Wilderness for Wildness: Saving the Wild in a Post-Natural World

Abstract

Humanity stands at a crossroads. We are at the brink of a planetary crisis of our own making. Carbon emissions threaten a level of climate instability not seen in this epoch. Accelerating species loss invites the possibility of a “sixth great extinction.” Scientists warn that entire ecosystems are unraveling. Wilderness, some claim, has become a relic of an unretrievable past. At the end of nature, a chorus of new environmentalists insist that wilderness preservation must therefore be abandoned and defend instead a moral duty to manage the biosphere benevolently through unprecedented human intervention. This might involve turning back the sun through solar geoengineering, harnessing genomic engineering to resurrect species, or perhaps using technologies we have yet to even imagine. This dissertation resists such a call by defending the moral value of ‘letting be’: of protecting the existence of wild systems that we do not attempt to control. I call this alternative picture a wildness ethic and argue that it has long been the underlying ethos of wilderness preservation. Moreover, the preservation and promotion of wildness not only remains possible but has never been more urgent. Ultimately, I argue that politically embracing a liberatory wildness ethic, long the beating heart of preservationist philosophy, may be one of the few things capable of staying catastrophe for good.