The Trouble With Wilderness
From 1995 to 2020
The first time I read William Cronon’s The Trouble with Wilderness I was utterly confused. I didn’t really know what point the essay was trying to make… it was difficult to imagine something being wrong with the wilderness. After all, I was never taught of it this way. But the more I read, and the more I thought about it, the more I saw what the trouble with wilderness was. And the thing about it is that it's a message that needs spreading.
Have you seen this image?
Maybe you’ve seen some version of it on the internet, maybe you've taken a picture like this yourself (I know I have). What do you see in the landscape? in between the fog and the giant rocks? Is it perhaps the wilderness? An unexplored, uninhabited, pristine land where one is connected to something greater than oneself? Many would describe it as a place where there are no humans to be found, only the wild and natural. It is not uncommon to hear this description or to even think of it this way, it is after all the way many of us were taught to think of the wild.
But just because something is normalized it doesn’t make it right.
We were taught to believe that the land encountered by European settlers was “savage”, that nature did what it wanted and ecosystems flourished to their will. However, it was not like this at all. The land was not untouched by the hands of “civilization”, it had people in it. Societies and nations who managed their ecosystems, people with complex agricultural and harvesting practices, trading routes, governments, wars, and treaties of their own. Perhaps the telling of this story was easier if the existence of these people and their impacts on the ecosystems they inhabited was simply ignored.
The wilderness as a concept is, after all, a social construct.
It’s something that was created to a) ignore the existence of certain peoples and b) benefit others from it. And it gets a lot more complex.
“The trouble with wilderness [as a concept] is that it leaves no place for humans in it.”- Cronon
The thing about untouched ecosystems is that they haven't existed for at least the last 200 years — they were constructed through the removal of the people who already inhabited the land — and after claiming that they were pristine, they were assigned romantic values and ideologies.
Such romantic ideologies promoted the dichotomy between humankind and the natural world, it’s as if in order for nature to be true it must be wild and untouched, and as Cronon puts it “…our very presence in nature, represents its fall.”
How are we then to exists on a planet if the only thing we seem to do to it degrade it? destroy it?
I don’t think this is true. This pattern of thinking is what has led us to become stagnant, to justify our behaviors and lifestyles on the basis that “this is just what humans do to the planet”. Through this ideology, we set ourselves outside of nature, outside of the wild, and reproduce a dualism that leaves no place for change. This is why I think we should talk about the trouble with wilderness more. I’m not advocating for the idea of “being one” with nature, cause we are not. What I’m really talking about is creating a reciprocal relationship with nature. One that recognizes our existence in it and its existence in our lives.
Time has come for us to realize that many of our beliefs about the wilderness were created to serve certain power systems, to narrate a story in a more convenient way, and unfortunately, it has carried on until today.
But it does not have to be like this. I try to see the wild in everything, from forest to garden. I try to define home as a place to care for and sustain. I recognize that I have the power to choose, we all do. And we can begin to define the wilderness in a different way, perhaps one that includes us in it too.
