He is more lone than you can imagine …. Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, This ground is not prepared for you. 24. In McKibben’s view, nature has died, and we are responsible for killing it. In forcing us to acknowledge that they are not of our making, that they have little or no need of our continued existence, they recall for us a creation far greater than our own. Nature is where humans aren’t. 5 notes. Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (New York: Macmillan, 1902), pp. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you future. For them, wild land was not a site for productive labor and not a permanent home; rather, it was a place of recreation. In his article “The Trouble with Wilderness or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Cronon argues that because of the culturally constructed nature of wilderness, the wilderness as we imagine it … 27. To assert the unnaturalness of so natural a place will no doubt seem absurd or even perverse to many readers, so let me hasten to add that the nonhuman world we encounter in wilderness is far from being merely our own invention. John Milton, “Paradise Lost,” John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. But the trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The trouble is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. Trouble with the Wilderness Cont. The author either got his facts wrong; he was not thorough on his research, he just chose to ignore the facts, or he has no knowledge of historical events. Meanwhile, its original inhabitants were kept out by dint of force, their earlier uses of the land redefined as inappropriate or even illegal. 10. He explains the word "wilderness" by talking about the American history. Part of the difference between these descriptions may reflect the landscapes the three authors were describing. However much one may be attracted to such a vision, it entails problematic consequences. (27) The ease with which anti-environmental forces like the wise-use movement have attacked such single-species preservation efforts suggests the vulnerability of strategies like these. No mere mortal was meant to linger long in such a place, so it was with considerable relief that Wordsworth and his companion made their way back down from the peaks to the sheltering valleys. At first he paints a wilderness we should fear, a wilderness we were not built for. When John Muir arrived in the Sierra Nevada in 1869, he would declare, “No description of Heaven that I have ever heard or read of seems half so fine.” (8) He was hardly alone in expressing such emotions. Humans in the beginning, did not travel around in groups looking for a “wilderness experience” rather, they would look for land to settle in to grow. Thus, in the myth of the vanishing frontier lay the seeds of wilderness preservation in the United States, for if wild land had been so crucial in the making of the nation, then surely one must save its last remnants as monuments to the American past—and as an insurance policy to protect its future. of Notre Dame Press, 1968); William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape (London, England, 1803). If civilization was to be redeemed, it would be by men like the Virginian who could retain their frontier virtues even as they made the transition to post-frontier life. Create lists, bibliographies and reviews: or Search WorldCat. thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind. Tellingly, it is a land where hardy travelers can support themselves by hunting with “primitive weapons (bow and arrow, atlatl, knife, sharp rock).” (34) Foreman claims that “the primary value of wilderness is not as a proving ground for young Huck Finns and Annie Oakleys,” but his heart is with Huck and Annie all the same. (9). He quotes Henry David Thoreau "It was vast, Titanic, and such as man… (24), The removal of Indians to create an “uninhabited wilderness”—uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place—reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is. (26) The most striking instances of this have revolved around “endangered species,” which serve as vulnerable symbols of biological diversity while at the same time standing as surrogates for wilderness itself. Foreman writes, “The preservation of wildness and native diversity is the most important issue. We need urban farms and rain gardens, and solar panels, and parks in our cities, and habitats for our animals. WorldCat Home About WorldCat Help. 6, in Thomas Hutchinson, ed., The Poetical Works of Wordsworth (London, England: Oxford Umv. 13. Modern Environmentalism works a lot like Voluntourism if you ask me. Nothing could be more misleading. If the frontier was passing, then men who had the means to do so should preserve for themselves some remnant of its wild landscape so that they might enjoy the regeneration and renewal that came from sleeping under the stars, participating in blood sports, and living off the land. Feelings like these argue for the importance of self-awareness and self criticism as we exercise our own ability to transform the world around us, helping us set responsible limits to human mastery—which without such limits too easily becomes human hubris. by William Cronon In the reading "The Trouble with Wilderness; or , Getting Back to the Wrong Nature", written by William Cronon shows an in depth analysis to the history of the word "wilderness". In William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90. How does it help to “save the trees” in our own backyard, when it means that more will be chopped down somewhere else, transported, and brought back to us to use? We work our nine-to-five jobs in its institutions, we eat its food, we drive its cars (not least to reach the wilderness), we benefit from the intricate and all too invisible networks with which it shelters us, all the while pretending that these things are not an essential part of who we are. Indeed, my principal objection to wilderness is that it may teach us to be dismissive or even contemptuous of such humble places and experiences. By seeing the otherness in that which is most unfamiliar, we can learn to see it too in that which at first seemed merely ordinary. Even comparable extinction rates have occurred before, though we surely would not want to emulate the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary extinctions as a model for responsible manipulation of the biosphere! William Cronon really emphasizes for Americans that wilderness is really not what comes to the eye, but it is far deeper than that. Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land. 29-62. Although God might, of course, choose to show Himself anywhere, He would most often be found in those vast, powerful landscapes where one could not help feeling insignificant and being reminded of one’s own mortality. Cronon opens with the first chapter titled "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature" in which he argues that a duality has emerged between mankind and nature. We can see that people moved from thinking of the wilderness as a savage, desolate, and barren place to one that should be utilized and appreciated today. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, p. 238. To return to my opening argument: there is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. He admits that “preserving a quality wilderness experience for the human visitor, letting her or him flex Paleolithic muscles or seek visions, remains a tremendously important secondary purpose.” (35) Just so does Teddy Roosevelt’s rough rider live on in the greener garb of a new age. When we visit a wilderness area, we find ourselves surrounded by plants and animals and physical landscapes whose otherness compels our attention. The romantic legacy means that wilderness is more a state of mind than a fact of nature, and the state of mind that today most defines wilderness is wonder. