The Trouble With Cronon's Wilderness

In “The Trouble with Wilderness”, Cronon argues that nature is more cultural than natural; the wilderness paradigm, therefore, can only be understood through human-nature dialectic. I agree, although Cronon falls short of fully engaging with the cultural heritage of wilderness. Abbreviating the more than 200-century long development of the current nature and wilderness conception into 20 pages, Cronon is expected to have to be selective in what historical nuances to elaborate. I argue that as an environmental historian Cronon fails to contextualize his commentary appropriately while addressing his essay to the wrong audience.

Cronon’s project is to unfold the American tradition of the wilderness myth and its legacy in environmentalism. He bases his critique on the ideas of a selective few- Muir, Wordsworth, Thoreau, Turner, Roosevelt, Wister- all of whom are confined to an undeniable identity: white male elite. In another of his essays, “Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative”, Cronon asserts that whatever an environmental history’s overt purpose, “it cannot avoid a covert exercise of power: it inevitably sanctions some voices while silencing others.”¹ Cronon uses such power to divorce his wilderness concept from the very values and ideas inherent in the environmental and conservation movement. Indeed, by reading a few writers who have much to say about wilderness philosophy, Cronon has left behind advocates who have long been "going forward" to the "right nature".

Cronon suggests that environmentalists view wilderness as a place to maintain the “frontier ethic”: “In the myth of the vanishing frontier lay the seeds of wilderness preservation in the United States.”² The “frontier ethic” Cronon calls upon refers to the attitude of early European settlers who consumed natural resources of the land, and having depleted one area, moved westward to new frontiers. From its inception, the frontier ethic assumes that the earth’s resources are at the disposal of humans, conceiving of humans as masters of the land, and that the only needs to be considered are those of humans. The frontier ethic is about humans shaping nature to human desires; it values control of the land. This is the ethic that drives many industrialized societies today to support their population and economic growth on the basis of unlimited resources, or at least if what is relied upon today depletes, another avenue of resource extraction will be discovered.

In actuality, the environmental ethic is meant to counter the frontier ethic. The environmental ethic and for its devotees envisions humans as part of the natural world rather than as dominators, manipulators, or masterhead managers of it. It’s an ethic that places limits on human activities in pursuit of a healthier habitat for all of earth’s living and nonliving residents without having to sacrifice the welfare of one species for the benefit of the other.
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Cronon argues that the wilderness idea diverts environmentalists from the real world of environmental affairs. He posits that “in its reproduction of the dangerous dualism that sets human beings outside of nature… wilderness poses a serious threat to responsible environmentalism.”³ For those, like me, who “doubt how pervasive these habits of thought actually are in contemporary environmentalism”, Cronon lists some examples of where his wilderness concept “serves as the ideological underpinning for environmental concerns.”⁴ He cites the protection of biological diversity and single “endangered species” as such concerns, but his historical analysis lacks contextual relevance. Environmentalists have argued and do argue for the protection of ecosystems and ecological processes; the focus on single species as exemplified in the current Endangered Species legislation merely reflects all that was successfully legislated, not what environmentalists wanted. Its not that environmentalists haven’t argued for more holistic approaches to management, including ones that bridge the gap between the human and nonhuman, but that such proposals have and continue to be opposed by politicians, development agencies, and corporate interests. Much more about the modern wilderness concept Cronon wishes to capture- and on what the realities of our governmental management strategies are based- would be uncovered through more thorough, analytic readings of the internal debates, political considerations, and historical context surrounding these environmental issues.
And in response to Cronon’s repeated assertion that “wilderness tends to privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others”⁵, i.e. favoritism of more aesthetically pleasing landscapes, I reply that a vast continuum of areas have and are repeatedly identified as worthy of protection (the Great Plains had been argued to be protected as early as 1830). The problem, as mentioned above, has been that those in power have not permitted these kinds of places to gain protection: the scenic characteristics of the areas protected in the Park system are a consequence of political realities, not of environmentalists’ tenets or conversationalists’ agendas. I ask Cronon to heed his own advice: “At the most basic level, we judge a work bad history if it contradicts evidence we know to be accurate and true.”⁶

In the end, Cronon is searching for a “middle ground” in order to imagine “a world better for humanity in all of its diversity and for all the rest of nature too.”⁷ Back to his essay “Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative”, Cronon insists that when a history rests on the stories of white males, “no narrative centered on so singular a central character could be politically innocent. More erasures are at work here: Indians, yes, but also women, ethnic groups, underclasses, and any other communities that have been set apart from the collectivity represented by Man or Civilization. The narrative leaves little room for them.”⁸ Indeed, if Cronon had engaged with the feminine version of wilderness, researching, for example, the works of Susan Schrepfer or Judith Butler, he would have found the answer for which he was looking all along. Historically, women have created an alternative view of wilderness that both accepts and respects the human history and place in nature- in Cronon’s “pristine” wilderness, values both the biological and aesthetic qualities of natural landscapes, and (ah-ha!) seen them as a home.

My purpose of this critique is to suggest that if Cronon had engaged with the myriad voices, stories, and experiences offered by the great diversity of American citizens, he would have conceived of a wilderness paradigm that would remedy many of the ills of our current environmental legislation. Moreover, if he had called upon the legacies of nature and wilderness that African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, women, and-yes- environmentalists have endeared, Cronon could have used such a critique of wilderness to target and address the most deleterious colluders of nature: Congress.