Cronon’s Conundrum

Our concept of wilderness is not natural because it presumes a “virginity,” an untouched quality that precludes Native Americans and which assumes that wherever man isn’t, nature is.  How homocentric!  If man has a religious or near-religious experience in the nature encounter, is his own nature as city-dweller wholly divorced from any personal redemptive qualities?  In other words, cannot man summon a sense of humility for his fellow beings without running to the wilderness and drinking in the sublimity?  Cronon grounds his discussion of wilderness in Scripture, wherein the wanderings of the ancient Israelites and the temptation of Christ occur in desert-like surroundings, not woods, teeming with life.  This is an important distinction.  Wilderness up to the late eighteenth century had been considered apart from creation and abysmal.  The use, then, of the term “wilderness” in the context of the nature encounter represented by the mid-nineteenth century a radical co-opting of religion to approximate, ironically enough, religious experience.

As the frontier became increasingly settled, the myth of wilderness as bestower of “rugged individualism” rose in prominence and embellished—burnished even—the extant American mythos as a land of opportunity for those willing to rise to the occasion.  Wordsworth’s sublimity less than fifty years on was supplanted by the economic opportunity immanent in farming, ranching, and owning large swaths of “wilderness.”  The secularization of the scriptural ideal of wilderness saw the transformation from wilderness as the place where God met the pilgrim on his spiritual journey to the place where God is made fully manifest in the life of the blessed citizen.  For those with money who could travel, going to the wilderness was a luxury, the benefits of which could not be experienced, understood, and enjoyed by the lower classes.  Analogously, for those with money, buying wilderness for the purpose of economic benefit was a privilege equally not to be enjoyed by the lower classes.

Wilderness is a myth because we assume that what isn’t owned by the federal government, a state, or a private individual is untouched.  This fallacy allows us to pursue a course of unimpeded annexation, whereby lands that are already owned or falling into ownership are purposed, re-purposed, and plundered yet again beyond all possibility of sustainability.  I prefer Cronon’s essay because it sticks a finger in the eye of boutique environmentalism, the idea that only by driving hundreds of miles out of the way—to Joshua Tree for instance—can the city-dweller wake up to his God-given, innate qualities of humility and start treating his fellow beings with more respect and compassion.  What hogwash.  Why do I need to go the forest to have a near-religious experience when we have religion available in the sunset at Venice Beach or the sunrise from my apartment stoop?

Why has a near-religious experience supplanted a religious one?  I don’t understand this.  As someone who is religious, I can’t wrap my head around the fact that a devolved form of Wordsworth’s sublimity is environmentalist grandeur run amok.