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 all but vanishes as you squint into the amber light of the setting sun. 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. Such memories may be uniquely our own, but they are also familiar enough be to be instantly recognizable to others. 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. I celebrate with others who love wilderness the beauty and power of the things it contains. 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. 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.
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 reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires. Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. 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. 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. As Henry David Thoreau once famously declared, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” ( 1)īut is it? The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. 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.
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. For many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth. 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. In William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the The Trouble with Wilderness or, Getting Back to
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