Wilderness, Sacrality, Nationalism

Wilderness, Sacrality, Nationalism

            In “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon examines the complex nexus of values and beliefs centered on the concept of wilderness in the United States.  Rather than a pure, natural given, the wilderness is an “unntural” cultural creation.   In the idea of wilderness are intertwined two American obsessions: religion and nationalism.  The signifiers of these cultural categories are not always obviously apparent, as they undergo revalutation and take on disguises.

            Cronon organizes his analysis by exploring the influence of the concepts of the sublime and the fontier on the creation of “wilderness.”  We find religion interacting with both these concepts while nationalism primarily relates to the second.  Previous to the reinterpretation of the sublime in the Romantic period, wilderness generally had negative connotations.  It caused one to feel terror or “bewilderment.” In antiquity, the wilderness was also a place of temptation and spiritual purification.  This trandformative possibility of the wilderness was valued and developed so that by the late 18^th century the wilderness was where one could encounter the divine.  In the United States, due to the influence of writers like Muir, the transformation of wilderness was complete: “Satan’s home had become God’s own temple” (72).  Wild nature became sacred.

            Related to this revaluation, the wilderness also became a place where one could return to certain core human experiences.  In the wilderness, human beings experienced some primitive essence that had been covered over by corrupting and artificial layers of “civilization.”  This primitivism was given a nationalist tinge by writers like Frederick Jackson Turner, who saw American democracy emerging from the encounter bewteen primitive human nature and the wilderness.  This American democratic spirit could be reinvigorated by returning to the wilderness.  The wilderness must be protected because it is “the last bastion of rugged individualism,” which can ensure the renewal of an essential Americanness (77).  Wilderness as frontier also connotes a place of authenticity.  The wilderness is the irreducible “real” – the place where we can experience the “truth” of the world and ourselves.  The real and the authentic, according to historian of religions Mircea Eliade, are preeminently qualities of the sacred.  Thus, as Cronon observes, modern environmentalism is replete with “quasi-relgious values” founded upon such a conception of the wilderness (80).  The assumption of wilderness as sacred and authentic represents a structure of belief homologous to what is usually undertood by the word “religious.”

            Within this complex of “religious” belief and national identity, certain problems and contradictions emerge.  One of these involves class.  The wilderness as an artificial place of authenticity and Americianness can only be enjoyed and benefited from by the middle and upper classes who have the money and leisure to travel.  It is a place of recreation and of internal renewal separate from the urban centers where these visitors live and work.  The wilderness allows them to purify themselves of the corruption of a greedy, ugly, industrial-capitalist world, thus absolving them of any complicity in its injustices.  Poet and farmer Wendell Berry has often drawn attention to the need to live responsibly in a place where we both make a home and work.  When we preserve the wilderness because we expect it to purify us of our corruption and sins, we accept more easily the faults of the “profane” world we inhabit.  This mentality can tacitly accept political and economic structures that cause injustice and destruction, thus devaluing most of the earth and many of our fellow human beings.