Reading Notes

The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature by William Cronon (William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature , New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90) The time has come to rethink wilderness.

This will seem a heretical claim to m any environmentalists, since the idea of wilderness has for decades been a fundam ental tenet—indeed, a passion—of the environmental movement, especially in the United States. For many Americans wilderness stands as the last re maining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infe cted the earth. It is an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness. Seen in this way, wilderness presents itself as the best antidote to our human selves, a ref uge we must somehow recover if we hope to save the planet. As Henry David Thoreau once famously declared, \ “In Wildness is the preservati on of the World.” (1) But is it? The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one real\ izes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Fa r from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quit e 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 still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. Wilderness hides its unnaturalne ss behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine t hat what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longi ngs and desires. For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships wit h the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem. To assert the unnaturalness of so natural a place will no doubt seem absurd or even perverse to many r eaders, so let me hasten to add that the nonhuman world we encounter in wilderness is far from being merely our own invention. I celebrate with others who love wilderness the beauty and power of the things it contains. Each of us who has spent time there can conjure images and sensations that seem all the more hauntingly real for having engraved themselves so indelibly on our memories. Such memories may be uniquely our own, but they are also familiar enough be to be instantly recognizable to others.

Remember this? The torrents of mist shoot out from the base of a great waterfall in the depths of a Sierra canyon, the tiny droplets cooling your face as you listen Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 2 to the roar of the water and gaze up toward the sky through a rainbow that hovers just out of reach. Remember this too: looking out across a desert canyon in the evening air, the only sound a lone ra ven calling in the distance, the rock walls dropping away into a chasm so deep that its bottom all but vanishes as you squint into the amber light of the setti ng sun. And this: the moment beside the trail as you sit on a sandstone ledge, your boots damp with the morning dew while you take in the rich smell of t he pines, and the small red fox—or maybe for you it was a raccoon or a coyote or a deer—that suddenly ambles across your path, stopping for a long moment to gaz e in your direction with cautious indifference before continuing on its wa y. Remember the feelings of such moments, and you will know as well as I do that you were in the presence of something irreducibly nonhuman, someth ing profoundly Other than yourself Wilderness is made of that too. And yet: what brought each of us to t he places where such memories became possible is entirely a cultural invent ion. Go back 250 years in American and European history, and you do not find near ly so many people wandering around remote corners of the planet looking fo r what today we would call “the wilderness experience.” As late as the eighteenth century, the most common usage of the word “wilderness” in the English language referred to landscapes that generally carried adjectives far different from t he ones they attract today. To be a wilderness then was to be “deserted,” “savage,” “desolate,” “ barren”—in short, a “waste,” the word’s nearest synonym. Its connotations were anything but positive, and the emotion one was most likely to feel in its presence was “bewilderment” or terror. (2) Many of the word’s strongest associations then were biblical, for it is used over and over again in the King James Version to refer to places on the margins of civilization where it is all too easy to lo se oneself in moral confusion and despair.

The wilderness was where Moses had wander ed with his people for forty years, and where they had nearly abandoned their God to worship a golden idol. (3) “For Pharaoh will say of t he Children of Israel,” we read in Exodus, “They are entangled in the land, the wilderness hath shut them in.” (4) The wilderness was where Christ had struggled with the devil and endured his temptations: “And immediately the Spir it driveth him into the wilder ness. 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.” (5) The “delicious Paradise” of John Milton’s Eden was surrounded by “a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides /Access denied” to all who sought entry.” When Adam and Eve were driven from that garden, the world they entered was a wilderness that only their labor and pain could redeem.

Wilderness, in short, was a place to which one came only against one’s will, and always in fear and trembling. Whatever val ue it might have arose solely from the possibility that it might be “reclaim ed” and turned toward human ends—planted as a garden, say, or a city upon a hill. (7) In its raw state, it had little or nothing to offer civilized men and women. Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 3 But by the end of the nineteenth century, all this had changed. The wastelands that had once seemed worthless had for some people come to seem almost beyond price. That Thoreau in 1862 could declare wildness to be the preservation of the world suggests the sea change that was going on. Wilderness had once been the antithesis of all that was orderly and good—it had been the darkness, one might say, on the far side of the garden wall—and yet now it was frequently likened to Eden itself. When John Muir arrived in the Sierra Nevada in 1869, he would declare, “No description of Heaven that I have ever heard or read of seems half so fine.” (8) He was hardl y alone in expressing such emotions. One by one, various corners of the American map came to be designated as sites whose wild beauty was so spectacular that a growing number of citizens had to visit and see them for themselves. Niagara Falls was the first to undergo this transformation, but it was soon follow ed by the Catskills, the Adirondacks, Yosemite, Yellowstone, and others. Yosemite was deeded by the U. S.

government to the state of California in 1864 as the nation’s first wildland park, and Yellowstone became the first tr ue national park in 1872. (9) By the first decade of the twentieth century, in the single most famous episode in American conservation history, a nati onal debate had exploded over whether the city of San Francisco should be permi tted to augment its water supply by damming the Tuolumne River in Hetch Hetchy valley, well within the boundaries of Yosemite National Park. The dam was eventually built, but what today seems no less significant is that so many people fought to prevent its completion. Even as the fight was being lost, Hetch Hetchy became the baffle cry of an emerging movement to preserve wilderness. Fifty years earlier, such opposition would have been unthinkable. Few w ould have questioned the merits of “reclaiming” a wasteland like this in order to put it to human use. Now the defenders of Hetch Hetchy attracted widespread national attent ion by portraying such an act not as improvement or progress but as desecrati on and vandalism. Lest one doubt that the old biblical metaphors had been turned completely on their heads, li\ sten to John Muir attack the dam’s defenders. “Their arguments,” he wrote, “are curiously like those of the devil, devised for the destruction of the first garden—so much of the very best Eden fruit going to waste; so much of the best Tuolumne water and Tuolumne scenery going to wast e.” (10) For Muir and the growing number of Americans who shared his views, Satan’s home had become God’s Own Temple. The sources of this rather astonishi ng transformation were many, but for the purposes of this essay they can be gathered under two broad headings: the sublime and the frontier. Of the two, the sublime is the older and more pervasive cultural construct, being one of the most important expressions of that broad transatlantic movement we today label as romanticism; the frontier is more peculiarly American, though it too had its European antecedents and parallels.

The two converged to remake wilderness in their own image, freighting it with moral values and cultural symbols that it ca rries to this day. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the moder n environmental movement is itself a grandchild of romanticism and post-frontier ideology, whic h is why it is no accident that so Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 4 much environmentalist discourse takes its bearings from the wilderness these intellectual movements helped create. Although wilderness may today seem to be just one environmental concern among many, it in fact serves as the foundation for a long list of other such c oncerns that on their face seem quite remote from it. That is why its infl uence is so pervasive and, potentially, so insidious. To gain such remarkable influence, the concept of wilderness had to become loaded with some of the deepest core val ues of the culture that created and idealized it: it had to become sacred. This possibility had been present in wilderness even in the days when it had been a place of spiritual danger and moral temptation. If Satan was there, then so was Christ, who had found angels as well as wild beasts during His sojourn in the desert. In the wilderness the boundaries between human and nonhuman, bet ween natural and supernatural, had always seemed less certain than el sewhere. This was why the early Christian saints and mystics had often emul ated Christ’s desert retreat as they sought to experience for themselves t he visions and spiritual testing He had endured. One might meet devils and run the risk of losing one’s soul in such a place, but one might also meet God. For some that possibility was worth almost any price. By the eighteenth century this sense of the wilderness as a landscape where the supernatural lay just beneath the surface was expressed in the doctrine of the sublime, a word whose modern usage has been so watered down by commercial hype and tourist advertising that it retains only a dim echo of its former power.

(11) In the theories of Ed mund Burke, Immanuel Kant, W illiam Gilpin, and others, sublime landscapes were those rare places on earth where one had more chance than elsewhere to glimpse the face of God. (12) Romantics had a clear notion of where one could be most sure of having this experience. Although God might, of course, choose to show Himse lf anywhere, He would most often be found in those vast, powerful landscapes where one could not help feeling insignificant and being reminded of one’s own mortality. Where were t\ hese sublime places? The eighteenth century catalog of their loca tions feels very familiar, for we still see and value landscapes as it taught us to do. God was on the mountaintop, in the chasm, in the waterfall, in the thundercloud, in the rainbow, in the sunset. One has only to think of the sites that Americans chose for their first national par ks—Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Rainier, Zion—to realize that virtually all of them fit one or more of these categories. Less sublime landscapes simply did not appear wo rthy of such protection; not until the 1940s, for instance, would the first swamp be honored, in Everglades National Park, and to this day there is no nati onal park in the grasslands. (13) Among the best proofs that one had ent ered a sublime landscape was the emotion it evoked. For the early romantic writers and artists who first began to celebrate it, the sublime was far fr om being a pleasurable experience. The classic description is that of William Wordsworth as he recounted climbing the Alps and crossing the Simplon Pass in his autobiographical poem “The Prelude.” Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 5 There, surrounded by crags and waterfalls, the poet felt himself literally to be in the presence of the divine—and experienc ed an emotion remarkably close to terror: The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And in the narrow rent at every turn Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side As if a voice were in them, the sick sight And giddy prospect of the raving stream, The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light Were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree; Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first, and last, and mi dst, and without end. (14) This was no casual stroll in the mountains , no simple sojourn in the gentle lap of nonhuman nature. What Wordsworth descri bed was nothing less than a religious experience, akin to that of the Old Testament prophets as they conversed with their wrathful God. The symbols he detec ted in this wilderness landscape were more supernatural than natural, and they inspired more awe and dismay than joy or pleasure. No mere mortal was meant to linger long in such a place, so it was with considerable relief that Wordsworth and his companion made their way back down from the peaks to the sheltering valley s. Lest you suspect that this view of the sublime was limited to timid Europeans who lacked the American know-how for feeling at home in the wilderness, remember Henry David Thoreau’s 1846 climb of Mount Katahdin, in Maine. Although Thoreau is regarded by many today as one of the great American celebrat ors of wilderness, his emotions about Katahdin were no less ambivalent than Wordsworth’s about the Alps. It was vast, Titanic, and such as man nev er inhabits. Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. He is more lone than you can imagine …. Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. She does not smile on hi m as in the plains. She seems to say sternly, why came ye here before your ti me? This ground is not prepared for you.

Is it not enough that I smile in the valle ys? I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but foreve r relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind.

Why seek me where I have not called t hee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother? (15) Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 6 This is surely not the way a modern backpacker or nature lover would describe Maine’s most famous mountain, but that is because Thoreau’s description owes as much to Wordsworth and other romantic contemporaries as to the rocks and clouds of Katahdin itself. His words took the physical mountain on which he stood and transmuted it into an icon of the sublime: a symbol of God’s presence on earth. The power and the glory of that ic on were such that only a prophet might gaze on it for long. In effect, romantics like Thoreau joined Moses and the children of Israel in Exodus when “t hey looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud.” (16) But even as it came to embody the aw esome power of the sublime, wilderness was also being tamed—not just by thos e who were building settlements in its midst but also by those who most cel ebrated its inhuman beauty. By the second half of the nineteenth centur y, the terrible awe that Wordsworth and Thoreau regarded as the appropriately pious stanc e to adopt in the presence of their mountaintop God was giving way to a much more comfortable, almost sentimental demeanor. As more and more tourists sought out the wilderness as a spectacle to be looked at and enjoyed for its great beauty, the sublime in effect became domesticated. The wilderness wa s still sacred, but the religious sentiments it evoked were more those of a pleasant parish church than those of a grand cathedral or a harsh desert retreat. The writer who best captures this late romantic sense of a domesticated sublime is undoubtedly John Muir, whose descriptions of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada reflect none of the anxiety or terror one finds in earlier writers. Here he is, for instance, sketching on North Dome in Yosemite Valley: No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future.

These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God’ s beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be. Drinking this champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breat hing the living air, and ever y movement of limbs is pleasure, while the body seems to feel beau ty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one’s flesh like radiant heat, making a pa ssionate ecstatic pleasure glow not explainable. The emotions Muir describes in Yosemi te could hardly be more different from Thoreau’s on Katahdin or Wordsworth’s on the Simplon Pass. Yet all three men are participating in the same cultural tradition and contributing to the same myth—the mountain as cathedral. The three may differ in the way they choose to express their piety—Wordsworth favoring an awe-filled bewilderment, Thoreau a stern loneliness, Muir a welcome ecstasy—but they agree completely about the church in which they prefer to worshi p. Muir’s closing words on North Dome diverge from his older contemporaries only in mood, not in their ultimate content: Perched like a fly on this Yosemite dome, I gaze and sketch and bask, oftentimes settling down into dumb admiration witho ut definite hope of ever learning much, yet with the longing, unresting effort t hat lies at the door of hope, humbly prostrate before the vast display of God’s power, and eager to offer self-denial Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 7 and renunciation with eternal toil to learn any lesson in the divine manuscript.

