Quote:
Originally Posted by Bęthberry
It is a beauty which has not always been associated with the Sublime, another aesthetic quality, which at least in the 18C was regarded as a quality of the kind of environment Laur speaks of, Mount Blanc in the Swiss Alps (which I read as her Alaskan wilderness, neither of which is a man-made environment (except as the oil and gas conglomerates and animal-hunting-by-airplane-advocates have their impact). This is a very different kind of beauty, one not associated with human sub-creation. It is a kind of landscape which often, in my reading of the historical expansion of North America, developes an adversarial relationship between humans and nature--and it is this very adversarial aspect which stimulates such tourist and sports development as heli-skiing and mountain climbing and championship snowmobiling races.
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Although the Romantics in the UK certainly found plenty of the Sublime in the English landscape - take Wordsworth as just one example. Though to be fair, they probably were unaware of just how delicate a balance between farming and nature had formed the Lakeland Fells and assumed 'God' had just done it all!