p.; Tlie Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Badk to the Wrong Nature William G ronon ■ the time has come to rethink wilderness. This will seem a heretical claim to many environmentalists, since the idea of wilderness has for decades been a fundamental tenet—indeed, a passion— of the environmental movement, especially in the United States. For many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth. It is an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness. Seen in this way, wilderness presents itself as the best antidote to our human selves, a refuge we must somehow recover if we hope to save the planet. As Henry David Thoreau once famously declared, "In Wildness is the preservation of the World."1 But is it? The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it is a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. Wilderness hides its unnaruralness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflec- 69 eg o pl, CO o cd CO o cq ID CO m Ql > c c o O tlon of our own unexamined longings and desires. For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture's problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem. To assert the unnaturalness of so natural a place will no doubt seem absurd or even perverse to many readers, so let me hasten to add that the nonhuman world we encounter in wilderness is far from being merely our own invention. I celebrate with others who love wilderness the beauty and power of the things it contains. Each of us who has spent time there can conjure images and sensations that seem all the more hauntingly real for having engraved themselves so indelibly on our memories. Such memories may be uniquely our own, but they are also familiar enough to be instantly recognizable to others. Remember this? The torrents of mist shoot out from the base of a great waterfall in the depths of a Sierra canyon, the tiny droplets cooling your face as you listen to the roar of the water and gaze up toward the sky through a rainbow that hovers just out of reach. Remember this too: looking out across a desert canyon in the evening air, the only sound a lone raven calling in the distance, the rock walls dropping away into a chasm so deep that its bottom ail but vanishes as you squint into the amber light of the setting sun. And this: the moment beside the trail as you sit on a sandstone ledge, your boots damp with the morning dew while you take in the rich smell of the pines, and the small red fox—or maybe for you it was a raccoon or a coyote or a deer—thai suddenly ambles across your path, stopping for a long moment to gaze in your direction with cautious indifference before continuing on its way. Remember the feelings of such moments, and you will know as well as I do that you were in the presence of something irreducibly nonhuman, something profoundly Other than yourself. Wilderness is made of that too. And yet: what brought each of us to the places where such memories became possible is entirely a cultural invention. Go back 250 years in American and European history, and you do not find nearly so many people wandering around remote corners of the planet looking for what today we would call "the wilderness experience." As late as the eighteenth century, the most common usage of the word "wilderness* in the English language referred to landscapes that generally carried adjectives far different from the ones they attract today. To be a wilderness then was to be "deserted," "savage," "desolate," "barren"—in short, a "waste," the word's nearest synonym. Its connotations were anything but positive, and the emotion one was most likely to feel in its presence was "bewilderment"—or terror.2 Many of the word's strongest associations then were biblical, for k is used over and over again in the King James Version to refer to places on the margins of civilization where it is all too easy to lose oneself in moral confusion and despair. The wilderness was where Moses had wandered with his people for forty years, and where they had nearly abandoned their God to worship a golden idol.3 "For Pharoah will say of the Children of Israel," we read in Exodus, "They are entangled in the land, the wilderness hath shut them in."4 The wilderness was where Christ had struggled with the devil and endured his temptations: "And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness for forty days tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him."5 The "delicious Paradise" of John Milton's Eden was surrounded by "a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides/Access denied* to all who sought entry.6 When Adam and Eve were driven from that garden, the world they entered was a wilderness that only their labor and pain could redeem. Wilderness, in short, was a place to which one came only against one's will, and always in fear and trembling. Whatever value it might have arose solely from the possibility that it might be "reclaimed" and turned toward human ends—planted as a garden, say, or a city upon a hill.7 In its raw state, it had little or nothing to offer civilized men and women. But by the end of the nineteenth century, all this had changed. The wastelands that had once seemed worthless had for some people come to seem almost beyond price. That Thoreau in 1862 could declare wildness to be the preservation of the world suggests the sea change that was going on. Wilderness had once been the antithesis of all that was orderly and good—it had Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1827-28. (Gift of Mrs. Maxim Kar-oiik for the M. and M. Karohk Collection of American Paintings, ISH-1S6S, courtesy Museum of Fine Art;, Boston) 72 / UNCOMMON GROUND been the darkness, one might say, on the far side of the garden wall—and g yet now it was frequently likened to Eden itself. When John Muir arrived in the Sierra Nevada in 1869, he would declare, "No description of Heaven that 1 have ever heard or read of seems half so fine."