ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts wonder as its organising philosophical idea. The concept is first examined in relation to natural-history visual culture in Victorian Britain and the popular science and global expedition early-cinema genres. I argue that these first forays into revealing the ‘unseen’ world of nature are crucially relevant for an understanding of contemporary BBC Earth series. These series enact a technological rekindling of a never-before-seen aesthetic that paradoxically relies on the idea that some things may never be seen again due to the current environmental crisis. I suggest that this paradox can be understood as a struggle on these series’ part to keep their foundations intact within a natural history paradigm in the age of the Anthropocene, according to which a distinction between human and natural histories is no longer tenable.
