Reflections on William Cronon's "The Trouble with Wilderness: or,Getting Back to the Wrong Nature"

   William Cronon’s, “The Trouble with Wilderness: or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” is the most impressive theoretical reading assignment to date, as deftly unpacked is society’s evolving meaning of the word “wilderness” to reveal a tangled web of contradictions that Cronon argues if not somehow reconciled will lead to the failure of the environmentalist movement. In an eye-opening introduction Cronon explains why there has never in fact been a wilderness to speak of in human history––at least, not if what we mean by the wilderness is a place standing wholly apart from civilization in some ineffable way. Yes, there have been (and surprisingly) still are places on earth untouched by human contact. But the brilliance of the article is how Cronon shows that despite this fact, inextricably there always is an all-to-human element to its significance that demands critical attention: 

Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, [the wilderness] 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 sill 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. (Cronon 69, italics mine)

Now, upon first reading the above, I found myself anticipating a sweeping post-structuralist claim about the material world, that is, that Cronon would argue that literally the existence of everything depends on language, a la Barthes, including the wilderness itself. However, much to my relief, Cronon is in fact not arguing from this perspective. What he very much is referring to is the concept of the wilderness. And of course, he is right. Any concept is inevitably the product of the human mind, and therefore has much about it that has a basis in language. His deeper point, then, is that often people, including earnest ecologists and environmentalists, unknowingly conflate the biological reality we know as the wilderness, with a problematic understanding of the concept of the wilderness itself, leading to a profound misunderstanding about how the two are distinct and should remain so. 

What I particularly appreciated about the reading is Cronon’s destabilizing of the meaning of the wilderness by offering an informative and revealing historical analysis of the word's changing denotation, but especially its varying connotations across cultures. A great deal of the meaning of the wilderness, in fact, is taken for granted. For instance, most famously, the Romantic writers of the nineteenth century give a particularly high importance to the respect and sanctity of the natural world, as indicated in their preoccupation with the doctrine of the sublime, which argues there are certain locations in nature or features of the environment that are capable of bringing one into contact with the divine. Whether it be Wordsworth’s Prelude or later John Muir’s raptures over the beauties of the Sierras, the Romantic writers’ ideology represents a positive attitude toward the environment that continues to be influential. 

Cronon sets the stage early of his discussion of the Romantic writers by explaining how early in European history, the physical wilderness had been perceived as a place of darkness, danger, and corruption, that one would be wise to avoid. Religion was particularly significant in shaping the discourses about the natural world. The King James Bible is replete with pejorative references to nature, profoundly impacting the ideologies of the era’s Christian communities: 

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. 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.” 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.” (Cronon 70-71)

As Cronon makes clear, for the Romantic meaning of the concept of the wilderness to be adequately understood, there needs be a familiarity first with the word's historical, pre-nineteenth century context. What Cronon does with great skill is exploit the word's semantic mutability to warn of society's remaining ignorant to the fact that a problematic ideology belonging to one group or another is often substituted for a truer understanding of both the concept of and the material reality that defines the wilderness. Precisely because Cronon, as most of us do, wants both himself and his descendants to live in a world that is unimpaired by pollution, he does not hesitate to identify the most contradictory and just plain nonsensical beliefs about the wilderness that pervade both the ecological and environmental discourse communities. The best example is his deconstruction of the paradox lying at the heart of what is known as the "Deep Ecology" movement, which essentially argues that nature’s salvation depends on what amounts to human kind’s exit from the planet. Or, to sum it up in Cronon’s words: “[I]f nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves” (Cronon 83). Expressing a sentiment that many people can sympathize with, including those who would consider themselves to be fervent advocates for the environment, Cronon calls the Deep Ecologist position here an “absurdity,” arguing that any proposition that would essentially have all of humankind commit suicide is, to say in the least, unlikely to attract very many followers or be helpful in environmental discourses. 

As a reader, what I most took away from Cronon’s article was how important it is to be aware of the shifting semantic changes that take place in our language when we attempt to make profound decisions about our collective treatment of the environment. Few if any would argue for the goodness of a polluted, filthy planet. Such a view, to the extent there may actually be one, is not worth taking seriously. One can also be certain that virtually nobody would be anxious to participate in a global suicide either as a way to solve our problems. Cronon seems to want to appropriate sentiments such as these into productive starting points from which to proceed in our professional and public discourses. Lastly, Cronon's penetrating analysis of the various parties belonging to the environmentalist movement, specifically their peculiar and often contradictory definitions of “the wilderness," represents what seems to me to be just the kind of clear-minded thinking that the environmentalist movement requires to win the hearts—and perhaps more importantly the minds—of those like myself who are only beginning to familiarize themselves with the movement's ideologies.