* He was hardly alone in expressing such emotions. One by one, various corners of the American o map came to be designated as sites whose wild beauty was so spectacular co that s growing number of citizens had to visit and see them for themselves. others. Yosemite was deeded by the U.S. government to the state of Califor-iia in 1864 as the nation's first wild!and park, and Yellowstone became the irst true national park in 1872.9 By the first decade of the twentieth century, in the single most famous pisode in American conservation history, a national debate had exploded >ver whether the city of San Francisco should be permitted to augment its vater supply by damming the Tuolumne River in Hetch Hetchy valley, well within the boundaries of Yosemite National Park. The dam was eventually >uilt, but what today seems no less significant is that so many people fought o prevent its completion. Even as the fight was being lost, Hetch Hetchy ■ecame the battle cry of an emerging movement to preserve wilderness, 'ifcy years earlier, such opposition would have been unthinkable. Few roald have questioned the merits of "reclaiming" a wasteland like this in rder to put it to human use. Now the defenders of Hetch Hetchy attracted i^idespread national attention by portraying such an act not as improvement w r progress but as desecration and vandalism. Lest one doubt that the old we and dismay than joy or pleasure. No mere mortal was meant to linger c Dng in such a place, so it was with considerable rdief that Wordsworth and D lis companion made their way back down from the peaks to the sheltering o alleys. ai Lest you suspect that this view of the sublime was limited to timid Euros' cans who lacked the American know-how for feeling at home in the wil-o erness, remember Henry David Thoreau's 1846 climb of Mount Katahdin, i Maine. Although Thoreau is regarded by many today as one of the great umerican celeb rators of wilderness, his emotions about Katahdin were no rss ambivalent than Wordsworth's about the Alps. It ^ hi: was vast, Titanic, and such as man never inhabits. Same part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of ribs as he ascends. He is more lone than you can imagine. . . . Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and -t—i pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. She does not smile on him as in the « plains. She seems to say sternly, why came ye here before your time? Thii 4< ground is not prepared for you, Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? I y* have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks § for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly The Trouble with Wilderness / 75 drive thee hence to where I am kind. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother?'5 This is surely not the way a modern backpacker or nature lover would describe Maine's most famous mountain, but that is because Thoreau's description owes as much to Wordsworth and other romantic contemporaries as to the rocks and clouds of Katahdin itself. His words took the physical mountain on which he stood and transmuted it into an icon of the sublime: a symbol of God's presence on earth. The power and the glory of that icon, were such that only a prophet might gaze on it for long. In effect, romantics like Thoreau joined Moses and the children of Israel in Exodus when "they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud."16 But even as it came to embody the awesome power of the sublime, wilderness was also being tamed—not just by those who were building settlements in its midst but also by those who most celebrated its inhuman beauty. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the terrible awe that Wordsworth and Thoreau regarded as the appropriately pious stance to adopt in the presence of their mountaintop God was giving way to a much more comfortable, almost sentimental demeanor. As more and more tourists sought out the wilderness as a spectacle to be looked at and enjoyed for its great beauty, the sublime in effect became domesticated. The wilderness was still sacred, hut the religious sentiments it evoked were more those of a pleasant parish church than those of a grand cathedral or a harsh desert retreat. The writer who best captures this late romantic sense of a domesticated sublime is undoubtedly John Muir, whose descriptions of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada reflect none of the anxiety or terror one finds in earlier writers. Here he is, for instance, sketching on North Dome in Yosemite Valley: No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future. These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God's beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be. Drinking this champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breathing the living air, and every movement of limbs is pleasure, while the body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one's flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure glow not explainable. The emotions Muir describes in Yosemite could hardly be more different from Thoreau's on Katahdin or Wordsworth's on the Simplon Pass. Yet all three men are participating in the same cultural tradition and contributing to the same myth: the mountain as cathedral. The three may differ in the way they choose to express their piety—Wordsworth favoring an awe-filled bewilderment, Thoreau a stern loneliness, Muir a welcome ecstasy—but they agree completely about the church in which they prefer to worship. P-. co o cd co o (n co 76 / UNCOMMON GROUND Muir's closing words on North Dome diverge from his older contemporaries only in mood, not in their ultimate content; Perched like a fly on this Yosernite dome, 1 gaze and sketch and bask, oftentimes settling down into dumb admiration without definite hope of ever learning much, yet -with the longing, unresting effort that lies at the door of hope, humbly prostrate before the vast display of God's power, and eager to offer -self-denial and renunciation -with eternal toil to leam any lesson in the divine manuscript.17 Muir's "divine manuscript" and Wordsworth's "Characters of the great Apocalypse" were in fact pages from the same holy book. The sublime wilderness had ceased to be a place of satanic temptation and become instead a sacred temple, much as it continues to be for those who love it today. But the romantic sublime was not the only cultural movement that helped transform wilderness into a sacred American icon during the nineteenth century. No less important was the powerful romantic attraction of primitiv-ism, dating back at least to Rousseau-—the belief that die best antidote to the ills of an overly refined and civilized modern -world was a return to simpler, more primitive living. In the United States, this was embodied most strikingly in the national myth of the frontier. