The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature
by William Cronon
(William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W.
W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90)
The time has come to
rethink wilderness.
This will seem a heretical
claim to many environmentalists, since the idea of wilderness has for decades
been a fundamental tenet—indeed, a passion—of the environmental movement,
especially in the
But is it? The more one
knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not
quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart
from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of
very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It
is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered,
but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be
encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a
product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very
stuff of which it is made. Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask
that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the
mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature
when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires.
For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be
the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman
world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem.
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. I celebrate with others
who love wilderness the beauty and power of the things it contains. Each of us
who has spent time there can conjure images and sensations that seem all the
more hauntingly real for having engraved themselves so indelibly on our
memories. Such memories may be uniquely our own, but they are also familiar
enough be to be instantly recognizable to others. Remember this? 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. Remember this too: looking out across a desert canyon in the evening
air, the only sound a lone raven calling in the distance, the rock walls
dropping away into a chasm so deep that its bottom all but vanishes as you
squint into the amber light of the setting sun. And this: the moment beside the
trail as you sit on a sandstone ledge, your boots damp with the morning dew
while you take in the rich smell of the pines, and the small red fox—or maybe
for you it was a raccoon or a coyote or a deer—that suddenly ambles across your
path, stopping for a long moment to gaze in your direction with cautious
indifference before continuing on its way. Remember the feelings of such
moments, and you will know as well as I do that you were in the presence of
something irreducibly nonhuman, something profoundly Other than yourself
Wilderness is made of that too.
And yet: what brought each
of us to the places where such memories became possible is entirely a cultural
invention. Go back 250 years in American and European history, and you do not
find nearly so many people wandering around remote corners of the planet
looking for what today we would call “the wilderness experience.” As late as
the eighteenth century, the most common usage of the word “wilderness” in the
English language referred to landscapes that generally carried adjectives far
different from the ones they attract today. To be a wilderness then was to be
“deserted,” “savage,” “desolate,” “barren”—in short, a “waste,” the word’s
nearest synonym. Its connotations were anything but positive, and the emotion one
was most likely to feel in its presence was “bewilderment” or terror. (2)
Many of the word’s
strongest associations then were biblical, for it is used over and over again
in the King James Version to refer to places on the margins of civilization
where it is all too easy to lose oneself in moral confusion and despair. 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. (3) “For
Pharaoh will say of the Children of Israel,” we read in Exodus, “They are
entangled in the land, the wilderness hath shut them in.” (4) The wilderness
was where Christ had struggled with the devil and endured his temptations: “And
immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness. And he was there in the
wilderness for forty days tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and
the angels ministered unto him.” (5) The “delicious Paradise” of John Milton’s
But by the end of the
nineteenth century, all this had changed. The wastelands that had once seemed
worthless had for some people come to seem almost beyond price. That Thoreau in
1862 could declare wildness to be the preservation of the world suggests the
sea change that was going on. Wilderness had once been the antithesis of all
that was orderly and good—it had been the darkness, one might say, on the far
side of the garden wall—and yet now it was frequently likened to
By the first decade of the
twentieth century, in the single most famous episode in American conservation
history, a national debate had exploded over whether the city of
The sources of this rather
astonishing transformation were many, but for the purposes of this essay they
can be gathered under two broad headings: the sublime and the frontier. Of the
two, the sublime is the older and more pervasive cultural construct, being one
of the most important expressions of that broad transatlantic movement we today
label as romanticism; the frontier is more peculiarly American, though it too
had its European antecedents and parallels. The two converged to remake
wilderness in their own image, freighting it with moral values and cultural
symbols that it carries to this day. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the
modern environmental movement is itself a grandchild of romanticism and
post-frontier ideology, which is why it is no accident that so much
environmentalist discourse takes its bearings from the wilderness these
intellectual movements helped create. Although wilderness may today seem to be
just one environmental concern among many, it in fact serves as the foundation
for a long list of other such concerns that on their face seem quite remote
from it. That is why its influence is so pervasive and, potentially, so
insidious.
To gain such remarkable
influence, the concept of wilderness had to become loaded with some of the
deepest core values of the culture that created and idealized it: it had to
become sacred. This possibility had been present in wilderness even in the days
when it had been a place of spiritual danger and moral temptation. If Satan was
there, then so was Christ, who had found angels as well as wild beasts during
His sojourn in the desert. In the wilderness the boundaries between human and
nonhuman, between natural and supernatural, had always seemed less certain than
elsewhere. This was why the early Christian saints and mystics had often
emulated Christ’s desert retreat as they sought to experience for themselves
the visions and spiritual testing He had endured. One might meet devils and run
the risk of losing one’s soul in such a place, but one might also meet God. For
some that possibility was worth almost any price.
