Are most of us just p***ing about ...?

simon ess said:
My one deep thought for the month before I go out and get hammered...

Wilderness, like god, exists only in the mind of whoever perceives it and in the form in which it is perceived.
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Pookeyhead said:
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Funnily enough, just after I posted that I wondered if an exploration of how people perceive the notion of wilderness might make an interesting subject for a photographic project.

Of course, that idea might be dismissed as the mindless ramblings of a stoned hippy.
 
viv1969 said:
She's also not called Viv ;)
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I'm not called Pookeyhead either, but that never stops anyone :)

simon ess said:
Funnily enough, just after I posted that I wondered if an exploration of how people perceive the notion of wilderness might make an interesting subject for a photographic project.

Of course, that idea might be dismissed as the mindless ramblings of a stoned hippy.
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More interesting than what you'd find on Flickr though :)

You know I was only joking with the Young One's image don't you? I agree with everything you said.

There's the probable facts... and there's what we feel. Sometimes, people can't separate the two. Those that can are accused of being detached, remote, aloof or some kind of Spock character.

I think a project that somehow illustrates what people think of as wilderness would actually be very interesting.
 
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crofter said:
you tell me,you're the clever s***e.
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Ahhh.... now I understand. :) You thought you were being some kind of super slueth by finding a Flickr page, and thought you'd show the world how uninteresting it was by coming out of the blue without ever having said a word to me, and insulting me. Well done, and happy new year to you too. :)

Here's my web page as well if you want..

www.david-gregory.co.uk

Well.. what can I say? That took balls considering your own Flickr page's contents.
 
jerry12953 said:
Very good idea!
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I agree very interesting, thing is, how would you develop that, uk only to keep the cost down. Then what's the demographic to ask, social economic group, there'd be so many different answers, it could be very interesting. Does time make a difference, some town centres in late night early morning might be classed as wild.
 
Byker28i said:
Better seen on David's website, quite and interesting project with a good write up. Certainly interesting as a landscape project with some serious time put into the thought behind it and the taking of the images.

However, I get the feeling you tried to use it as a cheap shot?
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I agree, I got same feeling too. You're not in isolation. Uncomfortable springs to mind.
 
Byker28i said:
I agree very interesting, thing is, how would you develop that, uk only to keep the cost down. Then what's the demographic to ask, social economic group, there'd be so many different answers, it could be very interesting. Does time make a difference, some town centres in late night early morning might be classed as wild.
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Difficult to do as a purely or even mainly, photographic project, I suggest. Might be one for the sociologist. One has to be frank and admit that the majority of the population wouldn't give a **** about wilderness.
 
jerry12953 said:
Difficult to do as a purely or even mainly, photographic project, I suggest. Might be one for the sociologist. One has to be frank and admit that the majority of the population wouldn't give a **** about wilderness.
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Quite possibly but even if restricted to the uk (because of Attenborough etc we'd probably get answers like the rain forest, polar regions, Siberia) due to cost reasons, there's still interesting answers to be had.

Areas of Scotland, some of the lakes (or are these now covered with walkers), wales, inner cities at night. Perhaps the project would be to take answers then explore against a definition or definitions. It's got promise and certainly got my interest for a later project
 
Or perhaps you could think beyond the idea of definitions of wilderness as applied to the environment in a traditional way. Your idea about town centres, for example, or the wilderness created by extreme pollution in certain parts of the world.

For me, the greatest wilderness of all is a human mind unsullied by thought.
 
simon ess said:
Or perhaps you could think beyond the idea of definitions of wilderness as applied to the environment in a traditional way. Your idea about town centres, for example, or the wilderness created by extreme pollution in certain parts of the world.

For me, the greatest wilderness of all is a human mind unsullied by thought.
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I've asked a few people over the last couple of days:

A festival in Oxfordshire: http://www.wildernessfestival.com/

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A man fixes an aerial above boarded-up shops in Middlesbrough. Photograph: Ben Quinton for the Guardian Ben Quinton/Guardian

Urban exploration: http://www.derelictlondon.com/

Scotland: Knoydart and Glen Affric: http://www.theguardian.com/travel/v...-wilderness-scotland-knoydart-peninsula-video
and http://www.wildernessscotland.com/

Brecon Beacons
Peak district

Interesting responses
 
Sorry, but these must be the most trivial examples of wilderness it is possible to find!