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893 the classic academic statement of this myth, but it had been part of American cultural traditions for well over a century. As Turner described the process, easterners and European immigrants, in moving to the wild unsettled lands of the frontier, shed the trappings of civilization, rediscovered their primitive racial energies, reinvented direct democratic institutions, and thereby reinfused themselves with a vigor, an independence, and a creativity that were the source of American democracy and national character. Seen in this way, wild country became a place not o just of religious redemption but of national renewal, the quintessential loca-q) tion for experiencing what it meant to be an American. ^ One of Turner's most provocative claims was that by the 1890s the fron-° tier was passing away. Never again would "such gifts of free land offer themselves" to the American people. "The frontier has gone," he declared, "and with its going has closed the first period of American history."1* Built into the frontier myth from its very beginning was the notion that this crucible of American identity was temporary and would pass away. Those who id have celebrated the frontier have almost always looked backward as they did ^;o, mourning an older, simpler, truer world that is about to disappear forever. That world and all of its attractions, Turner said, depended on free ^ and—on wilderness. Thus, in the myth of the vanishing frontier lay the o seeds of wilderness preservation in the United States, for if wild land bad ^ >een so crucial in the making of the nation, then surely one must save its o ast remnants as monuments to the American past—and as an insurance pol-g cy to protect its future. It is no accident that the movement to set aside The Trouble -with Wilderness i 77 national parks and wilderness areas began to gain real momentum at precisely the time that laments about the passing frontier reached their peak. To protect wilderness was in a very real sense to protect the nation's most sacred myth of origin. Among the core elements of the frontier myth was the powerful sense among certain groups of Americans that wilderness was the last bastion of rugged individualism. Turner tended to stress communitarian themes when writing frontier history, asserting that Americans in primitive conditions had been forced to band together with their neighbors to form communities and democratic institutions. For other writers, however, frontier democracy for communities was less compelling than frontier freedom for individuals." By fleeing to the outer margins of settled land and society—so the story ran—an individual could escape the confining strictures of civilized life. The mood among writers who celebrated frontier individualism was almost always nostalgic; they lamented not just a lost way of life but the passing of the heroic men who had embodied that life. Thus Owen Wister in the introduction to his classic 1902 novel The Virginian could write of "a vanished world" in which "the horseman, the cow-puncher, the last romantic figure upon our soil" rode only "in his historic yesterday" and would "never come again." For Wister, the cowboy was a man who gave his word and kept it {"Wall Street would have found him behind the times"}, who did not talk lewdly to women {"Newport would have thought him old-fashioned"), who worked and played hard, and whose "ungovemed hours did not unman him."20 Theodore Roosevelt wrote with much the same nostalgic fervor about the "fine, manly qualities" of the "wild rough-rider of the plains." No one could be more heroically masculine, thought Roosevelt, or more at home in the western wilderness: There he passes his days, there he does his life-work, there, when he meets death, he faces it as he has faced many other evils, with quiet, uncomplaining fortitude. Brave, hospitable, hardy, and. adventurous, he is the grim pioneer of our race; he prepares the way for the civilization from before whose face he must himself disappear. Hard and dangerous though his Existence is, it has yet a wild attraction that strongly draws to it his bold, free spirit.21 This nostalgia for a passing frontier way of life inevitably implied ambivalence, if not downright hostility, toward modernity and ail that it represented. If one saw the wild lands of the frontier as freer, truer, and more natural than other, more modern places, then one was also inclined to see the cities and factories of urban-industrial civilization as confining, false, and artificial, Owen Wister looked at the post-frontier "transition™ that had followed "the horseman of the plains," and did not like what he saw: "a shapeless state, a condition of men and manners as unlovely as is that moment in the year when winter is gone and spring not come, and the face of Nature is ugly."'22 In the eyes of writers who shared Wister's distaste for 78 / UNCOMMON GROUND modernity, civilization contaminated its inhabitants and absorbed them into the faceless, collective, contemptible life of the crowd. For all of its troubles and dangers, and despite the fact that it must pass away, the frontier had been a better place. If civilization was to be redeemed, it would be by men like the Virginian who could retain their frontier virtues even as they made tbe transition to post-frontier life. The mythic frontier individualist was almost always masculine in gender: here, in the wilderness, a mart could be a real man, the rugged individual he was meant to be before civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity. Wister's contemptuous remarks about Wall Street and Newport suggest what he and many others of his generation believed—that the comforts and seductions of civilized life were especially insidious for men, who all too easily became emasculated by the femininizing tendencies of civilization. More often than not, men who felt this way came, like Wister and Roosevelt, from elite class backgrounds. The curious result was that frontier nostalgia became an important vehicle for expressing a peculiarly bourgeois form of antimodernism. The very men who most benefited from urban-industrial capitalism were among those who believed they must escape its debilitating effects. If the frontier was passing, then men who had the means to do so should preserve for themselves some remnant of its wild landscape so that they might enjoy the regeneration