nature

The Idea of Wilderness: Debunking New Primitivism

Written by Lucy Mercer, 20.09.2012

The natural world may be conceived as a system of concentric circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations, which apprise us that the surface on which we stand is not fixed, but sliding.[i]                                                                                                  (John Elder)

In this review, I would like to look at Max Oelschlaeger’s seminal environmental text The Idea of Wilderness[ii] (1991), an intellectual history of the Western world’s relationship to nature. This will be split into two parts: firstly, I will address the problematic dichotomy that The Idea of Wilderness is predicated on – the civilisation versus primitive binary – and examine the implications of positing primitivism as a solution to the current environmental crisis. I will then attempt to suggest an alternative approach for the modern environmentalist.

Nature's Nothing

Written by Federico Campagna, 17.07.2012

I started out with nothin
and I still got most of it left

Seasick Steve

 

In the spring of 1836, just one year before his death, the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi wrote what is considered his poetic testament, La Ginestra o il Fiore del Deserto (The Broom or the Flower of the Desert). Starting off with the description of a flower of a broom plant growing on the arid slopes of the volcano Vesuvius, Leopardi progressed into a fiery attack against both the delusions of his century – which still believed in a ‘magnificent progressive fate’ – and those who failed to recognize the malignity of Nature towards us humans.
Nature in particular is targeted by Leopardi as the true enemy of humanity.

He has a noble nature
who dares to raise his voice
against our common fate,
and with an honest tongue,
not compromising truth,
admits the evil fate allotted us,
our low and feeble state:
a nature that shows itself
strong and great in suffering,
that does not add to its miseries with fraternal
hatred and anger, things worse
than other evils, blaming mankind
for its sorrows, but places blame
on Her who is truly guilty, who is the mother
of men in bearing them, their stepmother in malice.
They call her enemy:
and consider
the human race
to be united, and ranked against her”1
 

The Winter War

Written by Federico Campagna, 17.12.2011
Saint Augustine claimed that evil is just the lack of good. How else could we describe nature, the bottomless pit of the universe, the deserts of Saturn, the solar tempests, the carelessness of the weather? Humans, insects, birds, grass, fish, all living creatures are together in the struggle against evil. They are the rebels, doomed to a perennial fight. They are the resistance, because they are alive.
 

In medieval times, all wars stopped with the arrival of the winter winds. Before the imperialism of centrally heated offices, people used to be subjected to the evilness of nature more than to that of their fellow men. In that horrifically wise age, humans like us used to relegate the vanity of war to times of luxury, when the loss of one’s life or freedom could at least have been mitigated by the gentle warmth of the evening and the abundance of raspberries even at the edge of a serf’s field.

Now war expands to the darkest hours of January, when not even leaves dare to unfurl. War: the capital double-u like the cross of martyrdom of Saint Andrew, the final ‘ar’ like a scream softened by agony. Ages pass, martyrdoms take different names. So, it is Work today. The same cross, hiding the final sound of an Ogre, inhumanely muscular, insatiably hungry. On that cross the monster hangs his prey, cures them, lets them dry. And as their skin hardens like the leather of an executive chair, as their neurons take the square shape of silicon, he finally sinks his teeth into their flesh.

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