Mattia Acerbo, The Ecosocialist || The painting condenses a colonial vision of history. Indigenous peoples appear neither as political communities nor as societies with their own knowledge, memory and forms of dwelling. They are absorbed into the wilderness and made to disappear with it. Conquest becomes progress; displacement becomes the clearing of space for history to begin.
A similar violence is hidden inside one of the most beautiful images of modern environmentalism: pristine nature.
A valley without villages. A forest without names. A mountain without memory. A river stripped of the people who fished in it, crossed it, cultivated its banks, worshipped it and passed down stories about it across generations. Such landscapes appear as pure nature because the human histories that shaped them have been removed from view.
This is the secret of pristine nature: it often begins after the people who lived there have disappeared from the image.
Through the ideal of pristine nature, the living world is imagined as a realm before society: a pure outside, an original place untouched by human hands. Wilderness appears as the opposite of history — silent, empty, innocent, sublime. It is where modern society goes to forget itself and dream of a world before labour, property, industry, war and domination.
But the empty landscape is rarely empty.
It has been emptied.
The sublime beauty of pristine nature therefore has historical conditions and political effects. It teaches us to look at land without seeing the relations that shaped it, turns inhabited worlds into scenery and allows dispossession to disappear into the apparent peace of the landscape.
Colonialism conquered land partly by transforming how land could be seen.
Empty Landscapes Are Made
To call a landscape “empty” is never innocent.
Emptiness is a way of seeing before it becomes a fact of geography. A place can be full of paths, stories, seasonal movements, sacred sites, grazing routes, burial grounds, hunting practices, names, fires and forms of care, and still appear vacant to the colonial eye.
It appears empty because the forms of life inhabiting it are not recognized as legitimate. Their relationships to the land are not recognized as forms of ownership. Their use of it does not count as improvement. Their societies do not count as civilization. Sometimes their lives do not even count as presence.
This is why the colonial imagination so often begins by producing vacancy. Land must become available in thought before it can be taken in practice. It must be described as wild, barren, wasted, underused, dangerous or waiting. Its inhabitants must be turned into nomads without property, savages without history, squatters without title, obstacles to progress, threats to nature or bodies out of place.
Only then can occupation be narrated as discovery, enclosure as protection, expulsion as conservation, and colonial settlement as redemption.
The very language of “discovery” already performs an erasure: to “discover” a land is to imagine that its history begins only when it enters the maps, archives and systems of possession of the colonizer. From the perspective of the peoples who had inhabited the Americas for millennia, the “discovery of America” is a contradiction in terms. What was new to Europe was neither unknown nor uninhabited; it could appear as a new world only by denying the knowledge, memory and sovereignty of those who already lived there.
William Cronon’s critique of wilderness remains decisive because it shows that wilderness is not a realm outside history, but a historically produced way of imagining nature as separate from society. This separation emerged from specific cultural anxieties and relations of power: from the desire to escape industrial modernity, but also from the erasure of the labour, memory and forms of dwelling that had shaped supposedly empty lands. What appears as the absence of society is therefore itself a social construction — one of modern society’s most powerful fantasies about nature and about its own disappearance from it.
The history of national parks reveals what this fantasy had to erase.
National Parks and the Colonial Eye
The national park is one of the great modern images of protected nature, and one in which this contradiction becomes especially visible. It promises refuge from industry, cities and the exhaustion of capitalist life. It offers mountains, forests, lakes, animals and silence. It presents itself as nature preserved from history.
But the very idea of the park is a historical product.
The history of Yosemite National Park reveals this colonial appropriation of nature in exemplary form. Before becoming an icon of American wilderness, Yosemite Valley was an Indigenous homeland. In 1851, the state-sanctioned Mariposa Battalion entered the valley, systematically burning villages and food supplies and forcing men, women and children from their homes. Its attempts to remove Native peoples from the wider Yosemite region, however, were never complete. Indigenous communities endured, returned, worked and maintained their relationships with the land despite continuing violence and dispossession.
The valley’s transformation into sublime scenery therefore did not require the complete disappearance of Indigenous life. It required that this life disappear from the dominant image of the landscape.
This is the obscene dialectic of wilderness: first removal, then reverence.
The same structure haunts Yellowstone. Celebrated as the world’s first national park, it is routinely imagined as a primordial landscape of geysers, bison, forests, rivers and volcanic earth. Yet the National Park Service now recognizes twenty-seven Tribes with ancestral and contemporary connections to the lands and resources within the park. Indigenous peoples travelled established trails, hunted, gathered plants and minerals, traded and conducted ceremonies throughout these territories.
The park did not create the nature within it. It created a particular political form of nature: protected space administered by the state, emptied of certain presences and opened to others.
This is the colonial eye at work. Indigenous dwelling appears as intrusion, while tourism appears as reverence for the land. The subsistence economies of local communities appear as degradation, while the scientific management of these territories appears neutral.
Human presence as such is not entirely rejected; only some humans are removed.
This political form of nature did not disappear with the colonial frontier. It survives in what is often called fortress conservation: the protection of ecosystems through borders, surveillance, exclusion and, at times, militarization. Indigenous peoples, peasants, pastoralists, forest communities and subsistence hunters can be treated as threats to biodiversity, while tourists, scientists, conservation organizations, private investors and state agencies are authorized to enter the same territories as visitors, experts or legitimate guardians. Once again, access to nature is distributed through relations of power.