and renewal that came from sleeping under the stars, participating in blood sports, and living off the land. The frontier might be gone, but the frontier experience could still be had if only wilderness were preserved. Thus the decades following the Civil War saw more and more of the £ nation's wealthiest citizens seeking out wilderness for themselves. The elite passion for -wild land took many forms: enormous estates in the Adiron-£ dacks and elsewhere (disingenuously called "camps" despite their many ser-& vants and amenities), cattle ranches for would-be rough riders on the Great % Plains, guided big-game hunting trips in the Rockies, and luxurious resort a hotels wherever railroads pushed their way into sublime landscapes. Wilder-"£ness suddenly emerged as the landscape of choice for elite tourists, who y brought with them strikingly urban ideas of the countryside through which hey traveled. For them, wild land was not a site for productive labor and lot a permanent home; rather, it was a place of recreation. One went to the vilderness not as a producer but as a consumer, hiring guides and other >ackcountry residents who could serve as romantic surrogates for the rough giders and hunters of the frontier if one was willing to overlook their new ^ tatus as employees and servants of the rich. In just this way, wilderness came to embody the national frontier myth, i—i anding for the wild freedom of America's past and seeming to represent a o ighly attractive natural alternative to the ugly artificiality of modern civil i-i ttion. The irony, of course, was that in the process wilderness came to o fleet the very civilization its devotees sought to escape. Ever since the nine- < ID The Trouble with Wilderness / 79 teenth century, celebrating wilderness has been an activity mainly for well-to-do city folks. Country people generally know far too much about working the land to regard wwworked land as their ideal. In contrast, elite urban tourists and wealthy sportsmen projected their leisure-time frontier fantasies outo the American landscape and so created wilderness in their own image. There were other ironies as well. The movement to set aside national parks and wilderness areas followed hard on the heels of the final Indian wars, in which the prior human inhabitants of these areas were rounded up and moved onto reservations. The myth of the wilderness as "virgin," uninhabited land had always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once called that land home. Now they were forced to move elsewhere, with the result that tourists could safely enjoy the illusion that they were seeing their nation in its pristine, original state, in the new morning of God's own creation.21 Among the things that most marked the new national parks as reflecting a post-frontier consciousness was the relative absence of human violence within their boundaries. The actual frontier had often been a place of conflict, in which invaders and invaded fought for control of land and resources. Once set aside within the fixed and carefully policed boundaries of the modern bureaucratic state, the wilderness lost its savage image and became safe: a place more of reverie than of revulsion or fear. Meanwhile, its original inhabitants were kept out by dint of force, their earlier uses of the land redefined as inappropriate or even illegal. To this day, for instance, the Blackfeet continue to be accused of "poaching" on the lands of Glacier National Park that originally belonged to them and that were ceded by treaty only with the proviso that they be permitted to hunt there.34 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. To return to my opening argument: there is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny. Indeed, one of the most striking proofs of the cultural invention of wilderness is its thoroughgoing erasure of the history from which it sprang. In virtually all of its manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from history. Seen as the original garden, it is a place outside of time, from which human beings had to be ejected before the fallen world of history could properly begin. Seen as the frontier, it is a savage world at the dawn of civilization, whose transformation represents the very beginning of the national historical epic. Seen as the bold landscape of frontier heroism, it is the place of youth and childhood, into which men escape by abandoning their pasts and entering a world of freedom where the constraints of civilization fade into memory. Seen as the sacred sublime, it is the home of a God who transcends history by standing as the One who remains untouched and unchanged by rime's arrow. No matter what the CO o co CO o 03 1£j 00 1X1 80 I UNCOMMON GROUND angle from -which we regard it, wilderness offers us the illusion that we can escape the cares and troubles of the world in which our past has ensnared This escape from history is one reason why the language we use to talk about wilderness is often permeated with spiritual and religious values that ■ reflect human ideals far more than the material world of physical nature. ■ Wilderness fulfills the old romantic project of secularizing Judeo-Christian values so as to mate a new cathedral not in some petty human building but in God's own creation, Nature itself. Many environmentalists who reject traditional notions of the Godhead and who regard themselves as agnostics ■ or even atheists nonetheless express feelings tantamount to religious awe when in the presence of wilderness—a fact that testifies to the success of the romantic project. Those who have no difficulty seeing God as the expression of our human dreams and desires nonetheless have trouble recognizing that in a secular age Nature can offer precisely the same sort of mirror. Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modem environmentalism rest. The . critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism's most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be. But the trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate j5 of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world. The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living—urban folk for whom food comes from a supermarket or a restaurant instead of a field, and for whom the wooden co houses in which they live and work apparently have no meaningful connec-■ ■ tion to the forests in which trees grow and die. Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for ^auman life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves pre-:isely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land. This, then, is the central paradox: wilderness embodies a dualistic vision n which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to 25 relieve that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in w m > c !=■ c o o I o I The T rouble with Wilderness / Si ■ nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature ■ is not. If this is so—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. To the ■ extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what ; an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like. Worse: to the extent that we live in an urban-industrial civili£ation but at the same time pretend to ourselves that our real home is in the wilderness, to just that extent 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. ■ By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness, we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit, in its flight from history, in its siren song of escape, in its reproduction of the dangerous dualism that sets human beings outside of nature—in all of these ways, wilderness poses a serious threat to responsible environmentalism at the end of the twentieth century. By now I hope it is clear that my criticism in this essay is not directed at wild nature per se, or even at efforts to se: aside large tracts of wild land, but rather at the specific habits of thinking that flow from this complex cultural construction called wilderness. It is not the things we label as wilderness that are the problem—for nonhuman nature and large tracts of the natural world do deserve protection—but rather what we ourselves mean when we use that label. Lest one doubt how pervasive these habits of thought actually are in contemporary environmentalism, let me list some of the places where wilderness serves as the ideological underpinning for environmental concerns that might otherwise seem quite remote from it. Defenders of biological diversity, for instance, although sometimes appealing to more utilitarian concerns, often point to "untouched" ecosystems as the best and richest repositories of the undiscovered species we must certainly try to protect. Although at first blush an apparently more "scientific" concept than wilderness, biological diversity in fact invokes many of the same sacred values, which is why organizations like the Nature Conservancy have been so quick to employ it as an alternative to the seemingly mazier and more problematic concept of wilderness. 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 CO o cd co o cq LD CO -:—I 82 / UNCOMMON GROUND wilderness is potentially in direct conflict with the very thing it encourages us to protect.26 The most striking instances of this have revolved around "endangered species," which serve as vulnerable symbols of biological diversity while at the same time standing as surrogates for wilderness itself. The terms of the Endangered Species Acr in the United States have often meant that those hoping to defend pristine wilderness have had to rely on a single endangered species like the spotted owl to gain legal standing for their case—thereby making the full power of sacred land inhere in a single numinous organism whose habitat then becomes the object of intense debate about appropriate management and use.v The ease with which anti-environmental forces like the wise-use movement have attacked such single-species preservation efforts suggests the vulnerability of strategies tike these. Perhaps partly because our own conflicts over such places and organisms have become so messy, the convergence of wilderness values with concerns about biological diversity and endangered species has helped produce a deep fascination for remote ecosystems, where it is easier to imagine that nature might somehow be "left alone" to flourish by its own pristine devices. The classic example is the tropical rain forest, which since the 1970s has become the most powerful modern icon of Unfällen, sacred land—a veritable Garden of Eden—for many Americans and Europeans. And yet protecting the rain forest in the eyes of First World environmentalists all too often means protecting it from the people who live there. Those who seek to preserve such "wilderness" from the activities of native peoples run the risk of reproducing I> the same tragedy—being forceably removed from art ancient home—that m befell American Indians. Third World countries face massive environmental Qi problems and deep social conflicts, but these are not likely to be solved by ■£i cultural myth that encourages us to "preserve" peopleless landscapes that & tave not existed in such places for millennia. At its worst, as environmental-g sts are beginning to realize, exporting American notions of wilderness in his way can become an unthinking and self-defeating form of cultural impe- q Perhaps the most suggestive example of the way that wilderness thinking an underpin other environmental concerns has emerged in the recent debate bout "global change." In 1989 the journalist Bill McKibben published a ook emitled The End of Nature, in which he argued that the prospect of obal climate change as a result of unintentional human manipulation of the co mosphere means that nature as we once knew it no longer exists.39 ^'hereas earlier generations inhabited a natural world that remained more ■ less unaffected by their actions, our own generation is uniquely different. ^ e and our children will henceforth live in a biosphere completely altered g' our own activity, a planet in which the human and the natural can no ^ nger be distinguished, because the one has overwhelmed the other. In cKibben's view, nature has died, and we are responsible for killing it. ^ he planer he declares, "is utterly different now. "30 The Troable with Wilderness / 83 But such a perspective is possible only if we accept the wilderness premise that nature, to be natural, must also be pristine—remote from humanity and untouched by our common past. In fact, everything we know about environmental history suggests that people have been manipulating the natural world on various scales for as long as we have a record of their passing. Moreover, we have unassailable evidence that many of the environmental changes we now face also occurred quite