The trouble with wilderness

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The trouble with wilderness

• By William Cronon, in Uncommon Ground
  Rethinking the Human Place in Nature.
• EHUF 362 Lecture 5

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The idea of wilderness has been a fundamental
tenet of the environmental movement for decades.

• that last place where civilization (the human
  disease) has not infected the earth
• the place we can turn to for escape
• Henry David Thoreau In wildness is the
  preservation of the world.

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Actually, wilderness is a human creation

• Created by particular human cultures
• At particular times in history
• 250 years ago there were few people wandering the
  remote corners of the earth looking for the
  wilderness experience.

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Terror

• In the late 18th century, wilderness referred to
  places that were desolate, deserted, savage,
  barren, wastelands.
• In the King James Bible, wilderness was used over
  and over again to refer to places on the margin
  of civilization, where it was all too easy to
  lose ones self in confusion and despair.
• Wilderness was a place one came to against ones
  will, and in fear and trembling.

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By the end of the 19th century, wilderness had
changed

• Wilderness had once been referred to as the
  darkness at the edge of Paradise, into which Adam
  and Eve were driven.
• Now it was frequently referred to as Eden itself.

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People began to trek to sites that had been
designated as places of wild beauty

• Niagara Falls
• Catskills
• Adirondacks
• Yosemite (in 1864, nations first wildland park)
• Yellowstone (in 1872, first true national park)

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Hetch Hetchy

• Most famous episode in American conservation
  history
• In first decade of 20th century
• City of San Francisco proposed to dam the
  Tuolumne R. in the Hetch Hetchy valley, well
  within Yosemite National Park

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Hetch Hetchy lost

• John Muir led fight, but lost.
• The damming galvanized the emerging movement to
  preserve wilderness.
• 50 years earlier, few people would have
  questioned reclaiming such a wasteland.
• Muir portrayed it as desecration flooding the
  valley was the work of the Devil.

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Sources of transformation of the perception of
wilderness

• The sublime
• The frontier

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The sublime

• Sublime landscapes in the 18th century were those
  in which one had more chances to glimpse the face
  of God.
• Sacred places
• If Satan was there, then so was Christ
• Places of grandeur, great beauty
• Mountain as cathedral

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• By the time of Muir, wilderness was becoming more
  of a romantic concept of the domesticated
  sublime.
• The sublime wilderness ceased being a place of
  Satanic temptations and became a sacred temple.

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The national myth of the frontier

• May have its roots in the primitivism of Rosseau
  the belief that the best antidote to the ills of
  civilization is a return to simple, more
  primitive living.

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The frontier and American character

• Historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893
  described the way the frontier molded the
  national character
• Easterners and Europeans moved west into wild
  unsettled lands
• They shed civilization
• Rediscovered primitive racial energies
• Reinvented direct democratic institutions
• Reinforced themselves with a vigor, independence
  and creativity that were the source of American
  Democracy and national character

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The frontier was temporary

• Based on free land
• In the myth of the vanishing frontier lay the
  seeds of wilderness preservation
• Set-asides for national parks occurred just when
  sentiment about passing frontier peaked
• Individual freedom was an important theme

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How invented is the idea of American wilderness?

• The fact that Indians had to be removed from it
  remind us how artificial it is.
• A flight from history a place to escape from our
  world and past.
• The dream of an unworked natural landscape is
  usually had by people who never had to work the
  land to eat.

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Central paradox

• Wilderness embodies a vision in which the human
  is entirely outside the natural if nature is
  wild, our presence there is its downfall. Where
  we are is where nature is not.

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• William Cronon
• If nature and humans are on two poles, we will
  never discover what the ethical, sustainable
  human place in nature is.

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A common perspective is that nature, to be
natural, must be pristine.

• But, people have been manipulating the natural
  world for as long as we have a record of people.
• And, many environmental changes we now face have
  occurred quite apart from human intervention in
  the earths past.

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Idealizing a distant wilderness means not
idealizing the environment where we live

• Most environmental problems are at home.
• We need an environmental ethic that tells us as
  much about using nature as it does about not
  using it.
• Wildness there are plenty of wild things where
  we live.