By the eighteenth century
this sense of the wilderness as a landscape where the supernatural lay just
beneath the surface was expressed in the doctrine of the sublime, a word whose
modern usage has been so watered down by commercial hype and tourist
advertising that it retains only a dim echo of its former power. (11) In the
theories of Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, William Gilpin, and others, sublime
landscapes were those rare places on earth where one had more chance than
elsewhere to glimpse the face of God. (12) Romantics had a clear notion of
where one could be most sure of having this experience. 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. Where were these sublime places? The
eighteenth century catalog of their locations feels very familiar, for we still
see and value landscapes as it taught us to do. God was on the mountaintop, in
the chasm, in the waterfall, in the thundercloud, in the rainbow, in the
sunset. 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. Less sublime
landscapes simply did not appear worthy of such protection; not until the
1940s, for instance, would the first swamp be honored, in Everglades National
Park, and to this day there is no national park in the grasslands. (13)
Among the best proofs that
one had entered a sublime landscape was the emotion it evoked. For the early
romantic writers and artists who first began to celebrate it, the sublime was
far from being a pleasurable experience. The classic description is that of
William Wordsworth as he recounted climbing the Alps and crossing the
The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end. (14)
This was no casual stroll
in the mountains, no simple sojourn in the gentle lap of nonhuman nature. What
Wordsworth described was nothing less than a religious experience, akin to that
of the Old Testament prophets as they conversed with their wrathful God. The
symbols he detected in this wilderness landscape were more supernatural than
natural, and they inspired more awe and dismay than joy or pleasure. 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. Lest you suspect that this view of the sublime
was limited to timid Europeans who lacked the American know-how for feeling at
home in the wilderness, remember Henry David Thoreau’s 1846 climb of Mount
Katahdin, in
It was vast, Titanic, and
such as man never inhabits. Some part of the beholder, even some vital part,
seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. He is more
lone than you can imagine …. Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at
disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty.
She does not smile on him as in the plains. She seems to say sternly, why came
ye here before your time? This ground is not prepared for you. Is it not enough
that I smile in the valleys? I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air
for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee
here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind. Why seek me
where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a
stepmother? (15)
This is surely not the way
a modern backpacker or nature lover would describe
But even as it came to
embody the awesome power of the sublime, wilderness was also being tamed—not
just by those who were building settlements in its midst but also by those who
most celebrated its inhuman beauty. By the second half of the nineteenth
century, the terrible awe that Wordsworth and Thoreau regarded as the
appropriately pious stance to adopt in the presence of their mountaintop God
was giving way to a much more comfortable, almost sentimental demeanor. As more
and more tourists sought out the wilderness as a spectacle to be looked at and
enjoyed for its great beauty, the sublime in effect became domesticated. The
wilderness was still sacred, but the religious sentiments it evoked were more
those of a pleasant parish church than those of a grand cathedral or a harsh
desert retreat. The writer who best captures this late romantic sense of a
domesticated sublime is undoubtedly John Muir, whose descriptions of Yosemite
and the
No pain here, no dull empty
hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future. These blessed mountains are
so compactly filled with God’s beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has
room to be. Drinking this champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breathing the
living air, and every movement of limbs is pleasure, while the body seems to
feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering
not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one’s flesh like radiant heat,
making a passionate ecstatic pleasure glow not explainable.
The emotions Muir describes
in Yosemite could hardly be more different from Thoreau’s on Katahdin or
Wordsworth’s on the
Perched like a fly on this
Yosemite dome, I gaze and sketch and bask, oftentimes settling down into dumb
admiration without definite hope of ever learning much, yet with the longing,
unresting effort that lies at the door of hope, humbly prostrate before the
vast display of God’s power, and eager to offer self-denial and renunciation
with eternal toil to learn any lesson in the divine manuscript. (17)
Muir’s “divine manuscript”
and Wordsworth’s “Characters of the great Apocalypse” are in fact pages from
the same holy book. 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.
But the romantic sublime
was not the only cultural movement that helped transform wilderness into a
sacred American icon during the nineteenth century. No less important was the
powerful romantic attraction of primitivism, dating back at least to of that
the best antidote to the ills of an overly refined and civilized modern world
was a return to simpler, more primitive living. In the
One of Turner’s most
provocative claims was that by the 1890s the frontier was passing away. Never
again would “such gifts of free land offer themselves” to the American people.
“The frontier has gone,” he declared, “and with its going has closed the first
period of American history.” (18) Built into the frontier myth from its very
beginning was the notion that this crucible of American identity was temporary
and would pass away. Those who have celebrated the frontier have almost always
looked backward as they did so, mourning an older, simpler, truer world that is
about to disappear, forever. That world and all of its attractions, Turner
said, depended on free land—on wilderness. 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. It is no accident that the movement to set aside
national parks and wilderness areas began to gain real momentum at precisely
the time that laments about the passing frontier reached their peak. To protect
wilderness was in a very real sense to protect the nation’s most sacred myth of
origin.
