Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 4:01 pm Post subject: Wilderness
Okay, I LOVED this reading! I feel like it has a direct link with the questions I had been asking about emotional attachment to land perfectly!
By understanding wilderness, I think people believe they can connect to something bigger than themselves, like as the example in the reading mentioned, God. Yet, it is interesting how the definition of wilderness seems to be the lack of humans or human influence, but people still venture into wilderness to experience it. How can someone experience wilderness if their definition of wilderness means they should not be there?
Wilderness definitely still has a place in our world now, I mean, we have Environmental History class. Though from the readings we have done, environment and wilderness can be defined separately, but wilderness is still an environment that plays a big role. “…wilderness offers us the illusion that we can escape the cares and troubles of the world in which our past has ensnared us.” (page 285, top of the left page) Cronan brought up that sickly people would relocate to a more remote area to be cured, because somehow nature will cure them. There are definitely a lot of similar stories-off the top of My head I immediately think of the movie “My Neighbor Totoro” in which a family moves to the country because the mother is very ill. (Forest spirits and stuff are there too, but that’s a different view on wilderness) I see this as a human connection to nature, but in a very selective way, because only beautiful aspects of nature are seen as good and nurturing, as if other lands are, for lack of a better word, mistakes.
Do others think that people are selective about which aspects of nature are worth preserving?
I’m only half way through the first reading, but here are some quotes that I found interesting:
“Satan’s home had become God’s own temple” (281). I found this interesting because last nights reading, referred to the forest as being a temple. Hearing that this idea was a well thought of “myth: the mountain as a cathedral” (282) didn’t really surprise me, but I find it interesting that many people would come to the same concoction of wilderness be spiritual.
In Zion national park in Utah there is a rock called Angels Landing, it is appropriately called that because at the end you are VERY high up 1,200 feet on one side and 800 on the other, there are no hand holds, and you have 3 feet between this nothing and nothing on either side of you. It is also in a huge valley that is aww striking. I definitely got this feeling of spirituality from that experience.
“in the wilderness the boundaries between human and nonhuman, between natural and supernatural, had always seemed less certain then elsewhere” (281). For this one I thought of the discussion today where we were talking about are we part of nature or not and when. Well this added another aspect to it for me: are we sometimes part of nature, like when we are in the forest, and sometimes not part of nature? If anyone has any ideas please respond.
In response to Knaide’s question, “Do others think that people are selective about which aspects of nature are worth preserving?” I think that we are selective to what we think is interesting. I know that is I have an old piece of something like, a pretty rock, I don’t want to get rid of it because its pretty and I like it, but a crumpled up peace of paper in a box of crumpled up pieces of paper I’m not even going to bother looking at, I’m just going to throw it away. I think that people look at nature like that. But by throw away they would develop or not care about it.
1) As Knaide said, the theme of God and His home i.e. wilderness is prevalent and one might feel this or they might not. Yet what was unsettling for me was when Cronon stated, "By the second half of the 19th century, the terrible awe that Woodsworth and Thoreau regarded as the appropriately pious stance...was giving way to a much more comfortable, almost sentimental demeanor," 282. In claiming "the appropriately pious stance," Cronon leads one to believe that Woodsworh and Thoreau did not have organic reactions to their expiriences within the wilderness, only acted upon an already culturally ingrained response. If not piety, the romanticized cultural reflex makes way for a leisurely "one-ness." What I took from this is that humans are incapable of reacting to nature without the context of their culture. Not FINDING nature, but REACTING to it. This distinction is imperative because, in my own backyard, in the parks near my house (humble, by no means any kind of Yosemite,) I have always felt a love towards nature that I can never remember being actively taught. In this sense, forget what one does or doesn't DO to nature, how it is felt can never be natural. While Thoreau dramatizes a profound loneliness of the wilderness, I always have felt as if the beauty of nature was that other people were unnecessary to one's attempts to commune with it.
