Over the 3 years that I physically lived in California (as I worked remotely for UC Davis remotely from Maryland for 1 year before that), I became progressively more ambivalent about the reverential attitudes that many people in California and more broadly in the western half of the contiguous US (including the Northwest, Mountain West, and Southwest) have toward wilderness and natural parks and a little bitter that such reverence could directly be connected to the way that urban spaces in this part of the US feel far more neglected and bare-bones than urban spaces in the Northeast & Mid-Atlantic do; the bitterness is related to my personal need, as someone with a disability who does not drive, for spaces with good public transit, safely walkable paths, and dense mixed-use development. I had thought about these issues more especially during this year, but thus far, I had not considered writing blog posts about these thoughts. It was only after reading the essay "The Trouble with Wilderness" published in 1995 by William Cronon [LINK], recommended to me by a friend who thought that I might be sympathetic to the arguments in the essay, that I felt compelled to further flesh out & share my thoughts about these issues in this blog.
The essay explains the dichotomies & hypocrisies inherent in primarily middle-class and rich American perceptions of wilderness and how these attitudes arose. The author explains how until the 19th century in North America & Europe, and until even later in many other parts of the world, wilderness was seen by most urban cultures as dangerous, desolate, and leading people through such desolation to despair & amorality, the latter exemplified by Rudyard Kipling's popularization in the late 19th century of the savage "jungle law". Additionally, there were roots before the 19th century of the idea of spending time in wilderness as leading to religious experiences, but such experiences were clearly meant to evoke terrified awe (consistent with the little bit that I understand about Christianity regarding its emphasis on sin & guilt) as opposed to transcendent bliss, and they were associated with people exiling themselves from society for tough religious penance, whether in the cloisters of a monastery or in a forest far from the comforts of urban civilization. The author explains that the transformation of popular perceptions of wilderness from negative to positive came in the 19th century in Europe & North America, as the perceptions of religious experiences shifted to being more uniformly positive & comforting and simultaneously as local governments started building more amenities to tame wilderness into being a natural park for tourists; I suspect that this also coincided with Friedrich Nietzsche's work on the overman (the self-realized man striving for betterment in conjunction with enjoyment of the world) being interpreted as humanity having a greater degree of control over nature and with the rise of prosperity theology in the US, but I am not yet well enough read to comment intelligently on Nietzsche's work, and in any case, the author does not explicitly make such connections or arguments. The author describes how this shift in perception was reinforced at the same time specifically in the US by the promotion of frontier myths; I was previously familiar with how the frontier myth played into those reverential attitudes in the US toward wilderness, but I didn't make the connection until reading this essay of this myth to the way that the people, including Teddy Roosevelt, who pushed this myth & related reverence for natural parks were in fact rich white American men who grew up in urban comfort & benefited from industrialization and were rewriting the frontier myth in their own image, contradicting the reality that most people, including cowboys, who worked on the actual frontier were racially, sexually, or otherwise socioeconomically marginalized by the settled WASP-dominated society in the Northeast & Mid-Atlantic. The author ties this erasure of history to how the reverence for natural parks among many Americans who grow up in urban settings took root because of the combination of feeling alienated from industrial areas (which were genuinely dangerous & polluted places to live in the 19th & early 20th centuries) and being ignorant of what undeveloped land (wilderness) is really like. The author argues that such positive perceptions are counterproductive for understanding how humanity can actually live sustainably with nature as such attitudes unduly compartmentalize "nature" as being irretrievably separate from humanity, and when combined with negative attitudes about urban environments & rigid beliefs that humanity destroys everything that it touches in nature, this leads to the logical (within its own axioms) yet incredibly depressing nihilistic conclusion that humanity should cease to exist. The author emphasizes that comfortable & positive experiences in the wilderness are too often accessible only to rich people in urbanized areas (in the sense of having the time & transportation to get to natural peaks that have a lot of physical infrastructure & amenities built deliberately, irrespective of the level of luxury of a given private tour) and that this has been true since the 19th century in North America & Europe. Finally, the author argues that it would be better to appreciate & cultivate nature closer to home even in urban settings.
