Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 3:33 am Post subject: The Sacred Wilderness
Pages 279-290,* William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," from Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon (1995)
Optional additional reading: pp.291-297 (flip backwards...): "Touch the Magic" by Susan G. Davis
Starter question: What do we hope to know/learn about ourselves by knowing wilderness? Does that learning still have a place in our world today? Did it ever? What relationship does the concept of "wilderness" have with the concept of "history"? Can they exist together in the same space and time?
I’ve only read through p.283 right now, but I plan on finishing it and probably writing more later.
I major theme I pulled from this reading so far was the sanctity of the wilderness. Humans idolize nature, and put it up on a pedestal. According to Cronon and the other writers he referenced, the wilderness holds, or maybe even is a divine presence, one that is separate and greater than humans. Everything about fearing God and stepping into the great sanctuary of wilderness where “one could not help feeling insignificant and being reminded of one’s own mortality” made me uncomfortable, because it was all based on Christianity and monotheistic beliefs. Pairing this religious idea with human experience of nature seems limiting. What am I supposed to do, as one who is neither a Christian nor a monotheist? How am I supposed to approach the wilderness? Is there a way Cronon could have presented the greatness and majesty of the wilderness without the religious allusions?
Unlike Naomi, I thought Cronon was getting at something very universal about wilderness. Whether or not we believe in god wilderness still has this overwhelming effect on us. To see such massive, sometimes hostile, expanses of land changes our perspective of scale, we are dwarved by the land. This experience is often considered divine by many who believe in god. The scale and grandeur of what they see can only be explained as god. It's interesting looking at the relationship between history and wilderness. Part of what i tihnk makes wilderness so appealing is that along with dwarfing humans in a physical sense, it also dwarves them in a sense of time. Wilderness is devoid of history as we know it. Something about that timelessness is fascinating and some would even say divine.
I was interested as well by the tie in between religion and nature. I have to come to expect such a comparison between religion and the beauty of nature as people tend to attribute good things to god. However they seemed to do it to a greater extent when talking about nature.
"God might, of course, choose to show Himself anywhere, He would most often be found in those vast, powerful landscapes where one could not help feeling insignificant and being reminded of one’s own mortality. Where were these sublime places? The eighteenth century catalog of their locations feels very familiar, for we still see and value landscapes as it taught us to do. God was on the mountaintop, in the chasm, in the waterfall, in the thundercloud, in the rainbow, in the sunset."
I wonder what it is that is inherent about nature to god. Perhaps people feel closest to him in nature. However one of the other ideas in the reading would say that people simply tie god-goodness in with nature because we are not exposed to enough nature. How connotations of nature have changed surprised me. Wilderness used to be seen as hostile and scary where as now since we don't get enough of it, it is a treat. I know the Greek gods used to live in palaces and have luxuries of life was the concept of god was once tied in directly with with human luxuries? Is god a representation of what people want? What does god represent now?
i agree with both naomi and paul how nature is put on a pesdestal and people view wilderness as divine. I find it interesting that we read about wilderness going from being more of a place of terror to more sacred and divine, and yet now people still tend to destroy it. I know that this isnt how everyone views nature and wilderness, but i still think that people would come across some of these pieces of writing and think about it being sacred and whatnot. i would also assume that now that we dont have as much that people would step back and change that or see if nature would change its course on its own.
going off of what peter was saying about the connection between God and nature, that reminded me of how, for example, in Africa some people worship specific things that are a part of nature. it is
At first, I found the way Cronon wrote to be almost annoying. The first couple pages came off as almost arrogant to me. As I read on, his points were beginning to make more and more sense to me until I realized that I was offended to boot because I share the same romanticized view of wilderness with the people he was criticizing. He articulated his point thusly: "The ideology of 'wilderness' is potentially in direct conflict with the very thing it encourages us to protect.
The reading made me understand that true preservation of nature isn't fencing off the pretty parts and acting like humans have nothing to do with them, but changing our lives and actions as humans to allow land outside of civilization to better sustain itself and not even need to be developed.
Before reading this, it had never occurred to me to consider what wilderness represents and how we view it. I have always understood "the wild" to represent confusion and disorder and to sometimes have a negative connotation, but i also have understood that sometimes it can be exotic and represent something better than society, with a positive connotation. I disagree with Cronon that it changed from something negative to positive. I feel like it was probably, in the past, mainly seen in a negative light but that not everyone saw it that way. And that at one point there was a change that as a culture wilderness became something good, wonderful even. But, again not always. I think it has always been a mix and maybe a slight shift of which was most popular.
Going into the reading, I thought that today's discussion was a good precursor. Cronon states, "The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems," which compares to how we talked about our seminar discussion today and how the more historians know, sometimes, the less sure they are of something. (In terms of situations where something becomes more complicated and intricate as opposed to furthering their original conclusions about something in history).
Like Stefan, I didn't like this reading at first. I had a hard time following Cronnon in the first few pages. I thought his writing was very confusing and I couldn't really understand what he was saying with his points like about nature being unnatural, ect. But later on, I got a better understanding of what he was trying to say. I found it interesting that the "wilderness" was so seemingly "worthless" to people back then, before such beauty in nature was as hard to come by as it is today. I think that maybe they had just been so used to the wilderness, that it had been a natural occurrence for them, and therefor, they didn't see it as anything unusual or out of the ordinary. If you're living in nature and everything is a beautiful expanse of land, I assume that you would become dulled of nature's vibrance from constant exposure. And really, if it doesn't even strike you as pretty, what use would the wilderness have been to people who were trying to establish themselves into towns and cities when they needed to focus on more important things- like starting from the ground up. Which means earning money, getting food on the table for your family, sheltering your family from the harshness of nature, and so on.
Once wilderness became an oddity, I think people realized more what they had had, and that could have been around when people started sticking up for the environment and trying to conserve it.
I was also going to say something about the religious aspect with nature, but I think Peter pretty much got it down- how they seemed so much more convinced of God's constant presence in nature than compared with other aspects of life (not that they didn't think that God was essentially everywhere, because they did. It just seemed like they were more adamant about his involvement in nature).
I also wondered about the tie between god and nature. I speculate that the connection has to do with the fact that god supposedly created everything and defined nature as it is. I assume people get so stuck up about changing nature because it would, in a way, offend god. This god of theirs had a master plan and an initial belief about what the world should be like. Tainting the sublimity that is nature would blaspheme this well-designed map of the omniscient god. I could also imagine that the religiously fanatic couldn’t fathom the idea of anything but god creating such beauty in the world.
I found myself rolling my eyes whenever Cronon went into great detail about the beautiful environmental settings he loved. I think the inherent beauty of wilderness should be last on the list of reasons to preserve the environment. Sure, Californian Redwoods are cool to look at, but do they serve of any vital importance to anything? Should we only protect them because they are the tallest trees in the world if that’s all we get from them? (I’m sure they do serve many purposes like being homes to birds or giving food or whatever. Might not have been a good example, but hopefully you catch my drift).
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