2) Pollan and Cronon both seem pretty insistent on disillusioning us to the idea of wilderness or nature as natural. Fine. Yet will we ever hear an argument for why the clearest manifestations of civilization (i.e., cities) are MORE natural than previously we thought/think---or is that implicit? I feel as if we are being informed that neither nature/wilderness is natural and OF COURSE, neither are the most evident of human constructs and creations. Is it then a fair conclusion that nothing is natural anymore? Or does that just lend itself to the tired, dead-end argument that EVERYTHING is therefore natural. I think Ellie's question about a day to day or else culture to culture movement of peoples that puts people in and out of nature either by will or some other designation is an excellent one because it both respects the premise of boundaries but also disallows stagnancy. So, sorry I couldn't answer your question Ellie but it made me think
There isn't a question up for grabs, so I guess I'll vent for a bit and ask one, then come back later to answer someone else's.
Cronon's a pretty cool guy. A lot of his ideas made a ton of sense to me, and like Knaide, I found that our in class discussion did a really good job of setting up this reading. The idea of human activity in relation to wilderness switching from production to conservation was pretttty crazy, and had some awesome evidence. The whole God argument made a lot of sense, because it was a fairly universal thing for people way back when. Not everyone had the same God, but before science exploded to explain the unexplainable, people turned to religion for that purpose. People also transitioned by calming down after their production craze, and appreciated nature's beauty. Those who didn't make this change were considered to be destructive, which leads me to a question. Does anyone care about what people 100 years ago did to the environment? Or, maybe, not care, but notice?
Also, I came up with a possible definition for either nature or natural. It is: What reminds us we're human. Another 'natural' that came up was the supernatural, or the unexplainable. People also used nature as an excuse for freedom, like in Cronon's example of men hunting to be manly. The paradox Cronon mentioned on page 285 is what I was trying to get in class.
Quote:
"...our very presence in nature represents its fall..."
Suppose that's enough for now.
Anyway, my question is:
Can anyone explain how nature works as a common for everyone in the world? Not sure if Cronon supported that idea or was disproving it, but I'm pretty sure he mentions it on 287-288.
alright, so I'm about four pages away from finishing, but I'll share some so-far thoughts.
First of all, to dylan's bolded, with all due respect, OF COURSE we care what people thought about nature 100 years ago! Wasn't that what most of this reading was about? Isn't that what environmental history is about?!
In fact, this article kinda reminded me of the Jared Diamond one in that it peeled back layers and layers of interpretations of nature chronologically-- except, the opposite of peeling back isn't the right word, because Cronon was working forwards.
In other news, I really liked dylan's definition of nature as a door to discussion, particularly with regard to this reading.
Quote:
Nature: something that reminds us we are human
so, allow me to make the not-too-huge intellectual leap from HUMAN-NESS to MORTALITY. Everybody on board?
now turn to page 281-
Quote:
"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"
eerily similar to what dylan said, right?
Now I'm going to try and explain what is weird about this train of thought:
1. Nature reminds us we are human, and nature makes us remember our own mortality.
2. Isn't mortality, death, one of the most natural processes we can conceive of? Whether talking about animals, plants, or humans, being a part of the natural world often means that you die. (total sidenote:unlike gods, who never die)
3. WE ENDED UP BACK AT NATURE! WE WENT FROM NATURE --> HUMAN ---> NATURE!
It was a cycle.
That is all I have to say.
QUESTION: If Cronon is right, could true environmentalism lie in fixing the aspects of our culture that make us turn to nature to "escape the confining strictures of civilized life" … often leading to nature's exploitation?
So I thought this reading was really interesting, partly because it covered a lot of the questions I had as I was leaving class today. I’m going to ATTEMPT to try to answer some questions/comments.
1. Rachel, I think your point in your first section about Cronon arguing how these wealthier people didn’t have their own original response to nature is interesting. I don’t think its necessarily that they were so deeply engrained in their culture that something external told them to respond in that way, its that they responded fundamentally different than say the people who actually worked the land/country folk, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence of their class background. On page 285 Cronon addresses this: “Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land.”
Also, Cronon is definitely not discounting the awe-inspiring reaction people get from being in “God’s natural cathedral”. I have no doubt that if I went to Niagra Falls or Zion I would have the same sublime experience. However, its different if your going to the Adirondacks for vacation, where you get to play tennis and swim in the lake, or if your working the fields and actually have to use the land to survive instead of just using it recreationally.
