Modernized Ecologizing?

Focusing on a recent turn among several agenda-setting Danish biologists toward wild nature, I explore the curious way that detached non-investment and enchantment interact to power this turn. Based on conversations and observations made over the course of long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I reveal how, in the view of such biologists, it is only by allowing natural dynamics to run their course, unencumbered by human intentionality, that we can hope to nurture engagements that are not only experientially powerful—enchanted even—but also invite care and genuine modes of connectivity to nature. The biologists’ pursuits of wild nature may indeed be seen as an effort of ecologization, but I suggest that it is one that deploys certain instruments—practical and ideational—fitted to a supposedly modern outlook that, as much scholarship has explored, emphasizes separation between the human and rest of the natural world.