild places and the buffer they provide against the worst excesses of man and nature. The human relationship with nature and landscape is a long one. It has shaped who we are as
a species and we in turn have shaped it. This is well expressed in Cicero’s De natura deorum where he talks about second nature as the bountification of wilderness: ‘We sow corn, we plant trees, we fertilize the soil by irrigation, we dam the rivers and direct them where we want. In short, by means of our hands we try to create as it were a second nature within the natural world’ (Cicero, trans. Hunt, 1996). By implication, first nature is wilderness, the jumble of stuff from which landscapes are made, while the building blocks of the planet, including the geosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere and atmosphere, have been called zero nature especially in the work of Charles Jencks on contemporary garden design (Spens, 2004). Third nature is often taken to refer to the development of a designed aesthetic, usually expressed through formal/informal gardens, landscape architecture, the arts and the appreciation of wild nature that evolved during the Romantic movement of the mid-nineteenth century, of
which Thoreau was of course a part (Castree, 2005; Whatmore, 2005). Today, we are seeing something of a shift in the nature paradigm towards a fourth nature based around the (re)creation of wildness through the process of ecological restoration or (re)wilding. While this does not entirely abandon the values and ideas of second and third nature, it does seek to redress the balance and bring us back full circle to first nature (wilderness) by reducing the human influence within selected landscapes, and in some cases removing it altogether, such that the primary dynamic is that of natural processes leading to natural form and function (see Figure 32.1). Part of this new movement is founded around the understanding that human survival is predicated on the existence of functional natural systems that provide us with ecosystem goods and services. De Groot et al. (2002) categorised these into provisioning, regulating, supporting and cultural services. The first three categories provide goods and services such as timber and fresh water, regulate processes such as flooding and carbon sequestration, and support a functioning planet through crucial systems such as the carbon and hydrological cycles. The fourth links back to our place as human beings within, and to our appreciation of, landscapes through cultural services such as the provision of high quality recreational environments and spaces in which to
Figure 32.1 The cycle of nature-culture.