2. Dylan, I don’t know if I can adequately answer your question about nature being the commons but I’m going to try to respond. This made me think back to FATE where Tad asked us to find a place on CSW’s campus that is an economic “commons”. I chose the red wall. People leave their shit there without cleaning it up, because frankly no one person is responsible to clean up after you and its not “owned” by one person. (as in it’d be different if I left my cups and bowls all over Rachel’s desk because that’s obviously someone’s space.) The same is true for the environment but on a MUCH bigger scale. The wilderness is one big common that isn’t owned by one person and worse the “dirty dishes” effect won’t be felt by the generation who left them there. If we cut down the rainforests and melt all the glaciers, it will be our grandchildren who have to clean up after us, so why not take a little bit more advantage of it now?
Finally, just some interesting quotes I thought were core to Cronon’s argument:
Page 279: Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation.”
Page 281: “…sublime landscapes were those rare places on earth where one had more chance than anywhere elsewhere to glimpse the face of God…where one could not help feeling insignificant and being reminded of one’s own mortality.”
Page 285: “It is not the things we label as wilderness that are the problem-for nonhuman nature and large tracts of the natural world do deserve protection—but rather what we ourselves mean when we use that label.”
And this quote might be my favorite one I’ve ever read describing nature: (on page 282) “Why seek me out where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother?”
I'll be coming back for Olivia's question shortly (not to call dibs, but I'll take on part of it....)
wait. Becker just posted. I'm taking on BUNTAINE's q.
This was such a great reading! Like Knaide and Dylan, I found our class discussion very helpful in preparing me for the reading, I looked over my notes and some similar themes came up, such as:
Privilege: Most environmentalists come from the middle class and up. People with greater amounts of money and power are beyond surviving. Like Cronin mentions, after the civil war the wealthiest people in the country developed somewhat of an obsession with the wilderness and started buying and admiring it. With the exception of people who are vegetarian for religious reasons, the countries with the highest rates of vegetarianism are countries in Europe, and the United States/Canada. If you have money and power, you have more choices about what you eat. People who are secure financially/physically do not need to worry about their own survival, so it is more likely for them to want to protect nature. I think this came up in one of our first forum threads, the idea that your socio-economic alters your perception of the environment.
Nature/God: Nature is often a vehicle people use to talk about God and spirituality, whether consciously or unconsciously. As Cronin states:
“(The) Wilderness fulfills the old romantic project of secularizing Judeo-Christian values so as to make a new cathedral not in some petty human building but in God’s own creation, nature itself...Agnostics or even atheists (environmentalists) nonetheless express feeling tantamount to religious awe when in the presence of wilderness” (285)
Is this admiration of nature innate? Or is is a result of cultural values?
All Animals Are Equal but Some Animals are More Equal than Others: Like we mentioned in class, it is much easier to raise money for the “Save the Baby Seals” than it is to raise money for “Save the Tarantulas”. On a psychological note, it is easier for humans to relate to and sympathize with other mammals, even if both species are endangered. Cronin talks about this theme when he talks about the wilderness, he states “there is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear” (284).
One question I had was do environmentalists (as Cronin suggests) pose a threat to the natural world? Is this idealism/distortion of reality a bad thing? Or is it okay because it is for a noble cause?
I know Will has Olivia's question too, but I'm a big fan of it, so I'm giving it a shot too.
I'm going to say yes, it could be, but I'm not 100% sure yet. I think a really important aspect of our relation to the environment and nature is using them as an escape and to find freedom. I get a little nervous on the, "fixing the aspects of our culture," part. Do we have to fix ourselves, or maybe just improve? Using solar energy, for example, still has us turning to the environment, but isn't as destructive to a limited resource like oil. I think true environmentalism might be improving the aspects of our culture that exploit nature, rather than fixing what leads to the bad effects.