How many "Britain's Last Wildernesses" can there possibly be?

There is no situation in which any land with sheep on it could possibly be described as wilderness. Sheep remove any native vegetation except coarse grasses by grazing. Sheep are the main reason why there is so little native woodland left in the British isles. (Although in Scotland that distinction may possibly be held by the Red Deer.)

The Brecon Beacons and no doubt the Peak District are just heaving with sheep.

Just to mention one reason why none of these areas could possibly be described as wilderness........

And

Pookeyhead said:
Some great examples of that on here ;)
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I wonder who he has in mind. Someone who doesn't agree with him, perhaps.......
 
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How big does an area have to be to be classed as a wilderness? 200 miles? 10 miles? 10 meters? A few milimeters? I think you'll need to establish some sense of scale, but i think this discussion is in danger of becoming bogged down by semantics.

I think PH is right in saying there a very few, if any areas left in the world that haven't in some way been affected by mankind, and you'll be hard pressed to find somewhere that can be said to be truly "natural." There are plenty of places that are crying out for further study however (if only to understand how they have been impacted by humans) and plenty of new discoveries to be made, I don't doubt. I would class these as "wilderness" in the sense that so little is still known about them, even though they are reduced to small, isolated pockets here and there. I suspect there are a great many cave systems for example (above and below water) that have yet to see much impact from mankind. The problem with describing wilderness as a completely natural, untouched, unexplored area is that as soon as you discover it (or very soon afterwards), you can't really call it wilderness any more.
 
jerry12953 said:
Sorry, but these must be the most trivial examples of wilderness it is possible to find! ...
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Perhaps, but my original suggestion was to ask people if wilderness existed in the UK and if so where would it be. I'm sure if we asked anywhere in the world we'd get things like sahara, rain forest etc. However simply for cost reasons and ease of documenting, it was restricted to the UK and the question asked. That doesn't mean it has to agree with your idea of wilderness, just that as a suggested project it had some legs and I did some preliminary investigation into if it was feasible.
 
I see! In these cases I think Wilderness is being used as promote things which are not wild at all. I would agree that Knoydart might come close to many people's idea of wilderness, even if it does have sheep and deer which would remove any chance of natural vegetation surviving or regenerating. (Not the case with the inner city, of course!)

I have to say, though, that a serious discussion of wilderness is probably beyond most contributors to a photography forum, though.
 
jerry12953 said:
I have to say, though, that a serious discussion of wilderness is probably beyond most contributors to a photography forum, though.
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Why might that be?
 
The British government were looking for some wilderness in the 1950's to explode (test) nuclear weapons.
They picked Australia and with permission, and assistance, from the Australian government proceeded to carry out the tests.

A local saying down here (Australia) was:
"Why did they pick Maralinga as one of the test sites?"
Answer:
"Because you could not tell the difference before and after the explosions".

For the aboriginal inhabitants of the area this was not true.
 
RichardTaylor said:
The British government were looking for some wilderness in the 1950's to explode (test) nuclear weapons.
They picked Australia and with permission, and assistance, from the Australian government proceeded to carry out the tests.

A local saying down here (Australia) was:
"Why did they pick Maralinga as one of the test sites?"
Answer:
"Because you could not tell the difference before and after the explosions".

For the aboriginal inhabitants of the area this was not true.
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I'd guess by some definitions of wilderness that if there were aboriginals present then that land could not have been wilderness.
 
ancient_mariner said:
I'd guess by some definitions of wilderness that if there were aboriginals present then that land could not have been wilderness.
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I think the general ACADEMIC definition of a wilderness is a land that is able to sustain natural speciation AND be free from any evidence of tampering by an industrialised society. There's a good book on this by J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson... well. it's edited by them. It's called "The Great New Wilderness Debate".

