The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature
Author(s)
Cronon, William
Abstract
The author writes about the history of wilderness and presents a new thinking which may seem heretical to many environmentalists. He argues that 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 is a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. 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.
