A Study On The Western Wilderness Concept Of The 20~Th Century

The sharp development of science and technology and economy in the western capital society was mostly based on the destroy of natural resource, the conflict between the exploitation and transformation and the preservation and protection of nature has already become the main contradiction in the modern society. As the production of this contradiction, the western wilderness concept was always taken as the hot issue by western environmental moralist. During the 19th and 20th century, the reseach on wilderness concept was constantly penetrated by the western scholar and the research was more and more approached to the essence of this concept. While, in China, the research on wilderness was still a blank area in environmental ethics, both the mass and the scholars did not give wilderness a specific orientation, so the research and anlehnung of the western wilderness concept had both theoretical and practical meanings. This paper takes the historical evolution of the western wilderness concept as the clue, analyzing the actual cause and the academic background of its establishment and development, through analyzing the historical, cultural and social elements which behind this concept, proclaiming the important idea of"biodiversity preservation area"and"free nature"which mainly contained in the mordern western wilderness, and this is the inevitable result of getting the modern western wilderness concept out of anthropocentrism and gradually approaching sustainable development and reinhabitation. The academic background of western wilderness concept contained the scientific logic of astronomy, ecology and evolution theory and the experience of the argument on conservertion and preservation, anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism, wholism and individualism of the philosophical idea.