Among the core elements of
the frontier myth was the powerful sense among certain groups of Americans that
wilderness was the last bastion of rugged individualism. Turner tended to
stress communitarian themes when writing frontier history, asserting that Americans
in primitive conditions had been forced to band together with their neighbors
to form communities and democratic institutions. For other writers, however,
frontier democracy for communities was less compelling than frontier freedom
for individuals. (19) By fleeing to the outer margins of settled land and
society—so the story ran—an individual could escape the confining strictures of
civilized life. The mood among writers who celebrated frontier individualism
was almost always nostalgic; they lamented not just a lost way of life but the
passing of the heroic men who had embodied that life. Thus Owen Wister in the
introduction to his classic 1902 novel The Virginian could write of “a vanished
world” in which “the horseman, the cow-puncher, the last romantic figure upon
our soil” rode only “in his historic yesterday” and would “never come again.”
For Wister, the cowboy was a man who gave his word and kept it (“Wall Street
would have found him behind the times”), who did not talk lewdly to women (“
There he passes his days,
there he does his life-work, there, when he meets death, he faces it as he has
faced many other evils, with quiet, uncomplaining fortitude. Brave, hospitable,
hardy, and adventurous, he is the grim pioneer of our race; he prepares the way
for the civilization from before whose face he must himself disappear. Hard and
dangerous though his existence is, it has yet a wild attraction that strongly
draws to it his bold, free spirit (21)
This nostalgia for a
passing frontier way of life inevitably implied ambivalence, if not downright
hostility, toward modernity and all that it represented. If one saw the wild
lands of the frontier as freer, truer, and more natural than other, more modern
places, then one was also inclined to see the cities and factories of
urban-industrial civilization as confining, false, and artificial. Owen Wister
looked at the post-frontier “transition” that had followed “the horseman of the
plains,” and did not like what he saw: “a shapeless state, a condition of men
and manners as unlovely as is that moment in the year when winter is gone and
spring not come, and the face of Nature is ugly.” (22) In the eyes of writers
who shared Wister’s distaste for modernity, civilization contaminated its
inhabitants and absorbed them into the faceless, collective, contemptible life
of the crowd. For all of its troubles and dangers, and despite the fact that it
must pass away, the frontier had been a better place. 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.
The mythic frontier
individualist was almost always masculine in gender: here, in the wilderness, a
man could be a real man, the rugged individual he was meant to be before
civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity. Wister’s
contemptuous remarks about Wall Street and
Thus the decades following the
Civil War saw more and more of the nation’s wealthiest citizens seeking out
wilderness for themselves. 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
There were other ironies as
well, The movement to set aside national parks and wilderness areas followed
hard on the heels of the final Indian wars, in which the prior human
inhabitants of these areas were rounded up and moved onto reservations. The
myth of the wilderness as “virgin ” uninhabited land had always been especially
cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once called that
land home. Now they were forced to move elsewhere, with the result that
tourists could safely enjoy the illusion that they were seeing their nation in
its pristine, original state, in the new morning of God’s own creation. (23)
Among the things that most marked the new national parks as reflecting a
post-frontier consciousness was the relative absence of human violence within
their boundaries. The actual frontier had often been a place of conflict, in
which invaders and invaded fought for control of land and resources. Once set
aside within the fixed and carefully policed boundaries of the modern
bureaucratic state, the wilderness lost its savage image and became safe: a
place more of reverie than of revulsion or fear. Meanwhile, its original
inhabitants were kept out by dint of force, their earlier uses of the land
redefined as inappropriate or even illegal. To this day, for instance, the
Blackfeet continue to be accused of “poaching” on the lands of
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. To return to my opening argument: there is
nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of
the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny.
Indeed, one of the most striking proofs of the cultural invention of wilderness
is its thoroughgoing erasure of the history from which it sprang. In virtually
all of its manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from history. Seen as
the original garden, it is a place outside of time, from which human beings had
to be ejected before the fallen world of history could properly begin. Seen as
the frontier, it is a savage world at the dawn of civilization, whose
transformation represents the very beginning of the national historical epic.
Seen as the bold landscape of frontier heroism, it is the place of youth and
childhood, into which men escape by abandoning their pasts and entering a world
of freedom where the constraints of civilization fade into memory. Seen as the
sacred sublime, it is the home of a God who transcends history by standing as the
One who remains untouched and unchanged by time’s arrow. No matter what the
angle from which we regard it, wilderness offers us the illusion that we can
escape the cares and troubles of the world in which our past has ensnared us.
