Getting Back to the Wrong Nature
(Page 5 of 5)
May/June 1996
William Cronon
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 never 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 only its location and perhaps its form as our own. Both trees stand apart from us; both share our common world. The special power of the tree in the wilderness is to remind us of this fact. It can teach us to recognize the wildness we did not see in the tree we planted in our own backyard. By seeing the otherness in what is most unfamiliar, we can learn to see it too in what 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 become a part of the solution to our environmental dilemmas rather than part of the problem.
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We can thus still join Thoreau in declaring that 'in Wildness is the preservation of the 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 Manhattan sidewalk, even in the cells of our own bodies. As Gary Snyder wisely said, 'A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth. It is a quality of one's own consciousness. The planet is a wild place and always will be.'
Learning to honor the wild--learning to remember and acknowledge the autonomy of the other--means striving for critical self-consciousness in all of our actions. It means that 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 intend 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 process. 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 (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.
An adaption of the essay 'The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature' by William Cronon from Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, edited by William Cronon.
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