So Olivia brought up something pretty badass in her cycle. I think what jumped out at me most was the sidenote- “unlike gods, who never die”. In my active reading, I came up with more about humans vs. God than humans vs death, although they may amount to the same thing. I wonder if our relationship to wildernesses has changed because the human –nature power dynamic has changed. For nearly all of European Colonial History, we had to fear the wild simply because there was so much of it and we had little or no control over it. For example: “Thoreau’s words took the mountain and transmuted it into… a symbol of God’s presence on Earth” (282). I suppose it felt like God was proving his existence through the existence of places where humans were strangers to their environment or powerless against it.
But have a look at Rachel’s quote about the “much more comfortable, sentimental demeanor” writers took towards the wilderness. About the same time Thoreau and Wordsworth stopped freaking out about nature and Muir started rhapsodizing about its grandeur, America reached a sort of tipping point where it was clear that most of the country could be developed, and most of the wildness of the country tamed. This was a problem culturally— for some men, “civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity…. Men who felt this way came from elite class backgrounds”. Finding nothing to evaluate themselves with, no monsters to conquer, no Gods to revere, men like Roosevelt scrambled to preserve the last great forests and canyons and such.
So, when we were at odds with nature because it was a threat, we ended up subjugating it. Now, having tried to protect what’s left, we’ve ended up distancing ourselves from it- which may ultimately be detrimental to all parties involved. So how do we engage with nature without setting ourselves at odds with it? I’m not sure that Orientalizing wilderness is our biggest problem with it culturally. But there should certainly be ways to see nature as less of an escape and more of a thing-to-be-lived-with, it would certainly fix the distance problem, the problem of nature as an “Other”. I think acknowledging that as in issue is a good first step. Then…. Land’s Sake field trip, anyone?
(Now that being said. Regardless of what being close to nature means to you, I still believe it is just as important to understand other environments as your own local one- that is, that one should see what “oldschool” wilderness is like as much as learn about ones own suburban backyard. )
Sorry to almost interrupt, but i wanted to return to Knaides post in the beginning of the forum cause i believe its very important. I want to touch back on what Knaide said about the definition of wilderness. A lot of what I may say might seem repetive of Knaides post but I think I wanted to bring it up again later in the forum. It’s important to always be thinking Knaides rough definition, “ …wilderness seems to be the lack of humans or human influence,” interesting and very true. I looked up wilderness on my computers dictionary and it was very close, basically the same as Knaides (Computer definition below). I always thought about wilderness this way but never acknowledged it as such. I think of humans interacting with wilderness but not being a part of it. Wilderness has an almost mystical feeling to it, uncontrollable in some ways. Yes, humans can affect it; indeed we have affected it in many ways. Yet, wilderness is a thing, a place, a noun. Many think of it as an adjective and that is wrong. Humans have a unjust ability to abolish wilderness because as the definitions have explained, it is an area that is not affected by humans.
wilderness |ˈwildərnis|
noun [usu. in sing. ]
an uncultivated, uninhabited, and inhospitable region.
• a neglected or abandoned area of a garden or town.
Cronon unclearly states that in the past, wilderness was not a place of activities, but of business. It didn’t have the attractions as it does today, with adventurers seeking this wilderness experience. In response to Dylan’s question, “Does anyone care about what people 100 years ago did to the environment? Or, maybe, not care, but notice?” I think people should and do care about the environmental history of the past. With out that history, there is no present or future history to compare it to. If care isn’t the right word, “notice” is definitely a good second choice. Its less personal to notice than to care about something and summarizes many view points of Environment History say 100 years ago.
also interrupting, but I just wanted to share with the class the moment I decided william cronon and i are getting married.
".. some kind of balanced, sustainable relationship. My own belief is that only in exploring this ground will we learn ways of imagining a better world for all of us: humans and nonhumans, rich people and poor, women and men, First Worlders and Third Worlders, white folks and people of color, consumers and producers-- a world better for humanity in all of its diversity and for the rest of nature too. The middle ground is where we actually live. It is where we-- all of us, in our different places and ways-- make our homes."
Olivia Becker asked the question: If we cut down the rainforests and melt all the glaciers, it will be our grandchildren who have to clean up after us, so why not take a little bit more advantage of it now?
