Response to William Cronon's "The Trouble with Wilderness"

***Site meter tells me that this post gets more traffic than any other post on this blog.   Is "The Trouble with Wilderness" a common college reading assignment or something?   Why are you people here?  Leave a comment and let me know!  Also, what do you think of my response?  Are you able to even make it all the way through?  Constructive criticism folks, let's hear it....
***Please note that this is a "stream of consciousness" style essay and reflects my reactions as I read Cronon's essay.  If you choose to comment please at least read to the end first so you see where I'm going with it. Thanks!

(If you have not read it, William Cronon's essay that I am responding to can be found here)

       Cronon opens with a description of wilderness that resonates with me - "The last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected 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." 
       That's a  definition that works for me.  I like it.  Then, in the next breath, it's "quite profoundly a human creation". 
       What the hell? 
       He goes on; "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."  
       Absurd.   Wilderness can't be contaminated by civilization?   Contaminating wilderness is the story of civilization. 
       I read on; "Wilderness itself is no small part of the problem."  ('The problem' being civilization's abusive relationship with the nonhuman world.)  
      This man is insane.  He is engaging in one of civilization's favorite tricks - blaming the victim.  Not only is he insane, he is talking out of both sides of his mouth as he uses the next full paragraph to illustrate how "the nonhuman world we encounter in wilderness is far from being merely our own invention."
       Oh really, what happened to it being "profoundly a human creation"?
By this early point in the essay I'm simply feeling irritated and somewhat confused. 
      With the intro out of the way, he launches into the meat - his historical analysis. 
      My initial reaction is that he is obviously rooted - firmly rooted - in a Euro-centric, Christian-centric world view.  Cronon's historical Wilderness was "deserted, savage, desolate, barren, a waste" where people felt "bewilderment or terror"
      Sure, if you're a "civilized" Christian.   How about the pagans of old Europe that the Christians killed off, co-opted, and supplanted.  Were they terrified of wilderness?  How about the Native Americans?  Did they exist in this (waste?!)land for tens of thousands of years in a state of bewilderment?
       No, of course not. 
       The history of wilderness I guess then depends on who writes the history.  But we already knew that. 
       Then we get into the biblical examples of our historical wilderness.   Not exactly an objective source since Christianity itself is a fine example of an Earth-hating, alienated religion.  (Where do you go when you die?  Oh, heaven.  Paradise is out there, not here.   Earth is only our stepping stone.  You are not a part of it, so stomp it up.)   Valuable only to the extent that it could be "reclaimed and turned toward human ends" nature, "in its raw state, had little or nothing to offer civilized men and women".
       Alright fine, so lets stop talking about wilderness from the viewpoint of the civilized, since they have obviously proven themselves insane.  These places, ALL places, could only be considered wasteland to those who were already alienated from them.  Cronon says "The wastelands that had once seemed worthless...."
       Again, worthless to whom?  The pagans, the Native Americans, the aborigine?  No, it was only worthless to the Christians; and to the civilized. 
       And then comes the transformation.  That miraculous time in which wilderness (for the civilized, or a couple of them anyway) undergoes metamorphoses from wasteland to priceless treasure.  It became sacred.  
       And just in time, considering that the vast majority of the civilized, for whom wilderness was not and is not sacred, were plotting, as was and is their way, to obliterate every last inch of wild land, wild animal, and wild human.  
       Then Cronon introduces the doctrine of the sublime.  And it is here, in this paragraph that I begin, finally, to see that it is not only Cronon's historical perception of the meaning of wilderness that differs from my own, it is his current perception of wilderness, his working definition.   He says that God "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 these sublime places? The eighteenth century catalog of their locations feels very familiar, for we still see and value landscapes as it taught us to do." 
        Maybe he still values landscapes the way he was taught, maybe the mass of the insane civilized value them this was too.  But I don't.   And here I realize that Cronon is not talking to me.  I am not the audience.  I know this because my wilderness is not confined to the powerful landscapes of Yosemite and the Grand Canyon.  My wilderness, the land that I value, the land that I hold sacred, is not defined by the vastness of it's terrain or its remoteness.  It includes those vast powerful places, to be sure, but the wilderness that matters to me on a daily basis, the wilderness that I long for, is the land that makes my home.   It is the stream at the bottom of the hill, just behind all the backyards, where the hemlock branches reach out across the water and which turns into a tumbling chocolate torrent after a hard rain; it is the wetland formed by the beaver pond on Hans creek a short walk from the old farmhouse where the deer come to drink   It is all those humble everyday places here in Appalachia and elsewhere that are being daily attacked, obliterated, destroyed, poisoned. 
       Cronon is speaking only of those places that our culture has determined to be sacred enough for protection. Thus, most my irritation at the first half of his essay hinges on the fact that the word wilderness seems to bring to his mind a whole host of historical myths and ironies that are meaningless to me and my vision of wilderness and basically irrelevant to my use of the word.
