8.1 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

8.1.1 Changing attitudes to the natural world

The ways that societies have thought about the physical world around them, and the innumerable shades of meaning invested in the single word ‘nature’, are vast and intriguing topics.Attitudes to the so-called ‘natural world’ are far from fixed. Landscapes are cultural constructions – many-layered palimpsests – which are the product of millennia of interaction between people and nature (Whyte 2002), and perceptions have constantly evolved. In fact, the attitudes which prevail today are very recent. For much of human history, nature was perceived as an enemy (or at best a reluctant ally) to be beaten into submission and coaxed to yield a living – to be feared, fought, flattened and farmed. Civilisation was almost synonymous with the conquest of nature (Thomas 1983); wild was bad, tamed and useful was good. This perspective has now been turned on its head: the wilder and more natural the better. Civilisation was once about rising above nature, whereas now it is seeking to reintegrate with nature.

Even 200 years ago the idea of preserving wilderness would have been unthinkable (Oelschlaeger 1991), and in medieval times the uplands which we now cherish were seen as ‘monstrous excrescences’ (Thomas 1983: 258). A Hanoverian officer posted to Scotland in 1715 described the uplands as: