Getting Back to the Wrong Nature
(Page 3 of 5)
May/June 1996
William Cronon
I hope it is clear that my criticism is not directed at wild nature per se, or even at efforts to set aside large tracts of wild land--for nonhuman nature and large tracts of the natural world do deserve protection--but rather at the specific habits of thinking that flow from this complex cultural construction called wilderness. 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 can offer no solution to the environmental and other problems that confront us.
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Defenders of 'biological diversity' (a seemingly more 'scientific' concept than 'wilderness' that is employed by organizations like the Nature Conservancy), for instance, often point to 'untouched' ecosystems as the best and richest repositories of the undiscovered species we must certainly try to protect. There is a paradox here, of course. To the extent that biological diversity (indeed, even wilderness itself) is likely to survive in the future only by the most vigilant 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.
Another example of the problematic use of 'wilderness' is in Earth First! founder Dave Foreman's description of the ideal 'Big Outside' in his promotion of the 'wilderness experience,' which bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the frontier myth: wide open spaces and virgin land with no trails, no signs, no facilities, no maps, no guides, no rescues, no modern equipment, a land where hardy travelers can support themselves by hunting with 'primitive weapons (bow and arrow, atlatl, knife, sharp rock).' When radical environmentalists express the popular notion that our environmental problems began with the invention of agriculture (as Foreman does in 1991's Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, Crown), 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. From such a starting place, it is hard not to reach the conclusion that the only way human beings can hope to live naturally on the earth is to follow the hunter-gatherers back into a wilderness Eden and abandon virtually everything that civilization has given us.
But if nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves. It is not a proposition that seems likely to produce positive or practical results, yet radical environmentalists and deep ecologists all too frequently come close to accepting it as a first principle. It may indeed turn out that civilization will end in ecological collapse or nuclear disaster, whereupon one might expect to find any human survivors returning to a way of life closer to that celebrated by Foreman and his followers. For most of us, though, the debacle would be cause for 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. Viewing nature and ourselves in such stark, absolute terms leaves us little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.
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