       Like definitions of freedom, the meaning of wilderness can be quite personal.  For me wilderness has little to do with whether or not a given place is inhabited by humans.  I am much more concerned with the manner in which those humans interact with the land - with their home.  For me wilderness is not the "original garden", "the frontier", or "the sacred sublime".  Wilderness for me is defined simply by the relative absence of the activities of industrial civilization and it's despoiling wake.   The more that the activities of industrial civilization destroy the life-giving characteristics of a place, the less that I consider that place to be wild.  Wilderness does not mean devoid of people - it means in balance with people, which means devoid of (or healing from) industrial civilization.   
       We find out near the end of his essay that Cronon actually shares a similar view of wilderness.  He is not critiquing wilderness so much as he is critiquing what he sees as the mainstream meaning of the word,  Which he defined by it's European/Christian historical context and our current legal standard of "the wilderness area" where humans are not permitted to freely live - a wilderness uninhabitable by humans.    "By now", he says, "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 aside 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."   
        By this point I'm mostly with him.  And now I understand why he chose to focus only on this culture's historical feelings toward wilderness and exclude the many historical examples of humans living more or less symbiotically with their homelands.   He simply wants his readers and his fellow earth-loving citizens to direct more focus toward creating an idea of wilderness that is relevant to us, a part of us, on a daily basis, that is intimately a part of our daily lives, rather than a place that's "out there", isolated from us as our culture has taught. 
       I absolutely agree.  Every time, every single time, that I walk in the forest, through the stream, through my neighborhood,  I am acutely aware of how these places have been and are being abused by humans and I think a lot about the ways in which these places could be healed.  I am also aware of how the ecological health of these places affects our heath, happiness, and freedom (to give just one example - polluted water is detrimental to human health, which in turn decreases our level of happiness, and reduces our level of freedom by forcing us, once again, into the industrial wage economy because we are left with no other choice but to purchase the clean drinking water we need to be healthy and happy - the water that used to be free.)  As Cronon phrases it, "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 problems start right here, at home, and if we are to solve those problems, we need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it." and "If wilderness can stop being (just) out there and start being (also) 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 that encompasses them both."
      Right on.  This is why I am fascinated not only by wilderness but also permaculture, natural building, personal health, primitive skills - they are all facets of living "rightly in the world". 
      I do have a few bones to pick with Cronon however.  It is important not to devalue the importance of legally articulated and established wilderness areas in a culture that has zero respect for the land.  The primary goal of "Wilderness areas" is simply to make industrial activity off-limits to just a few tiny spots on this earth.   Because if it isn't off-limits to industry then industry will take it - will destroy it - and not in some out-there spiritual way but in the very practical sense that the water will no longer be clean enough for a human to drink, or for a fish to live in.  If the few remaining stands of old-growth redwoods had not been bought up and protected they would be gone.  Every last one.  Along with every species that depends on them for survival.   If the Cranberry Wilderness here in W.V. wasn't legally protected wilderness then I guarantee the loggers and miners and gas drillers would be there, taking it.  If the everglades weren't protected, the developer scum would have filled it up and converted it to strip malls and suburbs years ago.  It is vitally important that there be places that industry cannot directly destroy. (I say directly because we know that they still do so indirectly.  Acid rain, air and water pollution, and invasive species care not about our invisible boundaries marking the "Wilderness".) 
      There is also much to be said for wilderness areas large enough to get lost in.  In a world where every inch of land has been claimed and posted, a certain freedom can only be found in a landscape where one is free to wander relatively unhindered by the ubiquitous 'no trespassing' sign.  
       Cronon also tries to turn wilderness into a class issue, claiming that it's just the elite who celebrate wilderness and that people living (working) close to the land don't defend it.   "Ever since the nineteenth century," he says, "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 regard unworked land as their ideal."     In my experience, a person's economic class or whether they are "city folk" or "country people" is completely irrelevant to their propensity to defend wilderness.   Most people in our culture, whether urban or rural, would (and do) gladly destroy every last piece of wild land to make a buck from it.  It is only a few (the sane) who can see the incalculable value, for them and for every generation that follows them, in a healthy landscape.   It isn't just, or even primarily, privileged urban folk who defend the land.  Here in Appalachia, for example, resistance to strip mining both in the 1970s and in more recent years was initiated by rural people directly impacted by the mining.  Ultimately though, I don't care who is defending the land, as long as someone is.   Even if wilderness really was only being defended by wealthy urbanites, would that somehow make it any less right?
       Finally, I need to address what Cronon calls his "principal objection to wilderness".   He believes that wilderness "may teach us to be dismissive or even contemptuous of humble places and experiences", that "wilderness tends to privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others", and that  "any way of looking at nature that encourages us to believe we are separate from nature — as wilderness tends to do — is likely to reinforce environmentally irresponsible behavior."    Let me, in closing, place blame where blame is properly due.   It is not Wilderness that teaches contempt, privilege, and separation from nature - it is our Civilization.