(17) Muir’s “divine manuscript” and Wordsw orth’s “Characters of the great Apocalypse” are in fact pages from t he same holy book. The sublime wilderness had ceased to be place of satanic temptation and become instead a sacred\ temple, much as it continues to be for those who love it today. But the romantic sublime was not the only cultural movement that helped transform wilderness into a sacred Americ an icon during the nineteenth century.

No less important was the powerful romantic attraction of primitivism, dating back at least to of that the bes t antidote to the ills of an overly refined and civilized modern world was a return to simpler, more primitive living. In the United States, this was embodied most strikingly in t he national myth of the frontier. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893 the classic academic statement of this myth, but it had been part of Americ an cultural traditions for well over a century. As Turner described the proce ss, easterners and European immigrants, in moving to the wild unsettled lands of the frontier, shed the trappings of civilization, rediscovered their primit ive racial energies, reinvented direct democratic institutions, and by rein fused themselves with a vigor, an independence, and a creativ ity that the source of American democracy and national character. Seen in this way, wild country became a place not just of religious redemption but of national r enewal, the quintessential location for experiencing what it m eant to be an American. One of Turner’s most provocative claims was that by the 1890s the frontier was passing away. Never again would “such gifts of free land offer themselves” to the American people. “The frontier has gone,” he declared, “and with its going has closed the first period of American history.” (18) Built into the frontier myth from its very beginning was the not ion that this crucible of American identity was temporary and would pass away. Those wh o have celebrated the frontier have almost always looked backward as they di d so, mourning an older, simpler, truer world that is about to disappear, forever. That world and all of its attractions, Turner said, depended on free land—on wilder ness. Thus, in the myth of the vanishing frontier lay the seeds of wilder ness preservation in the United States, for if wild land had been so crucial in the making of the nation, then surely one must save its last remnants as m onuments to the American past—and as an insurance policy to protect its future. It is no accident that the movement to set aside national parks and wil derness areas began to gain real momentum at precisely the time that laments about the passing frontier reached their peak. To protect wilderness was in a very real sens e to protect the nation’s most sacred myth of origin. Among the core elements of the frontier myth was the powerful sense among certain groups of Americ ans that wilderness was t he last bastion of rugged individualism. Turner tended to stress communitarian themes when writing frontier history, asserting that Americans in primitive conditions had been forced to band together with their neighbors to form communities and democratic Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 8 institutions. For other writers, however, frontier dem ocracy for communities was less compelling than frontier freedom for indi viduals. (19) By fleeing to the outer margins of settled land and society—so the story ran—an individual could escape the confining strictures of ci vilized life. The mood among writers who celebrated frontier individualism was almost always nostalgic; they lamented not just a lost way of life but the passi ng of the heroic men who had embodied that life. Thus Owen Wister in the introducti on to his classic 1902 novel The Virginian could write of “a vanished world” in wh ich “the horseman, the cow-puncher, the last romantic figure upon our soil” rode onl y “in his historic yesterday” and would “never come again.” For Wister, the co wboy was a man who gave his word and kept it (“Wall Street would have found him behind the times”), who did not talk lewdly to women (“Newport would have t hought him old-fashioned”), who worked and played hard, and whose “ungoverned hours did not unman him.” (20) Theodore Roosevelt wrote with much the same nostalgic fervor about the “fine, manly qualities” of the “wild rough-rider of the plains.” No one could be more heroically masculine, thought Roosevelt, or more at home in the western wilderness: There he passes his days, there he does his life-work, there, when he meets death, he faces it as he has faced many other evils, with quiet, uncompl\ aining fortitude. Brave, hospitable, hardy, and adv enturous, he is the grim pioneer of our race; he prepares the way for the civilizat ion from before whose face he must himself disappear. Hard and dangerous though hi s existence is, it has yet a wild attraction that strongly draws to it his bold, free spirit (21) This nostalgia for a passing frontier way of life inevitably implied ambivalence, if not downright hostility, toward modernity and all that it represented. If one saw the wild lands of the frontier as freer, truer, and more natural than other, more modern places, then one was also inclined to see the cities and factories of urban-industrial civilization as confining, false, and artificial. Owen Wister looked at the post-frontier “transition” that had followed “the hor seman of the plains,” and did not like what he saw: “a shapeless st ate, a condition of men and manners as unlovely as is that moment in the y ear when winter is gone and spring not come, and the face of Nature is ugly.” (22) In the eyes of writers who shared Wister’s distaste for modernity, civilization contaminated its inhabitants and absorbed them into the faceless, collective, contemptible life of the crowd. For all of its troubles and dangers, and despite the fact that it must pass away, the frontier had been a better place. If civilization was to be redeemed, it would be by men like the Virginian who could retain thei r frontier virtues even as they made the transition to post-frontier life. The mythic frontier individualist was al most always masculine in gender: here, in the wilderness, a man could be a real m an, the rugged individual he was meant to be before civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity.

Wister’s contemptuous remarks about Wall Street and Newport suggest what he and many others of his generation believed— that the comforts and seductions of civilized life were especially insidious for men, who all too easily bec\ ame emasculated by the feminizing tendencies of civilization. More often than not, Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 9 men who felt this way came, like Wister and Roosevelt, from elite class backgrounds. The curious result was that frontier nostalgia became an important vehicle for expressing a peculiarly bour geois form of antimodernism. The very men who most benefited from urban-industrial capitalism were among those who believed they must escape its debilitating e ffects. If the frontier was passing, then men who had the means to do so should preserve for themselv es some remnant of its wild landscape so that they might enjoy the regeneration and renewal that came from sleeping under the stars, participating in bl ood sports, and living off the land. The frontier might be gone, but the frontier ex perience could still be had if only wilderness were preserved. Thus the decades following the Civil Wa r saw more and more of the nation’s wealthiest citizens seeking out wilderness for themselves. The elite passion for wild land took many forms: enormous es tates in the Adirondacks and elsewhere (disingenuously called “camps” despite their many servants and amenities), cattle ranches for would-be rough riders on the Great Plains, guided big-game hunting trips in the Rockies, and luxuri ous resort hotels wherever railroads pushed their way into sublime landscapes. Wilderness suddenly emerged as the landscape of choice for elite tourists, who brought with them strikingly urban ideas of the countryside through which they traveled. For them, wild land was not a site for productive labor and not a perm anent home; rather, it was a place of recreation. One went to the wilderness not as a producer but as a consumer, hiring guides and other backcountry resi dents who could serve as romantic surrogates for the rough ri ders and hunters of the front ier if one was willing to overlook their new status as employees and servants of the rich. In just this way, wilderness came to embody the national frontier myth, standing for the wild freedom of America’s past and seeming to represent a highly attractive natural alternative to the ugly artificiality of m odern civilization. The irony, of course, was that in the process wilderne ss came to reflect the very civilization its devotees sought to escape. Ever since the nineteent h century, celebrating wilderness has been an activity mainly for well-to-do city folks. Country people generally know far too much about working the land to r egard unworked land as their ideal. In contrast, elite urban tourists and wealthy sportsmen projected their leisure-time frontier fantasies onto the American landscape and so created wilderness in their own image. There were other ironies as well, The movement to set aside national parks and wilderness areas followed hard on the heels of the final Indian wars, in which the prior human inhabitants of these areas were rounded up and moved onto reservations. The myth of the wilderness as “virgin ” uninhabited land had always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once called that land home. Now they we re forced to move elsewhere, with the result that tourists could safely enjoy the illusion that they were seeing their nation in its pristine, origin al state, in the new morning of God’s own creation.

