Mike Emanuele

The Trouble with Wilderness by William Cronon

Humanity has taken it upon itself to preserve nature because of it’s beauty and it’s importance to earth. This is the popular opinion of environmentalists and most people. However, Hundreds of years ago the wilderness wasn’t something to be preserved but something to be avoided. The author, William Cronon, describes the wilderness as non-human. In history, towns and cities would always sit on this boundary between the humanity and inhumanity. This creates a dualism that the majority of people are unfamiliar with. In modern day we’ve learned to coexist but we still manage to destroy wilderness when we touch it. Humans have created a paradox from the moment our existence began, “if nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves.” My essay is about learning to coexist with nature and finding it’s similarities between human and non-human. We try to live amongst nature because it is natural. Nonetheless, Humans cannot live in a primitive environment such as the wilderness, we must create our own homes by taking it away from other life. This isn’t necessarily something bad.