In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Since the late 1800s, the notion of wilderness as nature incarnate has been an animating force in American culture. A host of seminal, hugely influential environmental writers and activists, from John Muir and Aldo Leopold to David Brower and Edward Abbey, have idealized and championed wilderness.

In the 20th century, the wilderness ethos gave rise to the Sierra Club and the first wave of nature-centric environmentalism, energized the nascent conservation movement and influenced the emergent science of ecology.

The ideal of nature as undisturbed by humans and civilization was codified in the 1964 Wilderness Act, which defined the characteristics of wilderness as

an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain; an area of underdeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation and which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.

Before going any further, let me just say that I’m as big a fan of wilderness protection as anyone. So is environmental historian William Cronon, who sits on The Wilderness Society’s Governing Council, but who also published this provocative 1995 essay. Here’s his thunderclap of an opener:

The time has come to rethink wilderness.

This will seem a heretical claim to many environmentalists, since the idea of wilderness has for decades been a fundamental tenet—indeed, a passion—of the environmental movement, especially in the United States.

And indeed, such a claim was treated as heresy of the highest order. Cronon argued that wilderness, while intrinsically valuable, was nonetheless a cultural construction that encouraged a romanticized view of nature.

The blowback at the time was fierce (which Cronon responded to here), foreshadowing a similar outcry that followed ten years later, after this larger critique of environmentalism appeared. To me, the respective environmentalist tantrums of 1995 and 2005 exhibited a green movement stuck in a state of arrested development. (For more on why this is still the case, look for a follow-up post later today that will serve as a bookend to this one.) Alas, in the uproar over Cronon’s demythologizing of wilderness, this other important point he made in his essay got lost:

…the convergence of wilderness values with concerns about biological diversity and endangered species has helped produce a deep fascination for remote ecosystems, where it is easier to imagine that nature might somehow be “left alone” to flourish by its own pristine devices.

What’s the problem with this, you ask? Later on in his piece, Cronon writes:

Without our quite realizing it, wilderness tends to privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others.

Fortunately ecologists have matured, as I noted last year in a discussion of this article on urban ecology. More evidence of an important paradigm shift underway comes in this NYT piece on Emma Marris and her newly published book: The Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World.

In the NYT interview, Marris says:

We’re at a moment in ecological and conservation thinking where this notion of the “wild pristine” gets pulled apart, and we see that wild and pristine are almost opposite. You can never have 100 percent pristine, you can only approach the pristine. It’s a little bit of any empty concept in some ways because it presupposes that there was some sort of magical moment when everything was right.

And because everything has been a moving target forever, there was no real magical moment. So “pristine” is a word that we use when we mean things looking like they did at the beginning of our cultural memory, which tends to be very short.

I’m thrilled that we’ve finally arrived at this moment in time, where our ideas of nature and ecological restoration have become more sophisticated. I just wish there was more public discussion accompanying this shift in cultural and ecological consciousness.

Because as ecologist Daniel Botkin writes in the postscript to his pioneering book, Discordant Harmonies:

Nature in the twenty-first century will be a nature that we make; the question is the degree to which this molding will be intentional or unintentional, desirable or undesirable.

As I see it, anything that enlarges our understanding of nature and our role in shaping it (as urban ecology has done in recent years), is a good thing.

Silvio: Is there something about doing animal stories that is more pleasurable than doing a people story?

Simon: An animal is never duplicitous. An animal will never get involved in gratuitous cruelty. And it’s very refreshing to go see them after you’ve spent a lot of time interviewing politicians.

Talk about nailing both human and animal nature in one punch! In another exchange towards the end of the short segment he makes another interesting observation:

Silvio: You’ve met a lot of people who devote their lives to a particular species, but also a particular small community of animals.

Simon: That’s right. These are wonderful people. I’ve never met one of these people who have devoted their lives to animals that I didn’t like. And they’ve all got quite a bit in common.

Silvio: Like what?

Simon: They don’t like people very much.

Even though I write about environmental issues a fair bit, I don’t care much for nature, personally. Never go on strolls through the woods or hikes through the hills. The snippet of green space inside D.C. traffic circles is about as much as I can handle.