(25)
This escape from history is
one reason why the language we use to talk about wilderness is often permeated
with spiritual and religious values that reflect human ideals far more than the
material world of physical nature. Wilderness fulfills the old romantic project
of secularizing Judeo-Christian values so as to make a new cathedral not in
some petty human building but in God’s own creation, Nature itself. Many
environmentalists who reject traditional notions of the Godhead and who regard
themselves as agnostics or even atheists nonetheless express feelings
tantamount to religious awe when in the presence of wilderness—a fact that
testifies to the success of the romantic project. Those who have no difficulty
seeing God as the expression of our human dreams and desires nonetheless have
trouble recognizing that in a secular age Nature can offer precisely the same
sort of mirror.
Thus it is that wilderness
serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious
values of modern environmentalism rest. The critique of modernity that is one
of environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral and political
discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to
wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human
world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural
civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can
recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our
artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity.
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.
But the trouble with
wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its
devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core
of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the
illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the
tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the
world. The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of
people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living—urban
folk for whom food comes from a supermarket or a restaurant instead of a field,
and for whom the wooden houses in which they live and work apparently have no
meaningful connection to the forests in which trees grow and die. 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.
This, then, is the central
paradox: wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely
outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true,
must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. The
place where we are is the place where nature is not. If this is so—if by
definition wilderness leaves no place for human beings, save perhaps as
contemplative sojourners enjoying their leisurely reverie in God’s natural
cathedral—then also by definition it can offer no solution to the environmental
and other problems that confront us. 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. We thereby leave ourselves little
hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in
nature might actually look like.
Worse: to the extent that
we live in an urban-industrial civilization but at the same time pretend to
ourselves that our real home is in the wilderness, to just that extent we give
ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead. We
inhabit civilization while holding some part of ourselves—what we imagine to be
the most precious part—aloof from its entanglements. 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. By imagining that our true home is in
the wilderness, we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit. In its
flight from history, in its siren song of escape, in its reproduction of the
dangerous dualism that sets human beings outside of nature—in all of these
ways, wilderness poses a serious threat to responsible environmentalism at the
end of the twentieth century.
By now I hope it is clear
that my criticism in this essay is not directed at wild nature per se, or even
at efforts to set aside large tracts of wild land, but rather at the specific
habits of thinking that flow from this complex cultural construction called
wilderness. It is not the things we label as wilderness that are the
problem—for nonhuman nature and large tracts of the natural world do deserve
protection—but rather what we ourselves mean when we use the label. Lest one
doubt how pervasive these habits of thought actually are in contemporary
environmentalism, let me list some of the places where wilderness serves as the
ideological underpinning for environmental concerns that might otherwise seem
quite remote from it. Defenders of biological diversity, for instance, although
sometimes appealing to more utilitarian concerns, often point to “untouched”
ecosystems as the best and richest repositories of the undiscovered species we
must certainly try to protect. Although at first blush an apparently more
“scientific” concept than wilderness, biological diversity in fact invokes many
of the same sacred values, which is why organizations like the Nature
Conservancy have been so quick to employ it as an alternative to the seemingly
fuzzier and more problematic concept of wilderness. There is a paradox here, of
course. 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. (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. The terms
of the Endangered Species Act in the United States have often meant that those
hoping to defend pristine wilderness have had to rely on a single endangered
species like the spotted owl to gain legal standing for their case—thereby making
the full power of the sacred land inhere in a single numinous organism whose
habitat then becomes the object of intense debate about appropriate management
and use. (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.
Perhaps partly because our
own conflicts over such places and organisms have become so messy, the
convergence of wilderness values with concerns about biological diversity and
endangered species has helped produce a deep fascination for remote ecosystems,
where it is easier to imagine that nature might somehow be “left alone” to
flourish by its own pristine devices. The classic example is the tropical rain
forest, which since the 1970s has become the most powerful modern icon of
unfallen, sacred land—a veritable Garden of Eden—for many Americans and
Europeans. And yet protecting the rain forest in the eyes of
Perhaps the most suggestive
example of the way that wilderness thinking can underpin other environmental
concerns has emerged in the recent debate about “global change.” In 1989 the
journalist Bill McKibben published a book entitled The End of Nature, in which
he argued that the prospect of global climate change as a result of unintentional
human manipulation of the atmosphere means that nature as we once knew it no
longer exists. (29) Whereas earlier generations inhabited a natural world that
remained more or less unaffected by their actions, our own generation is
uniquely different. We and our children will henceforth live in a biosphere
completely altered by our own activity, a planet in which the human and the
natural can no longer be distinguished, because the one has overwhelmed the
other. In McKibben’s view, nature has died, and we are responsible for killing
it. “The planet,” he declares, “is utterly different now.” (30)
But such a perspective is
possible only if we accept the wilderness premise that nature, to be natural,
must also be pristine—remote from humanity and untouched by our common past. In
fact, everything we know about environmental history suggests that people have
been manipulating the natural world on various scales for as long as we have a
record of their passing. Moreover, we have unassailable evidence that many of
the environmental changes we now face also occurred quite apart from human
intervention at one time or another in the earth’s past. (31) The point is not
that our current problems are trivial, or that our devastating effects on the
earth’s ecosystems should be accepted as inevitable or “natural.” It is rather
that we seem unlikely to make much progress in solving these problems if we
hold up to ourselves as the mirror of nature a wilderness we ourselves cannot
inhabit.