My friend was correct; I did indeed feel that this essay strongly resonated with me, as I have had similar thoughts about the effects of the frontier myth on popular reverence for natural parks in the US and about the myth versus reality of human infrastructure & amenities in natural parks being marketed as "true wilderness". It is worth noting too that the word "jungle" came from the Sanskrit/Hindi word "jaṅgala", which originally meant "desert" (emphasizing the aridity) and was later expanded to refer to any place hostile to human settlement, but its application to thick forests with overgrown understories was based on a misunderstanding by British colonizers in India in the 19th century (which does not surprise me); this is relevant to illustrating perceptions in other cultures of wilderness and of shifts in perception in the 19th century, as other scholars who have published similar essays or book chapters in books or collections edited by William Cronon have showed how the shift in English away from the word "jungle", which had negative connotations, to the word "rainforest" was associated with a softening of the popular image of such ecosystems (previously seen in Europe and by white North Americans as harsh & antithetical to humanity).
I have learned over the last few years of discoveries over the last few decades about the ways that indigenous societies in America (considered as a single continent), before European colonization, shaped environments that in the 20th century were assumed to be untouched wilderness. The shaping took the form of light-touch agroforestry, silviculture (forest cultivation), and polyculture (farming many plant or animal species together in ways that are sustainable due to those species' ecologically mutualistic relations, as opposed to the monoculture prevalent in industrialized farming). Examples include the Amazon rainforest [LINK] whose shaping supported large & diverse highly-developed cities [LINK], wildflowers in the deserts of California [LINK] making clear that even the term "wildflower" in that context is a misnomer that erases indigenous American work on cultivating those plants over many generations, and the temperate rainforests of British Columbia where biodiversity was much higher due to human selection near indigenous settlements than farther away [LINK]. These discoveries came after William Cronon published his essay, so I hope that he would be aware of these more recent discoveries (as he retired from his tenured faculty position only within the last few years). Learning about these things motivated me to learn a little more, from Wikipedia, about agroforestry, silviculture, and polyculture. They seem like promising ways to promote soil fertility, biodiversity, greater resilience against pests & natural disasters, ecological health, and human health. However, it is important to recognize the tradeoffs between these benefits and the need for extensive delicate & prolonged human labor, given the implications for our current population level & standard of living in the US, instead of uncritically romanticizing such practices as better in every way than current practices of monocultures & mechanized farms, especially if such romanticism is a reflexive opposition to white dominance in the various countries of America, with that opposition in turn arising from sympathy with indigenous peoples who have been & continue to be oppressed. In particular, livestock & machines currently struggle to work well with any farming method other than monocultures, so scalability would be a problem, though I am optimistic that AI tools could be paired with more carefully-designed machines to more effectively seed & harvest more complicated crop growths in forests or polycultures.
The essay by William Cronon didn't have as much about disability or the neglect of urban spaces, which are more salient to my experiences. Thus, the extent to which the essay resonated with me because of those issues was more because my mind was filling in those gaps. For this reason, I am making this post one in a multi-part series, with this part focusing more on the essay itself and more directly related issues of indigenous land cultivation (as William Cronon's treatment of indigenous issues, which is understandable given the state of popular knowledge & research in the US in 1995, is with a sad tone as if indigenous peoples in America had been completely wiped out & existed only in the past, ignoring the ways that indigenous peoples in America continue to preserve traditional land management practices & shape their lands accordingly, even if those things happen now on much smaller scales than they did before European colonization). The next post in this series will focus more on my experiences & thoughts from the standpoints of disability & urban neglect; I may have more posts afterwards only if there is a clear need to break the material into shorter posts and there is a clean way to separate the posts by topic.