Human-rights organizations have documented how exclusionary forms of conservation have displaced Indigenous communities, restricted traditional livelihoods and violated collective rights in the name of environmental protection. This does not mean that all protected areas are colonial or that local practices are always sustainable. The key issue is who has the power to define ecological harm and decide which forms of human presence are allowed.
Conservation becomes politically blind when it defends the living world by reproducing the relations of domination that helped produce ecological crisis in the first place. When nature appears safe only after Indigenous, rural and impoverished communities have been removed from view, what is being protected is also a political image: nature without labour, memory, conflict or competing claims.
A museum of life built through the exclusion of the living.
The visitor arrives after the violence. He sees the valley, the river, the animals, the light. He feels awe. He thinks he is looking at nature before history.
In fact, he is looking at history itself after its erasure.
To Make the Desert Bloom
The same colonial logic appears in Palestine through the notorious formula “a land without a people for a people without a land.” The slogan originated in nineteenth-century Christian restorationism and was later adopted by several supporters of Zionist settlement. Its political force did not depend on Palestine being literally uninhabited, since Arab, Jewish and other communities already lived there. It depended on denying that the existing population constituted a people whose historical presence, social world and political claims counted.
A populated country could therefore be treated as empty space available for colonial appropriation.
The related fantasy of “making the desert bloom” reproduced this logic in an even more explicitly ecological form. It promised more than cultivation. It suggested that the land had been waiting for the settler: that before his arrival there had been only barrenness, waste, underuse and stagnation. Palestinian farmers, pastoralists and communities disappeared as ecological and political subjects — as people who cultivated, grazed, planted, traded, irrigated, repaired and inhabited the land. The “natives,” according to a familiar colonial stereotype, did not truly work the land; they were supposedly idle and incapable. Only the settler could properly cultivate it, improve the soil and harvest the fruits of his industry.
The settler’s activity could then appear as the beginning of history itself.
Before occupying the land, the colonizer first learns to see it as a land waiting for his arrival.
This is why Gaza belongs in this story, even though Gaza is not wilderness. It has long been an intensely inhabited coastal society: a place of homes, refugee camps, beaches, markets, cemeteries, schools, mosques, churches, farms, memories and ruins.
The histories of Gaza and Yosemite are not interchangeable. What they reveal is a recurring colonial and political operation: an inhabited world is transformed into a territory to be cleared, managed, or incorporated into a future designed by someone else.
In February 2025, Donald Trump proposed that the United States take control of Gaza, relocate its Palestinian population elsewhere and redevelop the territory as the “Riviera of the Middle East.” The proposal imagined the enclave as valuable Mediterranean real estate whose inhabitants appeared as removable obstacles standing between the land and its profitable future.
The obscenity of this fantasy becomes even clearer against the material destruction that preceded it. By September 2025, the United Nations Environment Programme estimated that 78 per cent of Gaza’s buildings had been damaged or destroyed, alongside devastating damage to cropland, water systems, soils and the other material conditions of social reproduction.
A living society is reduced to rubble. Its population is imagined elsewhere. The resulting emptiness is then presented as an opportunity for investment, tourism and reconstruction.
To make the desert bloom, power must first produce a desert.
The pristine valley and the promised Riviera are radically different projects. What connects them is a recurring production of vacancy: inhabited land is rendered beautiful, productive, protectable or profitable by making its people disappear from the political frame.
Nature Without History
The myth of pristine nature must therefore be criticized from the left.
Its ideological power lies in abstracting the living world from the historical relations through which it is inhabited, transformed, damaged and defended. Nature appears as a realm outside society, while the powers that determine who may inhabit, use, protect or be expelled from it disappear from view.
The ecosocialist task is to dismantle this abstraction. Human beings live within nature, through nature and by transforming nature, since every society reorganizes material and ecological relations. The decisive questions concern the social form of this transformation: who controls it, whose needs it serves, where its costs are displaced and whether it reproduces or destroys the conditions of collective life.
Capitalism transforms nature into value.
Colonialism transforms inhabited land into available space.
Pristine nature transforms the history of dispossession into sublime beauty.
Criticizing pristine nature does not mean abandoning ecological protection. On the contrary, it means struggling for an ecology that has no need to erase history in order to defend the living world; an ecology that does not confuse absence with purity or dispossession with care; an ecology that understands struggles over land, labour, memory and self-determination as ecological struggles.
This requires more than inserting Indigenous and local communities into conservation institutions whose basic structure remains unchanged. It requires challenging the power to decide what counts as nature, which lives belong within it and whose forms of knowledge, subsistence and dwelling remain legitimate.
There is no innocent ecology that can avoid these questions.
The myth of pristine nature offers wilderness as an escape from a society incapable of inhabiting the Earth without devastating it. Yet the living world does not need to be purified of history.
It needs to be freed from domination.
Once we understand this, the political task changes. We no longer ask how to preserve a world without people. We ask how to build forms of life in which human freedom no longer requires the destruction of its material conditions, and human presence no longer appears as an enemy of the living Earth.
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