apart from human intervention at one time or another in the earth's past.31 The point is not that our currenE problems are trivial, or that our devastating effects on the earth's ecosystems should be accepted as inevitable or "natural." It is rather that we seem unlikely to make much progress in solving these problems if we hold up to ourselves as the mirror of nature a wilderness we ourselves cannot inhabit. To do so is merely to take to a logical extreme the paradox that was built into wilderness from the beginning: if nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves. The absurdity of this proposition flows from the underlying dualism it expresses. Not only does it ascribe greater power to humanity than we in fact possess—physical and biological nature will surely survive in some form or another long after we ourselves have gone the way of all flesh—but in the end it offers us little more than a self-defeating counsel of despair. The tautology gives us no way out: if wild nature is the only thing worth saving, and if our mere presence destroys it, then the sole solution to our own. unnaturalness, the only way to protect sacred wilderness from profane humanity, would seem to be suicide. It is not a proposition that seems likely to produce very positive or practical results. And yet radical environmentalists and deep ecologists all too frequently come close to accepting this premise as a first principle. When they express, for instance, the popular notion that our environmental problems began with the invention of agriculture, 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. Earth First! founder Dave Foreman captures the familiar parable succinctly when he writes, Before agriculture was mid wired lei the Middle East, humans were in the wilderness. We had no concept of "wilderness" because everything was wilderness and isere a part of it. But with irrigation ditches, crop surpluses, and permanent villages, we became apart from the natural world. . . . Between the wilderness that created us and the civilization created by us grew an ever-widening rift.32 In this view the farm becomes the first and most important battlefield in the long war against wild nature, and all else follows in its wake. 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 earth is to follow the hunter-gatherers back into a wilderness Eden and abandon virtually everything that civiliza- 84 / UNCOMMON GROUND tion has given us. It may indeed turn out that civilization will end in ecologies cal collapse or nuclear disaster, whereupon one might expect to find any °- human survivors returning to a way of life closer to that celebrated by Pore-man and his followers. For most of us, though, such a debacle would be cause for regret, a sign that humanity had failed to fulfill its own promise co md failed to honor its own highest values—including those of the deep ecol- o In offering wilderness as the ultimate hunter-gatheTer alternative to civilian ;ation, Foreman reproduces an extreme but still easily recognizable version the myth of frontier primitivism. When he writes of his fellow Earth rimers that "we believe we must return to being animal, to glorying in our ;weat, hormones, tears, and blood" and that "we struggle against the mod-;rn compulsion to become dull, passionless androids,'' he is following in he footsteps of Owen Wister.35 Although his arguments give primacy to lefending biodiversity and the autonomy of wild nature, his prose becomes nost passionate when he speaks of preserving "the wilderness experience." -lis own ideal "Big Outside" bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the rontier myth: wide open spaces and virgin land with no trails, no signs, no acilities, no maps, no guides, no rescues, no modern equipment. Tellingly, : is a land where hardy travelers can support themselves by hunting with primitive weapons (bow and arrow, atlatl, knife, sharp rock)."M Foreman laims that "the primary value of wilderness is not as a proving ground for oung Huck Finns and Annie Oakleys," but his heart is with Huck and ^■oinie all the same. He admits that "preserving a quality wilderness experi-~nce for the human visitor, letting her or him flex Paleolithic muscles or ^ ?ek visions, remains a tremendously important secondary purpose. "3S J ust > > does Teddy Roosevelt's rough rider live on in the greener garb of a new £. Je & i*-- c However much one may be attracted to such a vision, it entails problem-° ic consequences. For one, it makes wilderness the locus for an epic strug-— e between malign civilization and benign nature, compared with which all Í5 Jter social, political, and moral concerns seem trivial. Foreman writes, The preservation of wildness and native diversity is the most important sue. Issues directly affecting only humans pale in comparison."'56 Presum->ly so do any environmental problems whose victims are mainly people, r such problems usually surface in landscapes that have already "fallen" id are no longer wild. This would seem to exclude from the radical envi-nmentalist agenda problems of occupational health and safety in industrial (2 wrings, problems of toxic waste exposure on "unnatural" urban and ricultural sites, problems of poor children poisoned by lead exposure in ^ e inner city, problems of famine and poverty and human suffering in the g verpopulated" places of the earch—problems, in short, of environmental 4 stice. If we set too high a stock on wilderness, too many other comers of ° e earth become less than natural and too many other people become less f I' The Trouble vrith Wilderness I 85 than human, thereby giving us permission not to care much about their suffering or their fate. It is no accident that these supposedly inconsequential environmental problems affect mainly poor people, for the long affiliation between wilderness and wealth means that the only poor people who count when wilderness is the issue are hunter-gatherers, who presumably do not consider themselves to be poor in the first place. The dualism at the heart of wilderness encourages its advocates to conceive of its protection as a crude conflict between the "human" and the "nonhuman"—or, more often, between those who value the nonhuman and those who do not. This in turn tempts one to ignore crucial differences among humans and the complex cultural and historical reasons why different peoples may feel very differently about the meaning