(23) Among the things that most mark ed the new national parks as reflecting a post-frontier consciousness was the relative absence of human violence within their boundaries. The actual frontier had often been a place of conflict, in which Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 10 invaders and invaded fought for control of land and resources. Once set aside within the fixed and carefully polic ed boundaries of the modern bureaucratic state, the wilderness lost its savage image and became safe: a place more of reverie than of revulsion or fear. Meanwhile, its original inhabitants were kept out by dint of force, their earlier uses of the land redefined as inappropriate or even illegal. To this day, for instance, the Blackfeet continue to be accused of “poaching” on the lands of Gl acier National Park that originally belonged to them and that were ceded by treaty only with t he proviso that they be permitted to hunt there. (24) The removal of Indians to create an “uninhabited wilderness”—uninhabited as never before in the human hi story of the place—reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is. To return to my opening argument: there is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny. Indeed, one of the most striking pr oofs of the cultural invention of wilderness is its thoroughgoing er asure of the history from which it sprang. In virtually all of its manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from history. Seen as the original garden, it is a place outside of time, from which human beings had to be ejected before the fallen world of history could properly begin. Seen as the frontier, it is a savage world at the dawn of civilization, whose transformation represents the very beginning of the national historical epic. Seen as the bold landscape of frontier heroism, it is the place of youth and childhood, into which men escape by abandoning their pasts and entering a world of freedom where the constraints of civilization fade into me mory. Seen as the sacred sublime, it is the home of a God who tran scends history by standing as the One who remains untouched and unchanged by time’s arrow. No matter what the angle from which we regard it, wilderness offers us the illusion that we can escape the cares and troubles of the world in which our past has ensnared us. (25) This escape from history is one reason why the language we use to talk about wilderness is often permeated with spiritual and religious values that reflect human ideals far more than the material world of physical nature. Wilderness fulfills the old romantic proj ect of secularizing Judeo-Christian values so as to make a new cathedral not in some pe tty human building but in God’s own creation, Nature itself. M any environmentalists who reject traditional notions of the Godhead and who regard themselves as agnostics or even atheists nonetheless express feelings tantamount to religious awe when in the presence of wilderness—a fact that te stifies to the success of the romantic project. Those who have no difficulty seeing God as the expression of our human dreams \ and desires nonetheless have trouble recognizing that in a secular age Nature can offer precisely the same sort of mirror. Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest. The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most impo rtant contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time mo re often than not appeals, explicitly or Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 11 implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupt ing influences of our artificial lives.

