Grizzly @ Adams

American Studies. With his now-classic essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon introduced the field of environmental studies to postmodernism. He did so by problematizing the seemingly straightforward concept of wilderness. To problematize a concept is to question the fundamental premises that lie beneath it and demonstrate that it’s not as simple as everyone had been used to thinking — to show, as Cronon puts it in the case of wilderness, that it “is not quite what it seems” (69).

In the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, wilderness denotes “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” “Untrammeled by man” means something like “not significantly altered by humans.” The Wilderness Act’s definition (which has the force of law) is problematic because in fact, as environmental historians have demonstrated conclusively, many of the landscapes we think of as wild have been significantly altered by humans, in particular by Native Americans, who for thousands of years had been deliberately altering the ecosystems in which they lived — by hunting animal species to extinction, by setting fires to clear out underbrush and foster the growth of certain kinds of trees, and so on.

To point out such historical facts is not exactly to deconstruct wilderness, however. Cronon comes closer to actually deconstructing wilderness when, first, he reviews just how decisively the term has been shaped by centuries of changing ideologies of nature and, second, when he analyzes the binary oppositions (human-nonhuman, artificial-natural, impure-pure, etc.) in terms of which wilderness has been defined.

Cronon argues that the deconstruction of wilderness has practical implications. He argues that environmentalism’s near-deification of wilderness has left us with a tendency to value pristine landscapes at the expense of the “impure” landscapes in which most of us actually live. (And what happens when people discover that those pristine landscapes are not really so pristine after all? Will they cease to protect them?) And, because wilderness by definition is a place where humans do not live, our idealization of wild nature makes it difficult for us to think clearly and creatively about how we should fit ourselves into the rest of nature, as inevitably we must do.

It’s fine to preserve wilderness landscapes as human-free zones, as places we visit but do not inhabit, but we still need to live our everyday lives somewhere, and the ideology of wilderness doesn’t tell us how best to do so. Wilderness ideology grounds an environmentalism for our vacations, but how are we to live the rest of the year? “Our challenge,” writes Cronon,

is to stop thinking of such things according to a set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the nonhuman, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, 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. (89)

Cronon’s essay, and the other essays collected with it in the anthology Uncommon Ground, provoked angry reactions from biologists convinced that, by deconstructing wilderness, a bunch of scientifically illiterate know-nothings in the humanities were denying the seriousness of environmental crisis and the very reality of nature itself.

A counter-anthology, Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, was put together by Soulé and his colleague Gary Lease and published as a response to the essays in Uncommon Ground. It was touted as a refutation of the postmodern position, but many of its essays turned out to be pretty postmodern themselves and could have just as easily have been included in Cronon’s volume (see, for example, Lease’s “Nature Under Fire” and David Graber’s “Resolute Biocentrism”).

One exception was Soulé’s contribution, “The Social Siege of Nature,” which claimed not only that the idea of nature as a social construct is wrong, but that it amounts to a “social assault” that justifies the exploitation of nature (137). Basically he was saying that people like Cronon (and me) were collaborators with the bad guys.

Given its thesis, you might expect Soulé’s essay to cite instances where developers justified their environmental destruction with the idea that nature is socially constructed. If you’ve read the essay, however, you’ll notice that Soulé never quite gets around to doing that. I’ll go over this essay’s many shortcomings in class; for now, it suffices to say that Soulé lost and Cronon won.

Here’s your question: What are some of the human values you’ve been taught to associate with wilderness? Can you provide examples of wilderness ideology or imagery in popular culture?