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton & CO, 1995), PP 379-408. In this view the farm becomes the first and most important battlefield in the long war against wild nature, and all else follows in its wake. (39). The tree in the garden could easily have sprung from the same seed as the tree in the forest, and we can claim only its location and perhaps its form as our own. The torrents of mist shoot out from the base of a great waterfall in the depths of a Sierra canyon, the tiny droplets cooling your face as you listen to the roar of the water and gaze up toward the sky through a rainbow that hovers just out of reach. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: Univ. Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, p. 65. One has only to think of the sites that Americans chose for their first national parks—Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Rainier, Zion—to realize that virtually all of them fit one or more of these categories. of Nebraska Press, 1987). 1365 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1978). The Trouble with Wilderness A Response William Cronon It's evident from these comments, as well as from other reactions I've received to this essay, that it has struck even more of a nerve than I intended it to. The sublime wilderness had ceased to be place of satanic temptation and become instead a sacred temple, much as it continues to be for those who love it today. Both trees stand apart from us; both share our common world. In the Bible the wilderness was a place people went to as punishment from God, in the wilderness Jesus and Moses were tempted by … 171-85. We are all part of nature, and we could all do our part if only we stopped trying to preserve “Wilderness” and started to live it. exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the Isn’t that how we’ll save the world? This, then, is the central paradox: wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. Press, 1956). 280-81, lines 131-42. (21). That’s part two of the problem: that “Wilderness” is a thing that exists only in nature, and we must escape humanity in order to find it. A useful survey of the different factions of radical environmentalism can be found in Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (New York: Routledge, 1992). We inhabit civilization while holding some part of ourselves—what we imagine to be the most precious part—aloof from its entanglements. The Trouble with Wilderness. Website: http://www.williamcronon.net. Copyright © William Cronon If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. This nostalgia for a passing frontier way of life inevitably implied ambivalence, if not downright hostility, toward modernity and all that it represented. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy. Any way of looking at nature that helps us remember—as wilderness also tends to do—that the interests of people are not necessarily identical to those of every other creature or of the earth itself is likely to foster responsible behavior. as in the plains. In just this way, wilderness came to embody the national frontier myth, standing for the wild freedom of America’s past and seeming to represent a highly attractive natural alternative to the ugly artificiality of modern civilization. The wilderness was where Moses had wandered with his people for forty years, and where they had nearly abandoned their God to worship a golden idol. Now the defenders of Hetch Hetchy attracted widespread national attention by portraying such an act not as improvement or progress but as desecration and vandalism. In virtually all of its manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from history. To this day, for instance, the Blackfeet continue to be accused of “poaching” on the lands of Glacier National Park that originally belonged to them and that were ceded by treaty only with the proviso that they be permitted to hunt there. This was no casual stroll in the mountains, no simple sojourn in the gentle lap of nonhuman nature. As Henry David Thoreau once famously declared, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” (1). To the extent that biological diversity (indeed, even wilderness itself) is likely to survive in the future only by the most vigilant and self-conscious management of the ecosystems that sustain it, the ideology of wilderness is potentially in direct conflict with the very thing it encourages us to protect. The elite passion for wild land took many forms: enormous estates in the Adirondacks and elsewhere (disingenuously called “camps” despite their many servants and amenities), cattle ranches for would-be rough riders on the Great Plains, guided big-game hunting trips in the Rockies, and luxurious resort hotels wherever railroads pushed their way into sublime landscapes. Yosemite was deeded by the U. S. government to the state of California in 1864 as the nation’s first wildland park, and Yellowstone became the first true national park in 1872. To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. The Trouble with Wilderness or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature William Cronon THE TIME HAS COME TO RETHINK WILDERNESS. But if we acknowledge the autonomy and otherness of the things and creatures around us—an autonomy our culture has taught us to label with the word “wild”—then we will at least think carefully about the uses to which we put them, and even ask if we should use them at all. The essay by Elaine Showalter is an attempt to study the field of literary criticism from the feminist point of view. Is it not enough that I smile Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (1864), in Henry David Thoreau (New York: Library of America, 1985), pp. In the broadest sense, wilderness teaches us to ask whether the Other must always bend to our will, and, if not, under what circumstances it should be allowed to flourish without our intervention. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be. Copyright © William Cronon. And I think perhaps most especially of the blown-out, bankrupt farm in the sand country of central Wisconsin where Aldo Leopold and his family tried one of the first American experiments in ecological restoration, turning ravaged and infertile soil into carefully tended ground where the human and the nonhuman could exist side by side in relative harmony. Any way of looking at nature that encourages us to believe we are separate from nature—as wilderness tends to do—is likely to reinforce environmentally irresponsible behavior. (32). uncomplaining fortitude. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893 the classic academic statement of this myth, but it had been part of American cultural traditions for well over a century. It is just here that our cultural traditions of wilderness remain so important. And in the narrow rent at every turn I’ll admit I often get these wild ideas. University of Wisconsin-Madison For one, it makes wilderness the locus for an epic struggle between malign civilization and benign nature, compared with which all other social, political, and moral concerns seem trivial. ... McCandless is quickly faced with reality, however. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Works of Thoreau, ed. (33) Although his arguments give primacy to defending biodiversity and the autonomy of wild nature, his prose becomes most passionate when he speaks of preserving “the wilderness experience.” His own ideal “Big Outside” bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the frontier myth: wide open spaces and virgin land with no trails, no signs, no facilities, no maps, no guides, no rescues, no modern equipment. Without our quite realizing it, wilderness tends to privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others. It can teach us to recognize the wildness we did not see in the tree we planted in our own backyard. 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