Most of all, it is the ultimate land scape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be. But the trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness repr esents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly exist ed before we began to leave our marks on the world. The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living— urban folk for whom food comes from a s upermarket or a restaurant instead of a field, and for whom the wooden houses in which they live and work apparently have no meaningful connection to the forests in which trees grow and die\ . Only people whose relation to the land was al ready alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, fo r the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings ac tually to make their living from the land. This, then, is the central paradox: wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, t hen our very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature is not. If this is so—if by definition wilderness leaves no place for human beings, save perhaps as contemplative sojourners enjoying their leisurely reverie in God’s natural cathedral—then also by definition it c an offer no solution to the environmental and other problems that confr ont us. To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civi lization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles . We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like. Worse: to the extent that we live in an urban-industrial civilization but at the same time pretend to ourselves that our real home is in the wilderness, to just that extent we give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead. We inhabit civilization wh ile holding some part of ourselves—what we imagine to be the most precious part— aloof from its entanglements. We work our nine-to-five jobs in its in stitutions, we eat its food, we drive its cars (not least to reach the wilderness), we benefit from the intricate and all too invisible networks with which it shelters us, all t he while pretending that these things are not an essential part of who we are. By im agining that our true home is in the wilderness, we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit. In its flight from Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 12 history, in its siren song of escape, in its reproduction of the dangerous dualism that sets human beings outside of nature— in all of these ways, wilderness poses a serious threat to responsible envir onmentalism at the end of the twentieth century. By now I hope it is clear that my criticism in this essay is not directed at wild nature per se, or even at efforts to set asi de large tracts of wild land, but rather at the specific habits of thinking that flow from this complex cultural construction called wilderness. It is not the things we label as wilderness that are the problem—for nonhuman nature and large tracts of the natural world do \ deserve protection—but rather what we ourselves mean when we use the label. Lest one doubt how pervasive these habits of t hought actually are in contemporary environmentalism, let me list some of the places where wilderness serves as the ideological underpinning for environmental concerns that might otherwise seem quite remote from it. Defenders of biol ogical diversity, for instance, although sometimes appealing to more utilitarian c oncerns, often point to “untouched” ecosystems as the best and richest repos itories of the undiscovered species we must certainly try to protect. Although at fi rst blush an apparently more “scientific” concept than wilderness, biological diversit y in fact invokes many of the same sacred values, which is why organizations like the Nature Conservancy ha\ ve been so quick to employ it as an alter native to the seemingly fuzzier and more problematic concept of wilderness. There is a paradox here, of course. To the extent that biological dive rsity (indeed, even wilderness itself) is likely to survive in the future only by the most vig ilant and self-conscious management of the ecosystems that sustain it, the ideology of wilderness is potentially in direct conflict with the very thing it encourages us to protect. (26) The most striking instances of this have revolved around “endangered species,” which serve as vulnerable symbols of biologi cal diversity while at the same time standing as surrogates for wilderness itself. The terms of the Endangered Species Act in the United States have often meant that those hoping to defend pristine wilderness have had to rely on a single endangered specie s like the spotted owl to gain legal standing for their case—thereby making the full power of the sacred land inhere in a single numinous organism whose habita t then becomes the object of intense debate about appropriate management and us e. (27) The ease with which anti- environmental forces like the wise-use movement have attacked such single- species preservation efforts suggests the vu lnerability of strategies like these. Perhaps partly because our own conflicts over such places and organisms have become so messy, the convergence of wilderness values with concerns about biological diversity and endangered species has helped produce a deep fascination for remote ecosystems, where it is easier to imagine that nature might somehow be “left alone” to flourish by its own pristine devices. The classic example is the tropical rain forest, which since the 1970s has become the most powerful modern icon of unfa llen, sacred land—a veritable Garden of Eden—for many Americans and Europeans. And yet protec ting the rain forest in the eyes of First World environmentalists all too often means protecting it from the people who live there. Those who seek to preserve such “wilderness” from the activities Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 13 of native peoples run the risk of reproducing the same tragedy—being forceably removed from an ancient home—that befell American Indians. Third World countries face massive environmental problems and deep social conflicts,\ but these are not likely to be solved by a cu ltural myth that encourages us to “preserve” peopleless landscapes that have not existed in such places for millennia. At its worst, as environmentalis ts are beginning to realize, exporting American notions of wilderness in this way can become an unthinking and self- defeating form of cultural imperialism. (28) Perhaps the most suggestive example of the way that wilderness thinking can underpin other environmental concerns has emerged in the recent debate about “global change.” In 1989 the journalist Bill McKibben published a book entitled The End of Nature, in which he argued that the prospect of global climate change as a result of unintentional human mani pulation of the atmosphere means that nature as we once knew it no longer exists. (29) Whereas earlier generations inhabited a natural world that remained mo re or less unaffected by their actions, our own generation is uniquely different. We and our children will henceforth live in a biosphere completely altered by our own activity, a planet in which\ the human and the natural can no longer be distinguished, because the one has overwhelmed the other. In McKibben’s view, nature has died, and we are responsible for killing it. “The planet,” he decla res, “is utterly different now.” (30) But such a perspective is possible only if we accept the wilderness premise that nature, to be natural, must also be pristine—remote from humanity and untouched by our common past. In fact, ev erything we know about environmental history suggests that peopl e have been manipulating the natural world on various scales for as long as we have a record of their passing. Moreover, we have unassailable evidence that many of the environmental changes we now face also occurred quite apart from human intervent ion at one time or another in the earth’s past. (31) The point is not that our current problems are trivial, or that our devastating effects on the earth’s ecosyst ems should be accepted as inevitable or “natural.” It is rather that we seem unlikely to make much progress in solving these problems if we hold up to ourselves as the mirror of nature a wilderness we ourselves cannot inhabit. To do so is merely to take to a logica l extreme the paradox that was built into wilderness from the begi nning: if nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves. The absurdity of this proposition flows from the underlying dualism it expresses. Not only does it ascribe greater power to humanity that we in fact possess—ph ysical and biological nature will surely survive in some form or another long a fter we ourselves have gone the way of all flesh—but in the end it offers us littl e more than a self-defeating counsel of despair. The tautology gives us no way ou t: if wild nature is the only thing worth saving, and if our mere presence destroys it, then the sole solution to our own unnaturalness, the only way to protect sa cred wilderness from profane humanity, would seem to be suicide. It is not a propos ition that seems likely to produce very positive or practical results. Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 14 And yet radical environmentalists and deep ecologists all too frequently come close to accepting this premise as a first principle. When they express, for instance, the popular notion that our environmental problems began with the invention of agriculture, they push the human fall from natural grace so far back into the past that all of civilized history becomes a tale of ecological declension.

Earth First! founder Dave Foreman capt ures the familiar parable succinctly when he writes, Before agriculture was midwifed in the Middle East, humans were in the wilderness. We had no concept of “ wilderness” because everything was wilderness and we were a part of it. But wit h irrigation ditches, crop surpluses, and permanent villages, we became apart fr om the natural world…. Between the wilderness that created us and the civili zation created by us grew an ever- widening rift. (32) In this view the farm becomes the first and most important battlefield in the long war against wild nature, and all else follows in its wake. From such a starting place, it is hard not to r each the conclusion that the only way human beings can hope to live naturally on earth is to follow the hunter-gatherers back i\ nto a wilderness Eden and abandon virtually everything that civilization has given us. It may indeed turn out that civilization wil l end in ecological collapse or nuclear disaster, whereupon one might expect to fi nd any human survivors returning to a way of life closer to that celebrated by Foreman and his followers. For most of us, though, such a debacle would be cause fo r regret, a sign that humanity had failed to fulfill its own promise and failed to honor its own highest values— including those of the deep ecologists. In offering wilderness as the ultimate hunter -gatherer alternative to civilization, Foreman reproduces an extrem e but still easily recognizable version of the myth of frontier primitivis m. When he writes of his fellow Earth Firsters that “we believe we must return to being animal, to gl orying in our sweat, hormones, tears, and blood” and that “we struggle against the modern compulsion to become dull, passionless androids,” he is following in the footsteps of Owen Wister. (33) Although his arguments give primacy to defending biodiversity and the autonomy of wild nature, his prose becomes most passionate when he speaks of preserving “the wilderness experience.” His own ideal “Big Outside” bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the fr ontier myth: wide open spaces and virgin land with no trails, no signs, no facilities, no maps, no guides, no res\ cues, no modern equipment. Tellingly, it is a land where hardy travelers can support themselves by hunting with “primitive w eapons (bow and arrow, atlatl, knife, sharp rock).” (34) Foreman claims that “the primary value of wilderness is not as a proving ground for young Huck Finns and Anni e Oakleys,” but his heart is with Huck and Annie all the same. He admits that “preserving a quality wilderness experience for the human visito r, letting her or him flex Paleolithic muscles or seek visions, remains a tremendously im portant secondary purpose.” (35) Just so does Teddy Roosevelt’s rough rider liv e on in the greener garb of a new age. Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 15 However much one may be attracted to such a vision, it entails problematic consequences. For one, it makes wilder ness the locus for an epic struggle between malign civilization and benign natur e, compared with which all other social, political, and moral concerns seem trivial. Foreman writes, “The preservation of wildness and native diversity is the most important issue. Issues directly affecting only humans pale in comparison.” (36) Presumably so do any environmental problems whose victims ar e mainly people, for such problems usually surface in landscapes that have already “fallen” and are no longer wild.