To do so is merely to take
to a logical extreme the paradox that was built into wilderness from the
beginning: if nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature
is to kill ourselves. The absurdity of this proposition flows from the
underlying dualism it expresses. Not only does it ascribe greater power to
humanity that we in fact possess—physical and biological nature will surely
survive in some form or another long after we ourselves have gone the way of
all flesh—but in the end it offers us little more than a self-defeating counsel
of despair. The tautology gives us no way out: if wild nature is the only thing
worth saving, and if our mere presence destroys it, then the sole solution to
our own unnaturalness, the only way to protect sacred wilderness from profane humanity,
would seem to be suicide. It is not a proposition that seems likely to produce
very positive or practical results.
And yet radical
environmentalists and deep ecologists all too frequently come close to
accepting this premise as a first principle. When they express, for instance,
the popular notion that our environmental problems began with the invention of
agriculture, they push the human fall from natural grace so far back into the
past that all of civilized history becomes a tale of ecological declension.
Earth First! founder Dave Foreman captures the familiar parable succinctly when
he writes,
Before agriculture was
midwifed in the
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. From such a starting place, it is
hard not to reach the conclusion that the only way human beings can hope to
live naturally on earth is to follow the hunter-gatherers back into a
wilderness Eden and abandon virtually everything that civilization has given
us. It may indeed turn out that civilization will end in ecological collapse or
nuclear disaster, whereupon one might expect to find any human survivors
returning to a way of life closer to that celebrated by Foreman and his
followers. For most of us, though, such a debacle would be cause for regret, a
sign that humanity had failed to fulfill its own promise and failed to honor its
own highest values—including those of the deep ecologists.
In offering wilderness as
the ultimate hunter-gatherer alternative to civilization, Foreman reproduces an
extreme but still easily recognizable version of the myth of frontier
primitivism. When he writes of his fellow Earth Firsters that “we believe we
must return to being animal, to glorying in our sweat, hormones, tears, and
blood” and that “we struggle against the modern compulsion to become dull,
passionless androids,” he is following in the footsteps of Owen Wister. (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. 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. 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.
However much one may be
attracted to such a vision, it entails problematic consequences. 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. Foreman writes, “The preservation of wildness and native
diversity is the most important issue. Issues directly affecting only humans
pale in comparison.” (36) Presumably so do any environmental problems whose victims
are mainly people, for such problems usually surface in landscapes that have
already “fallen” and are no longer wild. This would seem to exclude from the
radical environmentalist agenda problems of occupational health and safety in
industrial settings, problems of toxic waste exposure on “unnatural” urban and
agricultural sites, problems of poor children poisoned by lead exposure in the
inner city, problems of famine and poverty and human suffering in the
“overpopulated” places of the earth—problems, in short, of environmental
justice. If we set too high a stock on wilderness, too many other corners of
the earth become less than natural and too many other people become less than
human, thereby giving us permission not to care much about their suffering or
their fate.
It is no accident that
these supposedly inconsequential environmental problems affect mainly poor
people, for the long affiliation between wilderness and wealth means that the
only poor people who count when wilderness is the issue are hunter-gatherers,
who presumably do not consider themselves to be poor in the first place. The
dualism at the heart of wilderness encourages its advocates to conceive of its
protection as a crude conflict between the “human” and the “nonhuman”—or, more
often, between those who value the nonhuman and those who do not. This in turn
tempts one to ignore crucial differences among humans and the complex cultural
and historical reasons why different peoples may feel very differently about
the meaning of wilderness.
Why, for instance, is the ”
wilderness experience” so often conceived as a form of recreation best enjoyed
by those whose class privileges give them the time and resources to leave their
jobs behind and “get away from it all?” Why does the protection of wilderness
so often seem to pit urban recreationists against rural people who actually
earn their living from the land (excepting those who sell goods and services to
the tourists themselves)? Why in the debates about pristine natural areas are
“primitive” peoples idealized, even sentimentalized, until the moment they do
something unprimitive, modern, and unnatural, and thereby fall from
environmental grace? What are the consequences of a wilderness ideology that
devalues productive labor and the very concrete knowledge that comes from
working the land with one’s own hands? (37) All of these questions imply
conflicts among different groups of people, conflicts that are obscured behind
the deceptive clarity of “human” vs. “nonhuman.” If in answering these knotty
questions we resort to so simplistic an opposition, we are almost certain to
ignore the very subtleties and complexities we need to understand.
