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 United States For many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization that all too human disease has not fully infected the earth It is an island in the polluted sea of urban industrial modernity the one place we can turn for escape from our own too muchness Seen in this way wilderness presents itself as the best antidote to our human selves a refuge we must somehow recover if we hope to save the planet As Henry David Thoreau once famously declared In Wildness is the preservation of the World 1 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 Cronon Trouble with Wilderness Page 2 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 Eden was surrounded by a steep wilderness whose hairy sides Access denied to all who sought entry When Adam and Eve were driven from that garden the world they entered was a wilderness that only their labor and pain could redeem Wilderness in short was a place to which one came only against one s will and always in fear and trembling Whatever value it might have arose solely from the possibility that it might be reclaimed and turned toward human ends planted as a garden say or a city upon a hill 7 In its raw state it had little or nothing to offer civilized men and women Cronon Trouble with Wilderness Page 3 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