of wilderness. "Why, for instance, is the "wilderness experience" so often conceived as a form of recreation best enjoyed by those whose class privileges give them the time and resources to leave their jobs behind and "get away from it all"? Why does the protection of wilderness so often seem to pit urban recre-ationists against rural people who actually earn their Jiving from the land (excepting those who sell goods and services to the tourists themselves)? Why in the debates about pristine natural areas are "primitive"* peoples idealized, even sentimentalized, until the moment they do something unprimi-tive, modem, and unnatural, and thereby fall from environmental grace? What are the consequences of a wilderness ideology that devalues productive labor and the very concrete knowledge that comes from working the land with one's own hands?37 All of these questions imply conflicts among different groups of people, conflicts that are obscured behind the deceptive clarity of "human" vs. "nonhuman." If in answering these knotty questions we resort to so simplistic an opposition, we are almost certain to ignore the very subtleties and complexities we need to understand. But the most troubling cultural baggage that accompanies the celebration of wilderness has less to do with remote rain forests and peoples than with the ways we think about ourselves—we American environmentalists who quite rightly worry about the future of the earth and the threats we pose to the natural world. Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home. Most of our most serious environmental problems start tight here, at home, and if we are to solve those problems, we need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it. The wilderness dualism tends to cast any use as ah-use, and thereby denies us a middle ground in which responsible use and non-use might attain some kind of balanced, sustainable relationship. My own belief is that only by exploring this middle ground will we learn ways of imagining a better world for all of us: humans and nonhumans, rich people and poor, women and men, First Woriders and Third Worlders, white folks and people of 86 / UNCOMMON GROUND color, consumers and producers—a world better for humanity in all of its o diversity and for all the rest of nature too. The middle ground is where we ■ actually live. It is where we—all of us, in our different places and ways— ^ make our homes. That is why, when I think of the times 1 myself have come closest to co experiencing what I might call the sacred in nature, 1 often find myself en remembering wild places much closer to home. I think, for instance, of a o imall pond near my house where water bubbles up from limestone springs ld ;o feed a series of pools that rarely freeze in winter and so play home to waterfowl that stay here for the protective warmth even on the coldest of winter days, gliding silently through steaming mists as the snow falls from ;ray February skies. I think of a November evening long ago when I found nyself on a Wisconsin hilltop in rain and dense fog, only to have the setting un break through the clouds to cast an otherwordly golden light on the nisty farms and woodlands below, a scene so unexpected and joyous that I ingered past dusk so as not to miss any part of the gift that had come my yay. And 1 think perhaps most especially of the blown-out, bankrupt farm n the sand country of central Wisconsin where Aldo Leopold and his family tied one of the first American experiments in ecological restoration, turning avaged and infertile soil into carefully tended ground where the human and he nonhuman could exist side by side in relative harmony. What I celebrate bout such places is not just their wiJdness, though that certainly is among leir most important qualities; what I celebrate even more is that they 3;mind us of the wildness in our own backyards, of the nature that is all round us if only we have eyes to see it. ij. Indeed, my principal objection to wilderness is that it may teach us to be >ismissive or even contemptuous of such humble places and experiences. c Without our quite realizing it, wilderness tends to privilege some parts of _________l______ - r i -• ■ <■ - ... - - c atuie at the expense of others. Most of us, I suspect, still follow the con-° ;ntions of the romantic sublime in finding the mountaintop more glorious ® ian the plains, the ancient forest nobler than the grasslands, the mighty is inyon more inspiring than the humble marsh. Even John Muir, in arguing ° ;ainst those who sought to dam his beloved Hetch Hetchy valley in the erra Nevada, argued for alternative dam sites in the gentler valleys of the oihills—a preference that had nothing to do with nature and everything ith the cultural traditions of the sublime?* Just as problematically, our jntier traditions have encouraged Americans to define "true" wilderness if requiring very large tracts of roadless land—what Dave Foreman calls to The Big Outside." Leaving aside the legitimate empirical question in conization biology of how large a tract of land must be before a given species n reproduce on it, the emphasis on big wilderness reflects a romantic fron-... 1__.i___---i-----»- - ii * ..... o i - J-----O ----— ...UW H tUUHUUIli II Ull- r bebet that one hasn't really gotten away from civilization unless one can for days at a time without encountering another human being. By teach-^ 3 us to fetishize sublime places and wide open country, these peculiarly < nerican ways of thinking about wilderness encourage us to adopt too high The Trouble with Wilderness 1 87 a standard for what counts as "natural." If it isn't hundreds of square miles big, if it doesn't give us God's-eye views or grand vistas, if it doesn't permit us the illusion that we are alone on the planet, then it really isn't natural. It's too small, too plain, or too crowded to he authentically wild. In critiquing wilderness as I have done in this essay, I'm forced to confront my own deep ambivalence about its meaning for modem environmen-talism. On the one hand, one of my own most important environmental ethics is that people should always to be conscious that they are part of the natural world, inextricably tied to the ecological systems that sustain their lives. 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, 1 also think it 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. The autonomy of nonhuman nature seems to me an indispensable corrective to human arrogance. 