Art Historical Support of Colonial Environmentalism (late Blog Post 2)

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818. 

            Richard Grove discusses colonial roots of Environmentalism in Green imperialism. The argument of preservationist colonialism is supported by the ‘Sublime’ philosophy of Edmund Burke and illustrated in artworks such as Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich.

It is easy to believe that European colonists searched for the Garden of Eden in the foreign wilderness of their Eastern and Southern colonial conquests. Grove argues that the Europeans intended to preserve, rather than exploit, these Edenic lands for “knowledge of the natural world began to be seen as a respectable path to seeking knowledge of God.” (Grove 4)

A parallel movement of the art history world is the idea of the “Sublime”. There are endless historical art works that illustrate the Garden of Eden. However, I argue that the colonial perspective of the environment can be observed more broadly in the ‘Sublime’ landscapes that were popular until the 18^th century. Edmund Burke defines the Sublime experience in his work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. In summary, Burke’s ‘Sublime experience’ is equivalent with meeting God; terrifying and euphoric, sudden and persisting, overwhelming and mysterious.

Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 oil painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, is one of the most frequently cited works of the Sublime. It depicts an elegantly dressed man adorned with a cane atop a steep, jagged, rocky mountain overlooking an infinite landscape. A blanketing fog masks the earth below, alluding to the mysteries of unexplored lands unknown. The poise and dress of the wanderer suggests that this sort of journey is reserved for an elite class; that a pioneer is a privileged title.

Friedrich’s portrayal of the environment is revelatory of colonial environmentalism. The landscape fades into the horizon, representing an infiniteness of what the world has to offer. The delicacy to the white fog triggers thoughts of purity as it rises and blends into the heavens above, suggesting an inherent divinity within the environment hidden below. Conversely, dark, protruding rocks ominously pierce through the fog, proposing uncertain danger or consequences with the impending exploration. Almost tauntingly, clustered trees perch upon the stones like the peaks of resource icebergs. Friedrich’s landscape presents a collision of two dimensions: the man on the cliff and the distant landscape below. This could also allude to man meeting nature, Heaven meeting Earth, and the opposing dimensions of Burke’s Sublime.

“[The Sublime] comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger, the panther or the rhinoceros. Whenever strength is only useful, and employed for our benefit or our pleasure, then it is never sublime: for nothing can act agreeably to us, that does not act in conformity to our will; but to act agreeably to our will, it must be subject to us and therefore can never be the cause of a grand and commanding conception.” (Burke 20)

The terrific and mighty dimension of the Sublime speaks to its ‘higher power’ than man. If an entity can be commanded and massively exploited, it loses its ‘holiness’ and eliminates its potential as Eden. Thus, the Edenic locals’ exploitation of the subsistence resources directly degrades the intrinsic divinity of the garden, rather than merely the integrity of the garden via overexploitation. Therefore, the theories of the Sublime and the Garden of Eden couple to support colonial Environmentalism as an origin of Preservationist Environmentalism.

            Colonialism is the systematic control of one nation over another, or ‘colony’. Although the intentions may be holistically good, colonial Environmentalism, like Preservationist Environmentalism, forces the preservation of nature without consideration of another’s resource needs. This not only derives from the biblical belief of Eden, as suggested by Richard Grove, but also Edmund Burke’s broader philosophy of the Sublime as illustrated by Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.

Works Cited

1. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful With Several Other Additions. 1756. 

2. Grove, Richard. Introduction to Green imperialism, 1-15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.