There's an extract available on Google books. Being Google books though, all the best chapters and passages are redacted, which is annoying.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=euqXSx_MGHMC&pg=PA285&lpg=PA285&dq=wilderness+and+speciation&source=bl&ots=vq4U9Jcnuo&sig=6jNOQJ3RbUiCEzT3A7hegtCTcl0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi6io6J4JDKAhWDuBQKHR2KAbEQ6AEIJDAA#v=onepage&q=wilderness and speciation&f=false
 
ancient_mariner said:
I'd guess by some definitions of wilderness that if there were aboriginals present then that land could not have been wilderness.
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Buried in a long post somewhere above I made the same point; that most/all (?) bona fide wildernesses, no matter how extreme, would have had aboriginal peoples living within them at one time......
 
jerry12953 said:
Buried in a long post somewhere above I made the same point; that most/all (?) bona fide wildernesses, no matter how extreme, would have had aboriginal peoples living within them at one time......
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Having people living there doesn't mean it's not necessarily wilderness, as people can, and did live simple hunter gatherer lifestyles that had no impact upon the lands ability to self-speciate. Only when we decided to farm did this change the land. Many would argue this is when the Anthropocine started.
 
If farming defines the end of wilderness, how about ants and termites which both farm...
 
Most of Alaska or Antartica or 25000ft unclimbed mountains I'd say were wilderness. Drop off these academics who think it isn't with no food or water and come back for their bodies in a month.
 
Nod said:
If farming defines the end of wilderness, how about ants and termites which both farm...
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I never said farming defines the end of wilderness. :) It almost certainly marks the point at which we probably started to change the landscape though. I also said that wilderness is defined by a landscape that can self-speciate, and our activities have curtailed that process as our actions now interfere with our environment's ability to do so.
 
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Laudrup said:
Most of Alaska or Antartica or 25000ft unclimbed mountains I'd say were wilderness. Drop off these academics who think it isn't with no food or water and come back for their bodies in a month.
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Oh look.. an anti-academic post from you. There's a surprise :)

Being hard to survive in is not a definition of wilderness. England, just after the ice sheets withdrew at the end of the last ice age would have been a very easy place to survive in, but it would still have been wilderness.
 
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Pookeyhead said:
Oh look.. an anti-academic post from you. There's a surprise :)

Being hard to survive in is not a definition of wilderness. England, just after the ice sheets withdrew at the end of the last ice age would have been a very easy place to survive in, but it would still have been wilderness.
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It's another one of your garbage 'an academic said it' well so what? Is that argument from authority supposed to be the last word on it because they shift definitions to suit arguments? Stick you in the middle of Alaska or the Antarctic and see how long you'd last whilst muttering 'this isn't wilderness'. 25000ft unclimbed mountains aren't wilderness. I mean give us all a break from this half-baked environmentalist view.
 
Laudrup said:
It's another one of your garbage 'an academic said it' well so what? Is that argument from authority supposed to be the last word on it because they shift definitions to suit arguments? Stick you in the middle of Alaska or the Antarctic and see how long you'd last whilst muttering 'this isn't wilderness'. 25000ft unclimbed mountains aren't wilderness. I mean give us all a break from this half-baked environmentalist view.
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I'm not sure you read my last post, so I'll reiterate. Being hard to survive in doesn't make it a wilderness. I'd find it just as hard to survive locked inside a walk in freezer... it doesn't make it a wilderness... just a really hard place to survive.
 
Pookeyhead said:
I'm not sure you read my last post, so I'll reiterate. Being hard to survive in doesn't make it a wilderness. I'd find it just as hard to survive locked inside a walk in freezer... it doesn't make it a wilderness... just a really hard place to survive.
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A locked walk in freezer wasn't created by nature though, that is obviously man made, not wild. Try walking through the Antarctic or go up an unclimbed mountain at 7000 metres and say it isn't a wilderness. There is more evidence of humans on comet surfaces or planets or moons than there.
 
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