This would seem to exclude from t he radical environmentalist agenda problems of occupational health and safety in indus trial settings, problems of toxic waste exposure on “unnatural” urban and agricultura l sites, problems of poor children poisoned by lead exposure in the inner ci ty, problems of famine and poverty and human suffering in the “overpopulated” plac es of the earth—problems, in short, of environmental justice. If we set too high a stock on wilderness, 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 suffering or their fate. It is no accident that these supposedly inconsequential environmental problems affect mainly poor people, for the long affiliation between wilderness and wealth means that the only poor people who count when wilderness is the issue are hunter-gatherers, who presum ably do not consider themselves to be poor in the first place. The dualism at the heart of wilderness encourages its advocates to conceive of its protection as a cr ude conflict between the “human” and the “nonhuman”—or, more often, between t hose who value the nonhuman and those who do not. This in turn tempts one to ignore crucial differences among \ humans and the complex cultural and historical reasons why different peoples may feel very differently about the meaning of wilderness. Why, for instance, is the ” wilderness experience” so often conceived as a form of recreation best enjoyed by those whose clas s privileges give them the time and resources to leave their jobs behind and “ get away from it all?” Why does the protection of wilderness so often seem to pit urban recreationists against rural people who actually earn their living fr om the land (excepting those who sell goods and services to the tourists t hemselves)? Why in the debates about pristine natural areas are “primitive” peoples idealized, even sentimentalized, until the moment they do something unprimitive, modern, and unnatural, and thereby fall from environmental grace? What are the consequences of a wilderness ideology that devalues produc tive labor and the very concrete knowledge that comes from working the land with one’s own hands? (37) All of these questions imply conflicts among diffe rent groups of people, conflicts that are obscured behind the deceptive clarit y of “human” vs. “nonhuman.” If in answering these knotty questions we resort to so simplistic an opposition, we are almost certain to ignore the very subt leties and complexities we need to understand. Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 16 But the most troubling cultural baggage that accompanies the celebration of wilderness has less to do with remote rain forests and peoples than with the ways we think about ourselves—we American environmentalists who quite rightly worry about the future of the earth and the threats we pose to the natural world.

Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home. Most of our most serious environmental problem s start right here, at home, and if we are to solve those problems, we need an en vironmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it. The wilderness dualism tends to cast any use as abuse, and thereby denies us a middle ground in which responsible use and non-use might attain some kind of balanced, sustainable relationship. My own belief is that only by exploring this middle ground will we learn ways of imagining a better world fo r all of us: humans and nonhumans, rich people and poor, women and men, First Worl ders and Third Worlders, white folks and people of color, consum ers and producers—a world better for humanity in all of its diversity and for all the rest of nature too. The middle ground is where we actually live. It is where we—all of us, in our different places and ways—make our homes. That is why, when I think of the times I myself have come closest to experiencing what I might call the sacred in nature, I often find myself remembering wild places much closer to home. I think, fo r instance, of a small pond near my house where water bubbles up from limestone sp rings to feed a series of pools that rarely freeze in winter and so play home to waterfowl that stay here for the protective warmth even on the coldest of winter days, gliding silently through streaming mists as the s now falls from gray February skies. I think of a November evening long ago when I found m yself on a Wisconsin hilltop in rain and dense fog, only to have the setting sun break through the clouds to cast an otherworldly golden light on the misty farms and woodlands below, a scene so unexpected and joyous that I lingered past dusk so as not to miss any part of the gift that had come my way. And I think perhaps most especially of the blown-out, bankrupt farm in the sand country of central Wisconsin where Aldo Leopold and his family tried one of the first American experiments in ecological restoration, turning ravaged and infertile soil into carefully tended ground where the human and the nonhuman could exist side by side in relative harmony. What I celebrate about such places is not just their wild ness, though that certainly is among their most important qualities; what I celebrate even more is that they remind us of the wildness in our own backyards, of the nature that is all around us if only we have eyes to see it. Indeed, my principal objection to wilder ness is that it may teach us to be dismissive or even contemptuous of such humble places and experiences.

