Self-awareness and Self-criticism: Paths to Humility and Respect

     William Cronon’s “The Trouble with the Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” provides practical solutions to the troubling notions the cultural construction of the wilderness has taught us. The notion of needing to protect a wilderness that is “pristine” and out there, rather than the nature that surrounds us in our neighborhoods and cities, is a serious impediment to the host of environmental issues we face. In this respect, Cronon’s argument echoes the concerns articulated by Price. We need to be more self-conscious about the spaces we inhabit for ourselves and future generations. However, most people cannot think, or do not care to think, of life on Earth beyond their own moment in the sun. Peter Guther’s observation that man has a linear relationship to time is what inhibits man from taking environmental issues seriously (Byerly 54). As Cronon notes, the idea of the wilderness allows us to think of it as our “real home,” as opposed to the homes we live in, and “evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead” (81). Unfortunately, I think the Christian doctrine of apocalypse and afterlife erroneously contributes to a laissez-faire attitude regarding the environment in which people are comforted by the idea of rapture and Heaven or the afterlife as their “real home.” The idea of separate states of being, life on Earth and life in Heaven, is analogues to the notion of life in and outside of nature and “reinforce[s] environmentally irresponsible behavior” (89). Thus, Cronon notes that “[o]ur challenge is to stop thinking […] according to a set of bipolar moral scales in which the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world” (89). Instead, we must resist the urge to be “dismissive and contemptuous of humbler places and experiences” and through “self-awareness and criticism” allow the wilderness and the natural world to “teach profound feelings of humility and respect” (87).
Cronon’s introduction of the wilderness as being constructed in our image, which he acknowledges is the image of the “elite tourist and wealthy sportsman” really drew me in as a reader (79). I am very interested in Milton’s use of images and reflections in Paradise Lost, especially in discerning “good” images and reflections from “evil” ones. Cronon acknowledges the difficulty of seeing the wilderness as unnatural and a construction since it “hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural” (69). The wilderness, according to Cronon, holds up a mirror in which we “too easily imagine we behold Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longing and desire” (69). The call of the Romantics seems to advocate the importance of self-consciousness and being able to recognize “the Other within” as well as “the Other next door” (89). We are called not to separate ourselves from nature but rather to recognize “the autonomy of the nonhuman world” and how our perceptions and understanding shape our relationship with ourselves, the natural world, and others (87).