Paul Weissfellner

INTD 105: Science Writing

Prof. Fenn

The Trouble with Wilderness Response

In his essay The Trouble with Wilderness, William Cronon lays out a comprehensive critique of the American concept of wilderness. He takes the reader through the history of wilderness and perceptions of it in America, from the standpoint that the entire idea of wilderness and the way that it is expressed is flawed and dangerous. From its origins as a forum for religious experiences  to a playground for the urban elite, wilderness has taken many forms. I found his descriptions of the issues with wilderness interesting, especially as he presented them as antithetical to all of mainstream environmentalism. I particularly liked his analysis of the effects of wilderness of the general views of nature as a whole. Nature is only valuable if it is untouched, but what really constitutes untouched? Humans have lived everywhere for thousands of years, and, more often than not, wilderness preserves an area where people had lived after kicking them out; it is not how nature was before humans. It’s how nature was when a certain group of humans arrived. At the end, Cronon brings it back to Haraway’s ideas of the cyborg, in that nature and humanity cannot be separated without dire philosophical consequences. My rock is no longer a representation of the struggle between humans and nature; rather, it is a monument to unity, to the natural and human-made systems that worked together to create it as it exists now.