CAT 2021 Slot 2 VARC: The Trouble with Wilderness

Few words in the environmental vocabulary carry as much emotional charge, and as much conceptual instability, as 'wilderness'. In common usage it denotes land untouched by human hands: a forest, a mountain range, or a desert existing in a state prior to, and independent of, human history. This is precisely the sense enshrined in the United States' Wilderness Act of 1964, which defines wilderness as an area 'where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain'. The Act has done enormous good, protecting tens of millions of acres from logging, mining, and road-building. But the environmental historian William Cronon, in an influential essay published in 1995, argued that the very idea of wilderness as pristine, human-free nature is not a discovery about the natural world but an invention of a particular culture at a particular historical moment, and that treating it as timeless truth has had unintended and sometimes damaging consequences.

Cronon's argument proceeds historically. Wilderness, he observes, was not always prized. To European settlers of earlier centuries, wild land was a moral and physical threat, a howling waste to be subdued and cultivated; the Puritan imagination associated wilderness with exile and temptation, not sanctity. The reversal, from wilderness as wasteland to wilderness as sacred refuge, occurred gradually over the nineteenth century, driven by Romantic aesthetics that located the sublime in untamed mountains and by a growing anxiety, among an increasingly urbanized elite, that industrial civilization had severed people from an authentic relationship with nature. The wilderness ideal, in other words, was less a rediscovery of a pre-existing category than a response to the very civilization it claimed to stand outside of; it is, Cronon writes, 'quite profoundly a human creation'.

The historical claim carries a practical sting. If wilderness is defined by the absence of human presence, then the designation erases the people who were, in fact, present. Many of the landscapes canonized as pristine American wilderness, Yosemite and Yellowstone prominent among them, were inhabited and actively managed, through controlled burning, selective harvesting, and seasonal migration, by indigenous peoples for millennia before their designation as protected wild land. Establishing these areas as wilderness in the legal sense typically required the forcible removal of their prior inhabitants, whose long presence was rendered invisible by a definition that equated wildness with the absence of people. The 'pristine' landscape that visitors now encounter is, in an important sense, itself a product of that removal and of a century of fire suppression policy, not an unmediated glimpse of nature before history.

Cronon's critics, who are numerous within the conservation movement, worry that this line of argument, however historically accurate, risks undermining the practical case for protecting wild land at precisely the moment such protection is most needed. If wilderness is 'merely' a cultural construction, does that license further development on the grounds that no landscape is more authentically natural than any other? Cronon anticipated this objection and rejected the inference explicitly: to say that the concept of wilderness has a human history is not to say that the ecological value of relatively undeveloped land, its biodiversity, its role as carbon sink and watershed, is illusory. His target was never conservation itself but a mode of environmental thinking that locates authentic nature only in the absence of people, a framing that, he argued, made it harder to value and improve the humbler, humanly inhabited landscapes, farms, second-growth forests, even cities, where most people actually live and where most environmental harm and repair actually occurs.

The durable lesson of this debate is not that wilderness protection is misguided but that the categories environmentalism uses are themselves historical artifacts, worth examining rather than treating as self-evident. A conservation ethic robust enough to include both the remaining wild places and the everyday, inhabited landscapes where ecological stakes are highest may serve the natural world, and its human inhabitants, considerably better than one built on a strict opposition between the pristine and the fallen.