But the most troubling
cultural baggage that accompanies the celebration of wilderness has less to do
with remote rain forests and peoples than with the ways we think about
ourselves—we American environmentalists who quite rightly worry about the
future of the earth and the threats we pose to the natural world. Idealizing a
distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we
actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home. Most of our
most serious environmental problems start right here, at home, and if we are to
solve those problems, we need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much
about using nature as about not using it. The wilderness dualism tends to cast
any use as abuse, and thereby denies us a middle ground in which responsible
use and non-use might attain some kind of balanced, sustainable relationship. My
own belief is that only by exploring this middle ground will we learn ways of
imagining a better world for all of us: humans and nonhumans, rich people and
poor, women and men, First Worlders and Third Worlders, white folks and people
of color, consumers and producers—a world better for humanity in all of its
diversity and for all the rest of nature too. The middle ground is where we
actually live. It is where we—all of us, in our different places and ways—make
our homes.
That is why, when I think
of the times I myself have come closest to experiencing what I might call the
sacred in nature, I often find myself remembering wild places much closer to
home. I think, for instance, of a small pond near my house where water bubbles
up from limestone springs to feed a series of pools that rarely freeze in
winter and so play home to waterfowl that stay here for the protective warmth
even on the coldest of winter days, gliding silently through streaming mists as
the snow falls from gray February skies. I think of a November evening long ago
when I found myself on a Wisconsin hilltop in rain and dense fog, only to have
the setting sun break through the clouds to cast an otherworldly golden light
on the misty farms and woodlands below, a scene so unexpected and joyous that I
lingered past dusk so as not to miss any part of the gift that had come my way.
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. What I celebrate about such
places is not just their wildness, though that certainly is among their most
important qualities; what I celebrate even more is that they remind us of the
wildness in our own backyards, of the nature that is all around us if only we
have eyes to see it.
Indeed, my principal
objection to wilderness is that it may teach us to be dismissive or even
contemptuous of such humble places and experiences. Without our quite realizing
it, wilderness tends to privilege some parts of nature at the expense of
others. Most of us, I suspect, still follow the conventions of the romantic
sublime in finding the mountaintop more glorious than the plains, the ancient
forest nobler than the grasslands, the mighty canyon more inspiring than the
humble marsh. Even John Muir, in arguing against those who sought to dam his
beloved Hetch Hetchy valley in the Sierra Nevada, argued for alternative dam
sites in the gentler valleys of the foothills—a preference that had nothing to
do with nature and everything with the cultural traditions of the sublime. (38)
Just as problematically, our frontier traditions have encouraged Americans to
define “true” wilderness as requiring very large tracts of roadless land—what
Dave Foreman calls “The Big Outside.” Leaving aside the legitimate empirical
question in conservation biology of how large a tract of land must be before a
given species can reproduce on it, the emphasis on big wilderness reflects a
romantic frontier belief that one hasn’t really gotten away from civilization
unless one can go for days at a time without encountering another human being.
By teaching us to fetishize sublime places and wide open country, these
peculiarly American ways of thinking about wilderness encourage us to adopt too
high a standard for what counts as “natural.” If it isn’t hundreds of square
miles big, if it doesn’t give us God’s eye views or grand vistas, if it doesn’t
permit us the illusion that we are alone on the planet, then it really isn’t
natural. It’s too small, too plain, or too crowded to be authentically wild.
In critiquing wilderness as
I have done in this essay, I’m forced to confront my own deep ambivalence about
its meaning for modern environmentalism. On the one hand, one of my own most
important environmental ethics is that people should always be conscious that
they are part of the natural world, inextricably tied to the ecological systems
that sustain their lives. 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. On the other band, I also
think it no less crucial for us to recognize and honor nonhuman nature as a
world we did not create, a world with its own independent, nonhuman reasons for
being as it is. The autonomy of nonhuman nature seems to me an indispensable
corrective to human arrogance. 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. To the extent that wilderness has
served as an important vehicle for articulating deep mom values regarding our
obligations and responsibilities to the nonhuman world, I would not want to
jettison the contributions it has made to our culture’s ways of thinking about
nature.
If the core problem of
wilderness is that it distances us too much from the very things it teaches us
to value, then the question we must ask is what it can tell us about home, the
place where we actually live. How can we take the positive values we associate
with wilderness and bring them closer to home? I think the answer to this
question will come by broadening our sense of the otherness that wilderness
seeks to define and protect. In reminding us of the world we did not make,
wilderness can teach profound feelings of humility and respect as we confront
our fellow beings and the earth itself 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. Wilderness
is the place where, symbolically at least, we try to withhold our power to
dominate. Wallace Stegner once wrote of
the special human mark, the
special record of human passage, that distinguishes man from all other species.
