This article discusses the expectations of happiness and moral elevation attributed to nature in contemporary secular context and its implications for environmental education practices based on direct contact with natural ecosystems. This paper situate the genesis of the moral value of wilderness in American conservative ideals of the nineteenth century and argued that this subject-moral, associated with the liberal-democratic context of the nineteenth century, corroborates nowadays with the perception of nature as a place of virtue and beauty. However, this does not mean a simple repetition of the ideals of the nineteenth century. The ideal of contemporary ecological virtue retake and transforms this notion of nature, articulating the nineteenth century inspiration with new axis of secularization and transcendence in the context of spiritualities of the immanence like the New Age ones.
Wilderness; Transcendence; Immanence; Environmental education