What William Cronon lacked when he wrote The Trouble With Wilderness was an interdisciplinary analysis of his astute insights that incorporated the socioeconomic, theological and psychological impacts of his concepts. His essay reflected an emotional response to history and lacked a scientific basis that instead conflated the perceived loss of unnatural wilderness with the religiously-rooted expulsion from the Garden of Eden he pines about early in his essay.
In discussing the post-civil war era, Cronon implies that the relative collective control of capital itself became sufficient that most Americans collectively outgrew the “wilderness” as it became a commodity offered by the wealthy elites. He implies this was an anthropogenic offense to nature in discussing the rejection of citizens to modern life when he writes on their fleeing the, “ugly artificiality of modern civilization.” (Cronon para. 27). Contrasting his point, this formative event lead to pursuing alternative inspirations that’s evidenced by the expansion of the sciences with electricity becoming ubiquitous only a few decades later. He doesn’t discuss rationality to his opinion, and instead merely asserts it to be ironic that the ownership of this land by a wealthy elite suggested immoral action using circular logic.
His point that, “…there is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear…” is both his strongest and most misunderstood point (Cronon para. 29). This is because when he referred to its source of power being due to, “the erasure of the history,” he neglected that this opportunity cost of Indigenous Americans created a socioeconomic power vacuum which was counter-balanced by the collective power-law distributed wealth and citizenry that resided in cities. Cronon presents a false dilemma here, because the history was not merely erased, but also included a future that never happened.
His final point of, “wilderness offers us the illusion that we can escape the cares and troubles of the world in which our past has ensnared us,” is the root of his argument (Cronon para. 29). He asserts that the past is more valuable than the present, and implies that the wilderness and its history are more important than the Earth itself. Pining for “paradise lost” has consistently been the source of the divine inspiration that drove a civilization to pursue the unknown. This has historically has been overwhelmed by folks being the best imagined iteration of a human being one could conceivably be.
Works Cited
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, NY, 1995, pp. 69–90, https://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.