In answering the question of whether or not ‘wilderness’ is
merely a social construction, it is important first to define what ‘wilderness’
means. In my argument, I will employ a definition of wilderness inspired by
Lynn White Jr. as an area pure of human affect. In The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, White Jr. wrote,
“The ‘wilderness area’ mentality invariably advocates deep-freezing an
ecology…as it was before the first Kleenex was dropped” (White Jr., 2011, p. 1204).
She, like Cronon and others, believe that many see wilderness as an area left
in its original form after creation.
This idea implies an area void of humans. As the world is not void of
humans, and humans have been interacting with and altering their environment
from the moment they were introduced to the planet, I argue that wilderness as
defined above is a social construction.
The idea that there was a time when nature existed free of
human influence is false. Humans, like other animals, need resources to
survive. Since their introduction to the planet they have been extracting food
and warmth from the land as well as learning how to work with nature for their
benefit. This low level of intrusion, in itself, defies the concept of an
untouched landscape. Even before A.D. 830, there is evidence that humans
changed their environment. Calendars, “…show men coercing the world around
them-plowing, harvesting, chopping trees, butchering pigs” (White Jr., 2011,
p. 1205). Even in A.D. 830, people were not shy about plowing which changes the
soil, harvesting which collects of nature’s bounty, and butchering pigs which
implies either a hunting of wild pigs which changes the dynamics of an
ecosystem or the breeding of pigs for food which allows humans to, in a sense,
control nature.
Still, a romantic idea lingers in popular thought that this
primitive interaction with wilderness took only little from the wilderness
rather than changed the way it worked. This notion is also false. Richard White
wrote in The Organic Machine, that many years before modern
civilization, Native Americans along the river, “built weirs to block the fish
until their harvest was complete. At Kettle Falls the Indians fixed timber
frames in the rocks of the falls and from them they hung huge willow baskets...Leaping
salmon would strike the frames and fall into the baskets…” (White, 1995, p. 16).
Native Americans changed the river to catch fish. They also took vast supplies
of fish away from their natural path upstream, and ergo from filling the role
of their ecological niche. From the beginning of human interaction with nature,
humans were not bystanders but active participants in wilderness.
Perhaps it is most clear to see wilderness as a social
construct, when one sees how it has been constructed historically. In order to
give people the wilderness void of human influence that they sought, humans
actually had to be removed. Native Americans, “…were forced to move elsewhere,
with the result that tourists could safely enjoy the illusion that they were
seeing their nation in its…original state...” (Cronon, 1996, p. 9). Many places
now perceived as wilderness, had in fact been inhabited for years. The
wilderness many see is merely an illusion which hides for many, the destruction
of an ancient way of life and a land different from origin in the ways it has
been changed by the Native Americans who had lived there.
The emergence of the social construct of wilderness as a
virgin land may have come from a separation of past and present and a disconnect
between how things appear on a daily basis and how they actually work. William
Cronin discussed the change in relationship between man and nature through time
in “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.” Earlier in history, men
knew where their food came from. They could see the animals they ate while they
were still living and they understood the relationship between land and corn
and food because they either worked with the land and animals themselves or
lived close to someone who did. This relationship between man and nature was
visible in all facets of life, not just food production, on a daily basis.
Through time, the connections between the day-to-day and nature became less
clear. One went to the market to receive their food, and never saw the land it
was grown on. One wore clothes made from plant and animal materials, whose
production they had no need to understand. It became easier to imagine human
survival without direct interaction with nature because most people stopped
directly interacting with nature. It is also true that humans have begun
impacting wilderness to a greater degree than they have in the past. It is
possible that a weaker understanding of human-nature relationships in addition
to the understanding that human influence on wilderness is much greater than it
was before has led to the idea that there once existed a place almost devoid of
human mark. The truth is, however, that humans have always affected
wilderness. In the past, it was
just to a lesser degree.
The idea that wilderness is a social construction can lessen
the burden on environmentalists. Rather than worrying about the last untouched
places on earth, and feeling the pain of the end with each new endangered
species listing, environmentalists can rest assured that it is not their responsibility
to protect the last remaining wilderness-because the wilderness as they
conceive it, has never existed. Rejecting the idea of wilderness as a virgin
landscape allows humans to become a part of the wilderness they adore. It
allows for our interference with wilderness. This is important because humans
are unlikely to leave wilderness to its own devices any time in the near
future. I do not intend to imply that nature should not be preserved. My
intention is that nature be preserved for what it is, a place for animal,
plant, and human. Rejecting the idea that wilderness can only be defined as an
untouched land allows environmentalists to build policies that work for
wilderness and the humans that are a part of it.
Works Cited
Cronon, William. “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great
West” W.W. Norton Company. 1991
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with
Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” Environmental History, Vol.
1, No. 1 (Jan., 1996), pp. 7-28 (online)
http://envhis.oxfordjournals.org/content/1/1/7.full.pdf+html
White, Jr., Lynn. "Science Magazine." Science: 1203-207. Science. Web. 10 Oct. 2011.
<http://www.sciencemag.org/content/155/3767/1203.full.pdf>.
White, Richard. The
Organic Machine. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. Print.
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This paper was written for 'Human Society and Environmental Change,' a course I completed at Stanford University.
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This paper was written for 'Human Society and Environmental Change,' a course I completed at Stanford University.