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. To the extent that wilderness has served as an important vehicle for articulating deep moral values regarding our obligations and responsibilities to the nonhuman world, I would not want to jettison the contributions it has made to our culture's ways of thinking about nature. 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 most ask is what it can tell us about home, the place where we actually live. How can we take the positive values we associate with wilderness and bring them closer to home? 1 think the answer to this question will come by broadening our sense of the otherness that wilderness seeks to define and protect. In reminding us of the world we did not make, wilderness can teach profound feelings of humility and respect as we confront our fellow beings and the earth itself; Feelings like these argue for the importance of self-awareness and self-criticism as we exercise our own ability to transform the world around us, helping us set responsible limits to human mastery—which without such limits too easily becomes human hubris. Wilderness is the place where, symbolically at least, we try to withhold our power to dominate. Wallace Stegner once wrote of the special human mark, the special record of human passage, that distinguishes man from all other species. It is rare enough among men, impossible to any other form of life. It is simply the deliberate and chosen refusal to make any marks at all. . .. We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.3* 88 I UNCOMMON GROUND The myth of wilderness, which Stegner knowingly reproduces in these ^ remarks, is that we can somehow leave nature untouched by our passage. ^ By now it should be clear that this for the most part is an illusion. But Stegner's deeper message then becomes all the more compelling. If living in history means that we cannot help leaving marks on a fallen world, then the g Ji lemma we face is to decide what kinds of marks we wish to leave. It is just lere that our cultural traditions of wilderness remain so important. In the ° >roadest sense, wilderness teaches us to ask whether the Other must always g jend ro our will, and, if nor, under what circumstances it should be allowed 0 flourish withour our intervention. This is surely a question worth asking .bout everything we do, and not just about the natural world. When we visit a wilderness area, we find ourselves surrounded by plants nd animals and physical landscapes whose otherness compels our attention, n forcing us to acknowledge that they are not of our making, that they have ttle or no need of our continued existence, they recall for us a creation far reater than our own. In the wilderness, we need no reminder that a tree as its own reasons for being, quite apart from us. The same is less true in re gardens we plant and tend ourselves: there it is far easier to forget the therness of the tree/0 Indeed, one could almost measure wilderness by the ttenr to which our recognition of its otherness requires a conscious, willed :t on our part. The romantic legacy means that wilderness is more a state f mind than a fact of nature, and the state of mind that today most defines ilderness is wonder. The striking power of the wild is that wonder in the ^ce of it requires no act of will, but forces itself upon us—as an expression ^ the nonhuman world experienced through the lens of our cultural his-^ ry—as proof that ours is not the only presence in the universe. > Wilderness gets us into trouble only if we imagine that this experience of P Dnder and otherness is limited to the remote corners of the planet, or that c somehow depends on pristine landscapes we ourselves do not inhabit. ° othing could be more misleading. The tree in the garden is in reality no ^ ;s other, no less worthy of our wonder and respect, than the tree in an «1 cient forest that has never known an ax or a saw—even though the tree in ; forest reflects a more intricate web of ecological relationships. The tree the garden could easily have sprung from the same seed as the tree in the "est, and we can claim only its location and perhaps its form as our own. 'th trees stand apart from us; both share our common world. The special 0 wer of the tree in the wilderness is to remind us of this fact. It can teach f? to recognize the wildness we did not see in the tree we planted in our s m backyard. By seeing the otherness in that which is most unfamiliar, we 1 learn to see it too in that which at first seemed merely ordinary. If *—i derness can do this—if it can help us perceive and respect a nature we had c c o o Lfl o i o i s5 •< "D Constructing? Nature: Tne Legfacy oí Frederick Law Olmsted Anne Whiston Spirn Frederick law olmsted (1822-1903) left a legacy of wonderful places, from Central Park to Boston's "Emerald Necklace," from Niagara Fails to Yosemite. Few people now recognize these as built landscapes. Most are startled to learn that New York's Central Park was constructed, that even the Ramble is an 'artful wilderness," and that Boston's Fens and Riverway were molded out of polluted mudflats, planted to grow into tidal marsh and floodplain forest. Even those few who recognize Central Park and the Fens as constructions are surprised at how extensively the experiences of Niagara Falls and Yosemite are shaped by design, for these have come to stand as monuments of nature untouched by human artifice.1 Olmsted's contemporaries certainly recognized that landscapes like Centra] Park and the Fens were designed and built. After all, they were familiar with the previous appearances of those sites and the lengthy and ambitious process of transformation. However, this popular realization soon faded. Olmsted was so skillful at concealing the artifice that both the projects he had so brill iandy constructed and the profession he had worked so hard to establish became largely invisible. Today the works of the profession of landscape architecture are often not "seen,™ not understood as having been designed and deliberately constructed, even when the landscape has been radically reshaped. Many landmarks of landscape architecture are assumed to be works of nature or felicitous, serendipitous products of culture. This blindness prevents their appreciation as artful answers to knotty questions of conflicting environmental values and compering purposes. 91