Talk of the Wilderness...

... or the idea of it

William Cronon
Photo from pbs.org

Right after fall study break, as I’m sure you all remember, we were assigned William Cronon’s essay The Trouble with the Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. I have to admit, I had a very hard time fully trying to understand Cronon’s argument and have reread and marked up this article numerous times in hopes to better comprehend his thoughts. Since I chose to answer prompt number four for the second conventional essay, I had to conquer this issue and become very comfortable discussing Cronon’s ideas. For those of you who did not spend as much time as I did with this piece, here’s a brief overview:

Wilderness?
Photo from Wikipedia

William Cronon explains the continuously changing perspectives of the Wilderness concept. He argues that our predisposition to favor Wilderness over civilization is due to our romanticized notion of the “sublime” with respect to God and the American canon, which glorifies our frontier origins. In essence, he splits Wilderness into two parts: the frontier and the sublime. The sublime perspective considers the Wilderness to be a place where people come in contact with the divine forces and is a very spiritual place. The frontier origin is described as “peculiarly American, though it too had its European antecedents and parallels.” Cronon begins his essay with the following statement that really set my brain off:

“The time has come to rethink wilderness.”

The first time I read this quote, I thought… what does this even mean? Cronon makes the argument in his essay that we now have an idea of wilderness rather than having an actual place that is designated to be wilderness. Cronon does not seem to believe that places such as the numerous national parks that we have preserved and remain untouched by humans are considered to be nature. He claims that it is all an idea. I discussed the ideas within his essay with a few of the students enrolled in our class and read over all the blog posts that had to do with Cronon’s article in order to continue to try and grasp what Cronon was talking about. Finally, I read this post and I finally could make a personal analogy to relate my experiences with Cronon’s ideas.

Just like the one I held!
Photo courtesy of thebutterflyjungle.blogspot.com

I thought back to a vacation to Florida I went on with my family a few years back. We went to a butterfly museum where you basically walk through this greenhouse filled with hundreds of beautiful butterflies. Just as Kevin fed the squirrel, I purchased this power like food to put on my finger in order to attract the butterflies to my hands. I remember the very moment that this beautiful butterfly landed promptly on the side of my hand and began to tickle me. In this very moment, I too admit that I felt this strange connection with nature, the wilderness and the wild- even though I was in the middle of a man made glass house filled with artificial trees and feeding this butterfly some weird- unnatural sugar… My experience supports the fact that we may need to reevaluate what wilderness is defined as or perhaps we should attempt to make a few distinctions. I wonder if my feelings would differ I got the opportunity to perhaps touch a live elephant in Thailand in comparison to touching an elephant at the zoo? Would I feel the same element of nature during both experiences? What do you think?