"Cover the alligator's eyes. That usually calms it down." Then, "tap it on its snout so that it drops its prey". Had "Surviving in Extreme Situations" already been published in the 16th century, the Seychelles might well have been populated earlier. The crocodiles that lived along the coasts of these islands helped to keep out earlier colonisers. The Seychelles were reputedly wild and dangerous. It wasn't until the 18th century with the ingress of cultivation that the mangrove thickets were drained, the crocodiles exterminated and the impenetrable lowland-plains cleared of the rain forests. Nowadays, tourists can travel to the pristine paradise on the back of the slogan "as pure as it gets“. The remote nature of the islands helps them to forget the hectic of their everyday lives.

Originally, wilderness signified land that had not been tamed by human beings. The not cultivated land. Virgin nature. Wilderness used to be associated with danger.

Fluorescent, transgenic fish: GloFish for the aquarium (courtesy of: glofish.com).

The woods and forests between villages and towns were places in which robbers and dangerous creatures lay in wait. Today, "virgin nature" is associated with harmony and dependability. In holiday brochures, the slogan "Escape to the wilderness" promises relaxation surrounded by nature. The wide reaches of the deserted forests of the taiga are pressed into service as carbon sinks to help stabilise our unbalanced climate system. In invasion biology plants that are introduced into regions, where they do not naturally occur, to be cultivated; so-called exotic, invasive species, are considered problematical. Wild, indigenous species are considered worthy of protection.

The strictly geometrically laid out gardens of Louis XIV's Versailles were an expression of the desire to exercise control over wilderness. The designer of the gardens, André Le Nôtre, planted his gardens following the principle of "forcer la nature’. In England, at the about the same time, landscape gardens were being laid out in flowing lines.

For the English planners it was more important to create gardens in harmony with the surrounding countryside. As Alexander Pope, a poet of the English enlightenment, put it, "To build, to plant, whatever you intend […] / In all, let Nature never be forgot / Consult the Genius of the Place in all / That tells the waters or to rise, or fall....“.

The re-naturalisation project, Le Petrin, on Mauritius. The right of the picture shows an area that has been cleared of exotic plants and now harbours 100% indigenous species. The fence protects the area from exotic apes. On the left: the "original", exotic wood (Photo: Eva Schumacher).

In re-naturalisations ecology, the nature gardening of the 21st century, tension continues to exist between "forcer la nature’ and "consult the genius of place". Some representatives call for the restitution of sites to the original, wild state they had had in past times. Others renounce wilderness as a term of reference and see re-naturalisation as a new shaping concept of the landscape.

It causes confusion that wilderness serves as a model for the functioning of ecosystems in ecological projects, while it is taken as the normative blueprint when it comes to implementation. A recently published attempt to shed some light into this jungle is entitled "wild design“. Humankind shapes nature according to its fantasies – within the limits of "natural" possibilities.

Instead of seeing wilderness, in its narrowest sense, as untouched nature, I prefer to see it as something unknown and untamed. Even seen like this, wilderness is being cultivated and destroyed all the time. Whether from trekking tourism with its high-tech equipment, couch-potato consumption of nature films or plant material collected for the pharma industry – in every instance a piece of wilderness is claimed and tamed. In parallel, wilderness is produced. The GloFish™, a genetically modified zebra fish for the aquarium, which glows in the dark thanks to corals' genes, promises new wilderness. Of her transgenic cacti with human hair, the artist Laura Cinti says: "I’d like to set one free“. I'm really looking forward to meeting a strokable cactus on my next hike. Just hope they won't become invasive. Wilderness is freedom and danger. "Like a true nature’s child, we were born, born to be wild.“ (Steppenwolf, 1968).