Una nueva tierra salvaje

Diane Cook A New Wild Land Diane Cook published A New Wild Land in 2020. It is a book that came out at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic but was obviously conceived before our planet stopped and we began to see life through the window and, from it, observe how nature gained ground in our absence. There is no science fiction or strange gadgets in this novel, despite being set in a future that could be hundreds of years from now or the day after tomorrow. Its protagonists leave the City and enter the Reserve, an unknown territory that brings together all the hostility and all the beauty of wild nature: a new nature in which the fundamental rule for inhabiting it is to leave no human trace. Outside the Reserve is the City where its inhabitants huddle together, where the air makes children sick, where all the colors are artificial. The rest of the planetary territory is dedicated to the exploitation of resources or the storage of garbage. Survival in the Reserve seems, compared to this, quite a privilege. However, in the pages of this novel you will not find a defense of Nature as that idyllic place to protect or to which to return to cure all the ills of humanity, nor a defense of the noble savage in a state of nature against the human being corrupted by progress and ferocious capitalism. It is not a moral or naïve novel, nor an ecological novel, nor even a dystopian novel, although it may seem so. It is a work that explores the human condition in a situation that is as adverse as it is unintelligible to the human of the Anthropocene: trying to survive by fighting against everything that progress and civilization have taught us.