Without our quite realizing it, wilderness tends to privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others. Mo st of us, I suspect, still follow the conventions of the romantic sublime in finding the mountaint op more glorious than the plains, the ancient forest nobler than the grasslands, the mighty canyon more inspiring than the humble marsh. Even John Muir, in arguing against those who sought to\ dam Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 17 his beloved Hetch Hetchy valley in the Sierra Nevada, argued for alternative dam sites in the gentler valleys of the foothills—a preference that had nothing to do with nature and everything with the cultural traditions of the sublime. (38) Just as problematically, our frontier traditions have encouraged Americans to define “true” wilderness as requiring very lar ge tracts of roadless land—what Dave Foreman calls “The Big Outside.” Leaving aside the legitimate empirical question in conservation biology of how large a tract of land must be before a given species can reproduce on it, the emphasis on big wilderness reflects a romantic frontier belief that one hasn’t really gott en away from civilization unless one can go for days at a time without encountering another human being. By teaching us to fetishize sublime places and wide open country, these peculiarly American ways of thinking about wilderness encourag e us to adopt too high a standard for what counts as “natural.” If it isn’t hundreds of square miles big, if it doesn’t give us God’s eye views or grand vistas, if it doesn’t permit us the illusion that we are alone on the planet, then it really isn’t natur al. It’s too small, too plain, or too crowded to be authentically wild. In critiquing wilderness as I have done in th is essay, I’m forced to confront my own deep ambivalence about its meaning fo r modern environmentalism. On the one hand, one of my own most important environmental ethics is that people should always be conscious that they are par t of the natural world, inextricably tied to the ecological system s that sustain their lives. Any way of looking at nature that encourages us to believe we are separate from nature—as wilderness tends to do—is likely to re inforce environmentally irresponsible behavior. On the other band, I also think it no less crucial for us to recognize and honor nonhuman nature as a world we di d not create, a world with its own independent, nonhuman reasons for being as it is. The autonomy of nonhuman nature seems to me an indispensable corrective to human arrogance. Any way of looking at nature that helps us remem ber—as wilderness also tends to do—that the interests of people are not necessarily identical to those of every other creature or of the earth itself is likely to foster re sponsible behavior. To the extent that wilderness has served as an important vehicle for articulating deep mom values regarding our obligations and re sponsibilities to the nonhuman world, I would not want to jettison the contributions it has made to our culture’s ways of thinking about nature. If the core problem of wilderness is that it distances us too much from the very things it teaches us to value, then the question we must ask is what it can tell us about home, the place where we actually live. How can we take the positive values we associate with wilderness and br ing them closer to home? I think the answer to this question will come by broadening our sense of the otherness that wilderness seeks to define and protect. In reminding us of the world we did not make, wilderness can teach profound feelings of humility and respect as we confront our fellow beings and the earth it self Feelings like these argue for the importance of self-awareness and self criticism as we exercise our own ability to transform the world around us, helping us set responsible limits to huma\ n mastery—which without such limit s too easily becomes human hubris. Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 18 Wilderness is the place where, symbolically at least, we try to withhold our power to dominate. Wallace Stegner once wrote of the special human mark, the special record of human passage, that distinguishes man from all other species. It is ra re enough among men, impossible to any other form of life. It is simply the deliberat e and chosen refusal to make any marks at all…. We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy. (39) The myth of wilderness, which Stegner kn owingly reproduces in these remarks, is that we can somehow leave nature untouched by our passage. By now it should be clear that this for the most part is an illusion. But Stegner’s deeper message then becomes all the more compelli ng. If living in history means that we cannot help leaving marks on a fallen worl d, then the dilemma we face is to decide what kinds of marks we wish to leav e. It is just here that our cultural traditions of wilderness remain so important. In the broadest sense, wilderness teaches us to ask whether the Other mu st always bend to our will, and, if not, under what circumstances it should be allowed to flourish without our intervention. This is surely a question worth asking about everything we do, and not just about the natural world. When we visit a wilderness area, we find ourselves surrounded by plants and animals and physical landscapes whose ot herness compels our attention. In forcing us to acknowledge that they are not of our making, that they have little or no need of our continued existence, they recall for us a creation far greater than our own. In the wilderness, we need no re minder that a tree has its own reasons for being, quite apart from us. The same is less true in the gardens we plant and tend ourselves: there it is far easier to forget the otherness of the tree. (40) Indeed, one could almost measure wilder ness by the extent to which our recognition of its otherness requires a conscious, willed act on our part. The romantic legacy means that wilderness is more a state of mind than a fact of nature, and the state of mi nd that today most defines wilderness is wonder. The striking power of the wild is t hat wonder in the face of it requires no act of will, but forces itself upon us—as an expression of the nonhuman world experienced through the lens of our cultural hist ory—as proof that ours is not the only presence in the universe. Wilderness gets us into trouble only if we imagine that this experience of wonder and otherness is limited to the remote corn ers of the planet, or that it somehow depends on pristine landscapes we ourselves do not inhabit. Nothing could be more misleading. The tree in the garden is in reality no less other, no less worthy of our wonder and respect, than the tree in an ancient forest that has n\ ever known an ax or a saw—even though the tree in the forest reflects a more intricate web of ecological relationships. The tree in the garden could easily have sprung from the same seed as the tree in the forest, and we can claim on\ ly its location and perhaps its form as our ow n. Both trees stand apart from us; both Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 19 share our common world. The special power of the tree in the wilderness is to remind us of this fact. It c an teach us to recognize the wildness we did not see in the tree we planted in our own backyard. By seeing the otherness in that which is most unfamiliar, we can learn to see it t oo in that which at first seemed merely ordinary. If wilderness can do this—if it can help us perceive and respect a nature we had forgotten to recognize as natural—then it will bec ome part of the solution to our environmental dilemmas rather than part of the problem. This will only happen, however, if we abandon the dualism that sees the tree in the garden as artificial—completely fa llen and unnatural—and the tree in the wilderness as natural—completely pristine and wild. Both trees in some ultimate sense are wild; both in a practica l sense now depend on our management and care. We are responsible for both, even though we can claim credit for n\ either.

Our challenge is to stop thinking of such things according to set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the nonhuman , the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world. Instead, we need to em brace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others. We need to honor the Other within and the Other next door as much as we do the exotic Other that lives far away—a lesson that applies as much to people as it does to (other) natural things. In particular, we need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word “home.” Home, after all, is the place where finally we make our living. It is the place for which we take responsibility, the place we try to sustain so we can pass on what is best in it (and in ourselv es) to our children. (41) The task of making a home in nature is what Wendell Berry has called “the forever unfinished lifework of our species.” “The only thing we have to preserve nature with” he writes, “is culture; the only thing we have to preserve wildness with is domesticity.” (42) Calling a plac e home inevitably means that we will use the nature we find in it, for there can be no escape from manipulating and working and even killing some parts of nature to make our home. But if we acknowledge the autonomy and otherness of the things and creatures around us—an autonomy our culture has taught us to label with the word “wild”—then we will at least think carefully about the uses to which we put them, and even ask if we should use them at all. just so can we still join Thoreau in declaring that “in Wildness is the preservation of th e World,” for wildness (as opposed to wilderness) can be found anywhere: in the seemingly tame fields and woodlots of Massachusetts, in the cracks of a Manhatt an sidewalk, even in the cells of our own bodies. As Gary Snyder has wisel y said, “A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness an ywhere on earth. It is a quality of one’s own consciousness. The planet is a wild place and always will be.” (43) To think ourselves capable of causing “the end of nature” is an act of great hubris, for it means forgetting the wildness that dw ells everywhere within and around us. Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 20 Learning to honor the wild—learning to remember and acknowledge the autonomy of the other—means striving for crit ical self-consciousness in all of our actions. It means the deep reflection and respect must accompany each act of use, and means too that we must always consider the possibility of non-use. It means looking at the part of nature we in tend to turn toward our own ends and asking whether we can use it again and again and again—sustainably—without its being diminished in the pr ocess. It means never imagining that we can flee into a mythical wilderness to escape history and the obligation to take \ responsibility for our own actions that history inescapably entails. Most of all, it means practicing remembrance and gratitude, for thanksgiving is the simplest and most basic of ways for us to recollect the nature, the culture, and the history that have come together to make the world as we know it. If wildness can stop being (just) out there and start being (als o) in here, if it can start being as humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world—not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home t hat encompasses them both.

Notes 1. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Works of Thoreau, ed. Henry S. Canby (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), p. 672. 2. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “wilderness”; see also Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mi nd, 3rd ed. (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale Univ.

