Getting Back to the Wrong Nature
(Page 4 of 5)
May/June 1996
William Cronon
In critiquing wilderness, I'm forced to confront my own deep ambivalence about its meaning for modern environmentalism. On the one hand, 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. On the other hand, it is no less crucial for us to recognize and honor nonhuman nature as a world we did not create, a world with its own independent, nonhuman reasons for being as it is. Any way of looking at nature that helps us remember--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 responsible behavior.
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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. 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, we give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead. We inhabit civilization while 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 institutions, 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 the while pretending that these things are not an essential part of who we are. So how can we take the positive values we associate with wilderness and bring them closer to home?
Our challenge is to stop thinking of things according to a set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the nonhuman, the unnatural and the natural, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world. Instead, we need to embrace 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 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 ourselves) to our children. And calling a place 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.Wilderness is more a state of mind than a fact of nature, and the state of mind that today most defines wilderness is wonder. When we visit a wilderness area, we find ourselves surrounded by plants and animals and physical landscapes whose otherness 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. Wilderness gets us into trouble only if we imagine that this experience of wonder and otherness is limited to the remote corners of the planet, or that it somehow depends on pristine landscapes we ourselves do not inhabit. In the wilderness, we need no reminder 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.
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