It is rare enough among men, impossible to any other form of life. It is simply
the deliberate and chosen refusal to make any marks at all…. We are the most
dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the
earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. 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. (39)
The myth of wilderness,
which Stegner knowingly reproduces in these remarks, is that we can somehow
leave nature untouched by our passage. By now it should be clear that this for
the most part is an illusion. But Stegner’s deeper message then becomes all the
more compelling. If living in history means that we cannot help leaving marks
on a fallen world, then the dilemma we face is to decide what kinds of marks we
wish to leave. It is just here that our cultural traditions of wilderness remain
so important. 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. This is surely a
question worth asking about everything we do, and not just about the natural
world.
When we visit a wilderness
area, we find ourselves surrounded by plants and animals and physical
landscapes whose otherness compels our attention. 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. In
the wilderness, we need no reminder that a tree has its own reasons for being,
quite apart from us. The same is less true in the gardens we plant and tend
ourselves: there it is far easier to forget the otherness of the tree. (40)
Indeed, one could almost measure wilderness by the extent to which our
recognition of its otherness requires a conscious, willed act on our part. 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. The
striking power of the wild is that wonder in the face of it requires no act of
will, but forces itself upon us—as an expression of the nonhuman world
experienced through the lens of our cultural history—as proof that ours is not
the only presence in the universe.
Wilderness gets us into
trouble only if we imagine that this experience of wonder and otherness is
limited to the remote corners of the planet, or that it somehow depends on
pristine landscapes we ourselves do not inhabit. Nothing could be more
misleading. The tree in the garden is in reality no less other, no less worthy
of our wonder and respect, than the tree in an ancient forest that has never
known an ax or a saw—even though the tree in the forest reflects a more
intricate web of ecological relationships. 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. Both trees stand apart from us;
both share our common world. The special power of the tree in the wilderness is
to remind us of this fact. It can teach us to recognize the wildness we did not
see in the tree we planted in our own backyard. 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. If wilderness can do this—if it can help us perceive
and respect a nature we had forgotten to recognize as natural—then it will
become part of the solution to our environmental dilemmas rather than part of
the problem.
This will only happen,
however, if we abandon the dualism that sees the tree in the garden as artificial—completely
fallen and unnatural—and the tree in the wilderness as natural—completely
pristine and wild. Both trees in some ultimate sense are wild; both in a
practical sense now depend on our management and care. We are responsible for
both, even though we can claim credit for neither. Our challenge is to stop
thinking of such things according to set of bipolar moral scales in which the
human and the nonhuman, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the
unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world.
Instead, we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is
also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each
has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly
denigrating the others. We need to honor the Other within and the Other next
door as much as we do the exotic Other that lives far away—a lesson that
applies as much to people as it does to (other) natural things. In particular,
we need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from
the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word “home.”
Home, after all, is the place where finally we make our living. It is the place
for which we take responsibility, the place we try to sustain so we can pass on
what is best in it (and in ourselves) to our children. (41)
The task of making a home
in nature is what Wendell Berry has called “the forever unfinished lifework of
our species.” “The only thing we have to preserve nature with” he writes, “is
culture; the only thing we have to preserve wildness with is domesticity.” (42)
Calling a place home inevitably means that we will use the nature we find in
it, for there can be no escape from manipulating and working and even killing
some parts of nature to make our home. 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.
just so can we still join Thoreau in declaring that “in Wildness is the
preservation of the World,” for wildness (as opposed to wilderness) can be
found anywhere: in the seemingly tame fields and woodlots of
Learning to honor the
wild—learning to remember and acknowledge the autonomy of the other—means
striving for critical self-consciousness in all of our actions. It means the
deep reflection and respect must accompany each act of use, and means too that
we must always consider the possibility of non-use. It means looking at the
part of nature we intend to turn toward our own ends and asking whether we can
use it again and again and again—sustainably—without its being diminished in
the process. It means never imagining that we can flee into a mythical
wilderness to escape history and the obligation to take responsibility for our
own actions that history inescapably entails. Most of all, it means practicing
remembrance and gratitude, for thanksgiving is the simplest and most basic of
ways for us to recollect the nature, the culture, and the history that have
come together to make the world as we know it. If wildness can stop being
(just) out there and start being (also) in here, if it can start being as
humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of
struggling to live rightly in the world—not just in the garden, not just in the
wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both.
Notes
1.
Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Works of Thoreau, ed. Henry S. Canby
(Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), p. 672.
2.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “wilderness”; see also Roderick Nash,
Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale Univ.
