ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the separation of nature and society is also implicitly present in the imagination. It deals with the imagination that anthropogenic global warming will lead to the loss of the last wild places on Earth. The chapter traces some of the deep-seated roots that The Loss of Wilderness has in the cultural history of the West. It devotes some pages to the Heideggerian heritage that appears in the utilization of the imagination form. The chapter describes as a ‘modern’ perception that separates nature from society and valourizes wilderness as something pure, pristine, and beautiful. Not that nature is imagined to be without destruction, of course; but rather because humanity’s destructiveness is imagined to be without the balance that nature possesses in its destructiveness. In the end, what matters is that for both Zeno and Nara the wilderness becomes an affective and cognitive entry to the suffering of the non-human world.