As Olivia said in her post that people in public places sometimes leave their things behind and sometimes do not think of the consequences for others. She brought up the great example of the red wall. Many times I have walked by after lunch and seen dirty plates lying on the ground. Even though the dinning hall is so close by I think one of the main reasons people don’t bring their plates back is because they are lazy and don’t want to walk. When they decide not to bring their plate back they are only thinking of themselves. This seems like what humans are doing to the environment. Cutting hundreds of trees to make a profit, which they will use to spend on themselves but at the same time leaving a mess for everyone else. So I think that a lot of people are concerned about the rainforests being cut down and the glaciers melting because it will effect their families. Like the saying goes blood is thicker than water and for the most part people are usually more concerned about taking care of their family than friends or strangers. They don't want their relatives down the road having a difficult life because of something they did to the environment. So where I think it differs from the red wall example is that the consequences of leaving plates on the ground will not effect the people closest to you (family) but people you barely know and maybe friends.
Cronon is saying that conserving nature is more of an upper class “activity”. Do you think that land plays a role in determining social classes? And if so how?
Again, super thought provoking reading. I think the forum tonight has brought up a lot of great points. First there was Rachel’s point about nature’s true beauty being the fact than other humans are unnecessary in order to commune with it, and that we as humans find it very difficult to look at nature without the context of our own culture (which I agree with). Then Olivia (Buntaine) and Will’s post about mortality and the cycle of nature to human back to nature again really got me thinking. Allow me to (attempt to) articulate my thoughts about this.
We humans truly fear what we cannot control. Will made the point about fearing the wild during European Colonial History because we didn’t have enough control over it. It’s for this reason that we fear death, something we have zero control over, and that will never change. Maybe that’s why we envy the gods so much. Maybe that’s why we love to convince ourselves that we have total control over things (like the gods). Nature does indeed remind us of our own morality, that we’re eventually going to die. Personally, I think that’s as big a reason as any that humans have developed civilizations in place of nature for god knows how long. We want to get rid of this thing that reminds us we’re going to end up a pile of bones. Again ill refer to Will’s post, when he talked about these writers becoming content and adopting the “comfortable, sentimental demeanor” because they knew they realized that they could “deal” with nature.
The other thing about nature is that in addition to reminding us of our mortality, it reminds us of our mistakes. It reminds us that we have permanently impacted the world around us, and that there’s no going back. Cronon drives this point home in one particular quote.
“But the trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world.” (Page 285).
This might’ve been the best back-to-back reading nights of the mod. I’m sorry to say that I really can’t think of a decent question for tomorrow. Somehow, a part of me tells me that we’ll have plenty to talk about. Goodnight, all.
Something that has been bothering me that this reading brought up was the fact that nature is valuable because we say it is, and different “natures” have different values. What makes Yellowstone more worth preserving over than the plains in the Midwest, other than the fact that we think it is prettier? In this reading and past readings we have done, the idea that the more we try to create and protect wilderness the less it becomes “wild” has shown up more and more frequently. I found it interesting that while people used endangered species as a mascot for preservation, human activity has a large role in many endangered species statuses. This is thing as a group like BP being advocates for environmentalism, when they caused the huge problem they are trying to reverse.
The quote “If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature is not” Seems to discredit any possible reasoning behind why humans should participate in preserving “nature”. However this is only true if I believe that humans and nature are separate, which I am not entirely sure of. Humans putting imaginary fences around a place and saying it is to be preserved and guarded, automatically makes it no longer its own thing, (I’m kinda anthropomorphizing here), but human responsibility instead.
Gigi asked: “Cronon is saying that conserving nature is more of an upper class “activity”. Do you think that land plays a role in determining social classes? And if so how?”
I don’t think land plays that big of a role in determining social class. If someone is born in a rural area they are less likely to be a wealthy trader on Wall Street and if someone is born in a Suburb of Boston they are less likely to end up being a farmer. However I think that is more about the culture that already exists in the land deciding that, as opposed to the land itself. I think it is more so people who don’t have to worry about conserving (sounds funny when you apply it to humans) their own lives on a more immediate basis have the luxury of being able to worry about things greater than themselves.
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