RETHINKING WILDERNESS

Rethinking Wilderness

Rethinking Wilderness

The more one appreciates of its peculiar annals, the more one acknowledges that wilds are not rather what it seems. Far from being the one placement on loam that stands omission from humanity, it is rather profoundly a human creation in certainty, the creation of very precise human heritage at very precise instants in human history. It is not a unspoiled sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, vulnerable, but still transcendent surroundings can for not less than a little while longer be came through without the contaminating stain of civilization. Instead, it's a merchandise of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made.

Wilderness obscures its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it becomes noticeable so natural. As we view into the reflector it saves up for us, we too effortlessly envisage that what we behold is Nature when in particulars we glimpse the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires. For this source, we wrongdoing us when we presume that wilds can be the reply to our culture's cumbersome bindings with the nonhuman world, for wilds is itself no little part of the problem. (Kidner 2000)

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. 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.” (Cronon, 1995)

To allegation the unnaturalness of so natural a placement will no query show absurd or even perverse to several readers, so let me hasten to add that the nonhuman world we get concurrently in wilds is far from being only our own invention. I commemorate with other ones who love wilds the attractiveness and power of the things it contains.

The torrents of mist blast out from the cornerstone of a large waterfall in the depths of a Sierra canyon, the minute droplets chilling your face as you learn to the roar of the water and view up in the main purpose of the sky through a rainbow that hovers just out of reach. In William Cronon's words, it “hardly needs saying that nothing in physical nature can help us adjudicate among these different visions [of nature], for in all cases nature merely serves as the mirror onto which societies project the ideal reflections they wish to see.” Constructionism therefore implies a relativistic stance within which one attitude toward or interpretation of the natural world is no better or worse than any ...