Currently, I am taking a class about the history of American baseball prior to 1930. The most interesting thing I have learned, thus far, is that baseball did not originate in Cooperstown, NY in 1839 as most Americans believe it did. In fact, the earliest references to base ball date back to the 1700s.
Generally, Americans latch onto the most enticing or comforting explanation of things; people believe what they want to believe. The American concept of 'wilderness' is just one of many in a list of myths we hold as truths.
Before reading Cronon's article, The Trouble with Wilderness, I had never really given much thought to the many dimensions of the idea of 'wilderness'. In fact, as far as I was concerned, 'wilderness' was just an ambiguous term for nature - a place where trees grew, underbrush was dense and people retreated for the weekend to swim, boat or hike.
Cronon documented the transition of beliefs about wilderness, breaking the process into three distinct eras:
As early as historians can tell, 'wilderness' was a romantic place filled with terrible awe. This early 19th-century belief proved to humble many early American settlers.
By the second half of the 19th-century, Americans felt comfortable and had sentimental attachments to the wilderness. Americans were passionate about the unexplainable beauty present in the uninhabited valleys and mountains.
Thus, 'wilderness' finally became a sacred part of the American ideal. Parks and preservations began to be marked off in an attempt to maintain some illusion of a frontier that, otherwise, seemed to be disappearing.
"To protect wilderness was in a very real sense to protect the nation's most sacred myth of origin," according to Cronon.
Americans are under the impression that their forefathers came to this vast land on a boat and were the first to roam and settle into all it had to offer.
False.
Many forget, Cronon explains, that Indians were forcibly removed from the picture to create a "uninhabited wilderness". Thus, we are reminded just how constructed the idea of an American wilderness really is.
In essence, the American idea of 'wilderness' is a construction of what Americans want to believe. (Just like the myth about the origins of baseball.)
After reading Cronon's article, my ideas about 'wilderness' have changed. I can now see that wilderness is the place we are in, not the places we are not/places we have not touched.
Cronon makes the point: "If nature dies because we enter it, the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves." Therefore, I have learned that human intervention does not prevent a place from being 'wilderness'. 'Wilderness' exists everywhere and it is our duty as part of that wilderness to honor and cohabit with it.
You mention the "American idea of 'wilderness'", and recall Cronon's discussion of historical events that have helped to define the word for our culture.
ReplyDeleteThis hints that another culture may have separate views of the definition through varying religions, histories, etc. It makes me wonder how might another culture respond to Cronon's work? What types of locations are chosen to be preserved and/or protected in other areas of the world? What are the associated values in such areas? Is it common to preserve only large areas, such as the Grand Canyon, or is it common in other cultures to appreciate nature in smaller venues?
You began your post in such a creative way by referencing the baseball origin myth and relating it to the myth of wilderness. I think it is well done!
ReplyDeleteYou mention, "In essence, the American idea of 'wilderness' is a construction of what Americans want to believe." Do you think all Americans hold the same view of wilderness? And what about other nations? I think it is more complicated in its definition, changing from person to person instead of country to country.
i love the opening to your blog, thats a great connection and idea you saw between the two classes.
ReplyDeleteIt is funny i see people pulling a similar quote from the readings, about the fact that if humans are killing the environment then the only way to save it is to kill our selves. But i find this idea so absurd, as i think most of us do. It really is a strange idea and even as in the readings it says the wilderness is everything around us, which i I agree, I feel it missed a point about the distraction and fixing of the environment. That although we may very well be destroying our environment that doesn't mean we can kill our selves or just gone on as we are, we must change. Yes we can say that our environment has change some to cities some into suburbs, but even though as the reading says nature is not what we think it is, it still is something amazing and dying. So i guess what i am getting at is what do you think , maybe not what the answer is to all this, but more of what do you think of it and how people react to the idea of nature being modernized?
I also thought that one of the more enlightening parts in Cronon's article was the idea of constructed wilderness, in that, we removed the native inhabitants in order to preserve the land as it is, which is just about the perfect definition of irony. But I agree that wilderness is very much constructed by man, in that, civilization is needed to identify wilderness, or else the entire world would be wilderness and thus does not need to be specifically defined.
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