Cronon and Nature

         Our relationship with nature has always been complicated to say the least. It seems rather impossible for us to figure out how we relate to the natural environment.  What I enjoyed most about Cronon’s article is that he was able to find common ground between what is nature and what we want it to be. 

I think Cronon is right in that the problem lies with how society defines nature and/or the wilderness. If we see it as something wild, then we immediately take ourselves out of the equation. If nature is at its purest when it is not inhabited by humans, then how are we supposed to interact with it?  More often than not, it is easy for us to forget that nature is not something “over there,” but in fact, it is all around us. 

I appreciated Cronon’s article because it provided a more balanced approach to nature. If we only focus our attention to the wild, then we run the risk of losing ourselves in the process. Cronon argues that “idealizing the distant wilderness too often means not dealing with the environment in which we actually live” (85). I think sometimes it might be easier for us to focus on protecting the latest endangered animal instead of dealing with more controversial issues such as, “the toxic waste exposure to the ‘unnatural’ urban and agricultural sites” because the solutions to toxic waste may more difficult to grapple with. Cronon is correct in that if we do not pay more attention to the environmental issues at home, “then 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 fate” (85). 

By examining and processing our urban world, not only can we work toward confronting some of the environmental issues at hand, but as Cronon explains we can also experience nature without going “over there.” Before I signed up for this class, I never really tried to define nature; I just thought that it was anything nonhuman and not man made. When I heard birds chirping on my balcony, or if I saw my dog running outside chasing a squirrel, I considered it apart of nature. I Never thought of nature as something far removed from me, I only thought that there was less of it my daily life. I also don’t think it is very realistic to preserve nature in its “purest form” because that would mean we couldn’t be apart of it. What we need to do is figure out how we can live with nature in a way that is environmentally responsible. No matter what we do, we will always have some kind of impact on the natural world. Regardless of how much we try to protect nature, it will always be affected by us. The truth is, we can’t just stop progressing as a society for the sake of nature, instead we should take Cronon’s advice and “set responsible limits to human mastery” (87). Now, we just need to figure out what those limits are...