(no subject)

More oyster work yesterday. I was told I'd be picked up at 7 so I got up at 6:30, I was ready by 7 but my ride didn't show until 7:45! So I was rather tried. Getting up before 7 am always makes me a bit grumpy, I don't mind getting up at 7 but anything before strikes me as too early.

However it was lovely day to be on the shore of the bay, and we where in a lovely spot. The weather was sunny and cool with fluffy clouds, and we where far away from most highway noses so much of the time we could birds calling. It's great to be paid to be outside on a day like that.

English and American Ideas of Wilderness

I'm reading a lovely book Uncommon Ground ed. William Cronon which is about reexamining American ideas of wilderness. It's making be think all types of interesting but only tangentially related thoughts.

For example thinking about how English ideas about wilderness are different then American ideas about wilderness. Studying in England really changed my ideas about wilderness. To oversimplify vastly England has no wilderness and America has no countryside. However my sense of this dissonance came from studying the landscape rather then from talking to people. One friend was quite taken aback when I mentioned hiking in areas with bears and mountain lions. Of course many of my friends are quite conservation minded, and one or two have even done conservation coppicing -- an activity that flies in the face of the idea of pristine isolated wilderness.

Still I see the influence of wilderness on English conservation efforts. There are people who want things to be bigger. While fragmentation is a problem for some English habitats (eg Chalk grassland) it is not a problem for ancient woodlands, many of which have had the same boundaries for centuries. (See The History of the Countryside by Oliver Rackham) Still there are several projects to expand reserves of all types with out reference to the sites history. Some projects go even father in attempts to create wilderness. For example at Wicken Fen they have introduced semi-wild horses. They plan to create a shifting landscape of different vegetation types in which the horses will play key role. But this is not a restoration project, for the goal is not to return the area to a past state, rather it is wilderness creation project.

So despite the the differences in landscape and the history of use of said landscape American and English ideas are not about Wilderness are not as different as they might be. Cronon argues that Romanticism and the Frontier where both key in the American ideas of wilderness and conservation. These ideas about wilderness seem to have fed back and forth across the Atlantic. Indeed Romanticism was happening in both places. Still I think if I dug a bit deeper I would find more differences. Yet the similarities would remain.