Press, 1982), pp. 1-22; and Max Oelsehlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From
Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale Univ. Press,
1991).
3.
Exodus 32:1-35, KJV.
4.
Exodus 14:3, KJV.
5.
Mark 1:12-13, KJV; see also Matthew 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13
6.
John Milton, “Paradise Lost,” John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed.
Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), pp. 280-81, lines 131-42
7.
I have discussed this theme at length in “Landscapes of Abundance and
Scarcity,” in Clyde Milner et al., eds., Oxford History of the American West
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 603-37. The classic work on the
Puritan “city on a hill” in colonial
8.
John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), reprinted in John Muir: The
Eight Wilderness Discovery Books (London, England: Diadem; Seattle, Washington:
Mountaineers, 1992), P. 211.
10.
John Muir, The Yosemite (1912), reprinted in John Muir: Eight Wilderness
Discovery Books, P. 715.
11.
Scholarly work on the sublime is extensive. Among the most important studies
are Samuel Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century
England (New York: Modern Language Association, 1935); Basil Willey, The
Eighteenth-Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of
the Period (London, England: Chattus and Windus, 1949); Marjorie Hope Nicolson,
Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the
Infinite (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1959); Thomas Weiskel, The
Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence
(Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkin.s Univ. Press, 1976); Barbara Novak, Nature
and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875 (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, ig8o).
12.
The classic works are Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful
and Sublime (1764), trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 196o); Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (1958; Notre Dame,
Indiana: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968); William Gilpin, Three Essays: On
Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape (London,
England, 1803)
13.
See Ann Vileisis, “From Wastelands to Wetlands” (unpublished senior essay,
14.
William Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” bk. 6, in Thomas Hutchinson, ed., The
Poetical Works of Wordsworth (
15.
Henry David Thoreau, The
16.
Exodus 16:10, KJV.
17.
John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, p. 238. Part of the difference
between these descriptions may reflect the landscapes the three authors were
describing. In his essay, “Reinventing Common Nature: Yosemite and Mount
Rushmore—A Meandering Tale of a Double Nature,” Kenneth Olwig notes that early
American travelers experienced
18.
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry
Holt, 1920), pp. 37-38.
19.
Richard Slotkin has made this observation the linchpin of his comparison
between Turner and Theodore Roosevelt. See Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth
of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century
20.
Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (New York: Macmillan,
1902), pp. viii-ix.
21.
Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888; NewYork: Century,
1899), p. 100.
22.
Wister, Virginian, p. x.
23.
On the many problems with this view, see William M. Denevan, “The Pristine Myth:
The Landscape of the
24.
Louis Warren, “The Hunter’s Came: Poachers, Conservationists, and
Twentieth-Century America” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994).
25.
Wilderness also lies at the foundation of the Clementsian ecological concept of
the climax. See Michael Barbour, “Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties” in
Cronon, Uncommon Ground, pp. 233-55, and William Cronon, “Introduction: In
Search of Nature,” in Cronon, Uncommon Ground, pp. 23-56.
26.
On the many paradoxes of having to manage wilderness in order to maintain the
appearance of an unmanaged landscape, see John C. Hendee et al., Wilderness
Management, USDA Forest Service Miscellaneous Publication No. 1365 (Washington,
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1978).
27.
See James Proctor, “Whose Nature?: The Contested Moral Terrain of Ancient
Forests,” in Cronon, Uncommon Ground, pp. 269-97
28.
See Candace Slater, “
29.
Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989).
30.
McKibben, The End of Nature, p. 49
31.
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!
32.
Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (
33.
Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, P. 34.
34.
Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, p. 65. See also Dave Foreman and Howie
Wolke, The Big Outside: A Descriptive Inventory of the Big Wilderness Areas of
the
35.
Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, p. 63
36.
Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, P. 27
37.
See Richard White, ”’Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’:
Work and Nature,” in Cronon, Uncommon Ground, pp. 171-85. Compare its analysis
of environmental knowledge through work with Jennifer Price’s analysis of
environmental knowledge through consumption. It is not much of an exaggeration
to say that the wilderness experience is essentially consumerist in its
impulses.
38.
Compare with Muir,
39.
Wallace Stegner, ed., This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers
(New York: Knopf, 1955), P. 17 (italics in original).
40.
Katherine Hayles helped me see the importance of this argument.
41.
Analogous arguments can be found in John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “Beyond
Wilderness,” A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale
Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 71-91, and in the wonderful collection of essays by
Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1991).
42.
Wendell Berry, Home Economics (San Francisco, California: North Point, 1987),
pp. 138, 143.
43.
Gary Snyder, quoted in New York Times, “Week in Review,” 18 September 1994, p.
6.
Excerpted
from Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, edited by William Cronon.
Copyright © 1995 by William Cronon. Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.