Press, 1982), pp. 1-22; and Max Oelsehlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale Univ. Press, 1991). 3. Exodus 32:1-35, KJV. 4. Exodus 14:3, KJV. 5. Mark 1:12-13, KJV; see al so Matthew 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13 6. John Milton, “Paradise Lost,” John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Od yssey Press, 1957), pp. 280-81, lines 131- 42 7. I have discussed this theme at l ength in “Landscapes of Abundance and Scarcity,” in Clyde Milner et al., eds., Ox ford History of the American West (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 603- 37. The classic work on the Puritan “city on a hill” in colonial New England is Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956). Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 21 8. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), reprinted in John Muir: The Eight Wilderness Discovery Books (London, England: Diadem; Seattle, Washington: Mountaineers, 1992), P. 211. 9. Alfred Route, National Parks: The American Experience, 2nd ed. (Lincoln:

Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1987) 10. John Muir, The Yosemite (1912), repr inted in John Muir: Eight Wilderness Discovery Books, P. 715. 11. Scholarly work on the sublime is extensive. Among the most important studies are Samuel Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII- Century England (New York: Modern Langua ge Association, 1935); Basil Willey, The Eighteenth-Century Ba ckground: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period (London, England: Chattus and Windus, 1949); Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountai n Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1959); Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studi es in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkin.s Univ. Press, 1976); Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875 (New York: Oxford Un iv. Press, ig8o). 12. The classic works are Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) , trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 196o); Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sub lime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (1958; Notre Dame, Indiana: Univ. of Notre Dame Pre ss, 1968); William Gilpin, Three Essays:

On Picturesque Beauty; on Pictures que Travel; and on Sketching Landscape (London, England, 1803) 13. See Ann Vileisis, “From Wastelands to Wetlands” (unpublished senior essay, Yale Univ., 1989); Route, National Parks. 14. William Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” bk. 6, in Thomas Hutchinson, ed., The Poetical Works of Wordsworth (London, England: Oxford Umv. Press, 1936), p.

536. 15. Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (1864), in Henry David Thoreau (New York: Library of Am erica, 1985), pp. 640-41. 16. Exodus 16:10, KJV. 17. John Muir, My First Summer in the Si erra, p. 238. Part of the difference between these descriptions may reflect the landscapes the three authors were describing. In his essay, “Reinventi ng Common Nature: Yosemite and Mount Rushmore—A Meandering Tale of a Doubl e Nature,” Kenneth Olwig notes that Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 22 early American travelers experienced Yosemite as much through the aesthetic tropes of the pastoral as through those of the sublime. The ease with which Muir celebrated the gentle divinity of the Sierra Nevada had much to do with the pastoral qualities of the landscape he described. See Olwig, “Reinventing Common Nature: Yosemite and Mount Ru shmore—A Meandering Tale of a Double Nature,” Uncommon Ground: Towa rd Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton & CO, 1995), PP 379-408. 18. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York:

Henry Holt, 1920), pp. 37-38. 19. Richard Slotkin has made this obser vation the linchpin of his comparison between Turner and Theodore Roosevelt. See Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), pp. 29-62. 20. Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Ho rseman of the Plains (New York:

Macmillan, 1902), pp. viii-ix. 21. Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888; NewYork:

Century, 1899), p. 100. 22. Wister, Virgin ian, p. x. 23. On the many problems with this view, see William M. Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 369-85 24. Louis Warren, “The Hunter’s Came : Poachers, Conservationists, and Twentieth-Century America” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994). 25. Wilderness also lies at the foundation of the Clem entsian ecological concept of the climax. See Michael Barbour, “Eco logical Fragmentation in the Fifties” in Cronon, Uncommon Ground, pp. 233-55, and William Cronon, “Introduction: In Search of Nature,” in Cronon, Uncommon Ground, pp. 23-56. 26. On the many paradoxes of having to manage wilderness in order to maintain the appearance of an unmanaged landscape, see John C. Hendee et al., Wilderness Management, USDA Forest Se rvice Miscellaneous Publication No.

1365 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1978). 27. See James Proctor, “Whose Natur e?: The Contested Moral Terrain of Ancient Forests,” in Cronon, Uncommon Ground, pp. 269-97 28. See Candace Slater, “Amazonia as Ed enic Narrative,” in Cronon, Uncommon Ground, pp. 114-31. This argument has been powerfully made by Ramachandra Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 23 Cuba, “Radical American Environmentalism: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71-83 29. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989). 30. McKibben, The End of Nature, p. 49 31. Even comparable extinction rates hav e occurred before, though we surely would not want to emulate the Cret aceous-Tertiary boundary extinctions as a model for responsible manipul ation of the biosphere! 32. Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Ec o-Warrior (New York: Harmony Books, 1991, p. 69 (italics in original). For a samp ling of other writings by followers of deep ecology and/or Earth First!, see Mi chael Tobias, ed., Deep Ecology (San Diego, California: Avant Books, 1984); Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Sal t Lake City, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1985); Michael Tobias, After Eden: History , Ecology, and Conscience (San Diego, California: Avant Books, 1985); Da ve Foreman and Bill Haywood, eds., Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkey Wr enching, 2nd ed. (Tucson, Arizona: Ned Ludd Books, 1987); Bill Devall, Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City, Utah: Gibbs Sm ith, 1988); Steve Chase, ed., Defending the Earth: A Dialogue bet ween Murray Bookchin & Dave Foreman (Boston, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1991); John Davis, ed., The Earth First\ , Reader. Ten Years of Radical Environm entalism (Salt Lake City, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1991); Bill Devall, Living Richly in an Age of Limits: Using Deep Ecology for an Abundant Life (Salt Lake, City, Ut ah: Gibbs Smith, 1993); Michael E.

Zimmerman ct al., eds., En vironmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1993). A useful survey of the different factions of radical environmentalism can be found in Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The S earch for a Livable World (New York:

Routledge, 1992). For a very interesting cr itique of this literature (first published in the anarchist newspaper Fifth Estate ), see George Bradford, How Deep is Deep Ecology? (Ojai, California : Times Change Press, 1989). 33. Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, P. 34. 34. Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warri or, p. 65. See also Dave Foreman and Howie Wolke, The Big Outside: A Descrip tive Inventory of the Big Wilderness Areas of the U.S. (Tucson, Arizona: Ned Ludd Books, 1989). 35. Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, p. 63 36. Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, P. 27 37. See Richard White, ”’Are You an En vironmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature,” in Cronon, Uncommon Ground, pp. 171-85. Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, Page 24 Compare its analysis of environmental knowledge through work with Jennifer Price’s analysis of environm ental knowledge through consum ption. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the wilderness experience is essentially consumerist in its impulses. 38. Compare with Muir, Yosemite, in J ohn Muir: Eight Wilderness Discovery Books, p. 714 39. Wallace Stegner, ed., This Is Dinos aur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers (New York: Knopf, 1955), P. 17 (italics in original). 40. Katherine Hayles helped me see the importance of this argument. 41. Analogous arguments can be found in John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “Beyond Wilderness,” A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 71-91, and in t he wonderful collection of essays by Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gar dener’s Education (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991). 42. Wendell Berry, Home Economics (San Francisco, California: North Point, 1987), pp. 138, 143. 43. Gary Snyder, quoted in New York Time s, “Week in Review,” 18 September 1994, p. 6. Excerpted from Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, edited by William Cronon. Copyright © 1995 by William Cronon. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.