Getting Back to the Wrong Nature

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In the wilderness the boundaries between human and nonhuman, between natural and supernatural, have always seemed less certain than elsewhere. By the 18th 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. Sublime landscapes were those rare places where one had a better chance than elsewhere on earth to glimpse the face of God. 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 parks--Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, Zion--to realize that virtually all of them fit one or more of these categories. Not until the 1940s would the first swamp be honored, in Everglades National Park, and to this day there is no national park in the grasslands.No less important than the sublime was the powerful romantic attraction of primitivism--the belief that the best antidote to the ills of an overly refined and civilized modern world was a return to simpler living--dating back at least to Rousseau. In the United States, this was embodied most strikingly in the national myth of the frontier. In the writing of historian Frederick Jackson Turner, for instance, wild country became a place not just of religious redemption but also of national renewal, the quintessential location for experiencing what it meant to be an American. It is no accident that the movement to set aside national parks and wilderness areas began to gain real momentum at precisely the time that laments about the vanishing frontier reached their peak. To protect wilderness was in a very real sense to protect the nation's most sacred myth of origin.

The idea of the sublime and the frontier myth converged to remake wilderness in their own image, freighting it with moral values and cultural symbols that it still carries. In the decades following the Civil War, more and more of the nation's wealthiest citizens sought out wilderness for themselves in enormous estates (disingenuously called 'camps') in the Adirondacks and elsewhere: cattle ranches for would-be rough riders on the Great Plains, guided big-game hunting trips in the Rockies, and luxurious resort hotels wherever railroads pushed their way into sublime landscapes. The irony, of course, is that wilderness came to reflect the very civilization its devotees sought to escape. There are other ironies as well: The movement to set aside national parks and wilderness areas followed hard on the heels of the final Indian wars; after the prior human inhabitants were rounded up and moved onto reservations, tourists could safely enjoy the illusion that they were seeing their nation in its pristine, original state. (Today, the Blackfeet continue to be accused of 'poaching' on the lands of Glacier National Park that originally belonged to them.) The removal of Indians to create an 'uninhabited wilderness'--uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place--reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is.

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