And this seems shocking:

He talks about the new house he’s going to buy now that the kids are bigger and he’s making money. He wants it to be in the country — in the mountains maybe, with trees all around, a place where he can fish off his own dock. That would be ideal, your feet in the water and nothing in sight but trees. The truth is, blankety blank really loves nature.

In contemporary public discourse, concern for “the environment” is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even free-market fundamentalists strain to display their ecological credentials, while corporations that sell fossil fuels genuflect at the altar of sustainability. Everyone has discovered how nice it is to be green. Will popular sentiment translate into public policy? There is reason to be skeptical.

After all, we have been here before.

There’s much to chew on in the Lears essay, and you’ll likely find yourself alternately agreeing and disagreeing as you read through it. For example, some of you Joe Romm acolytes may applaud the whacks against the Breakthrough Institute boys, then wince at the spanking Lears administers to Bill McKibben.

I’d like to return to the essay in another post, after I’ve fully digested it, especially because some of the “cautionary lessons” that Lears discusses from the 1970s and 1980s speak to the heated, contemporary debate over climate change politics and policy.

But a few quick observations. I noticed that Lears annoints Donald Worster as the top dog in the field of environmental history:

Over the last quarter of a century, he has played the leading role in creating the field of environmental history, producing a series of pathbreaking books on ecological thought and its consequences (or lack of them). Now he has turned his talents to Muir, the iconic mountain man.

That passage is mostly true; it would be more accurate to say that Worster played a leading role. For my money, William Cronon, Carolyn Merchant, Richard White, Alfred Crosby, Patty Limerick, among others, have also played leading roles in the emergence of environmental history as compelling sub-discipline of history.

As I’ve commented before on this blog, though, I still believe that cultural geographers beat environmental historians to the punch, pioneers such as Carl Sauer, David Lowenthal, and J.B. Jackson.

Finally, if you want a hint of where Lears stakes his own meta-argument, read this passage, which comes near the end:

The history of electric cars is a green parable for our time. It raises subversive questions about roads not taken. It shows that, without adequate public backing, green entrepreneurs–no matter how shrewd–cannot successfully buck the corporate consensus. And above all it challenges the fundamental dogma of development, technological determinism. For decades if not centuries, critics of development have been told that the capitalist (and for a while, the socialist) version of progress is simply unstoppable–a neutral, inevitable, and beneficent process that is beyond politics and policy debate. For a moment, in the forgotten 1970s, this dogma came under scrutiny. But the cyber-revolution of the last thirty years revived it. Techno-determinists from Thomas Friedman to Bill Gates have repeatedly told us that we must choose to do what we have to do anyway– re-organize our lives in accordance with the dictates of technology. The rhetoric of inevitability conceals the business interests it serves, and negates the possibility of challenging them.

I hope the Lears essay engenders a lively debate over the eco/societal roads taken and not taken.

I remember my head nearly exploding as I read it over ten years ago, while studying environmental policy in graduate school. One of Krieger’s numerous provocative passages:

What’s wrong with plastic trees? My guess is that there is very little wrong with them. Much more can be done with plastic trees and the like to give most people the feeling that they are experiencing nature. We will have to realize that the way in which we experience nature is conditioned by our society—which more and more is seen to be receptive to responsible interventions.

The notion that our conceptions of nature are culturally constructed (as in Bill Cronon’s Wilderness critique) is anathema to most environmentalists. That doesn’t negate the intrinsic value of nature, but it does make you queston (at least for me, it does) some of those cherished (and mythical) ideas about nature. But hey, that’s not me talking, it’s the NyQuil and Benadryl.

Most Americans know very little about wildlife and nature, and this affects their ability to make intelligent, rational, and well-considered decisions.

Also, I don’t think that intelligence + knowledge of nature necessarily = “rational, well-considered decisions.” In Boulder, Colorado, where I just spent a year, people are highly intelligent but let the deer roam wild because they like having Bambi in their midst. That attracts the mountain lions. I wouldn’t call this behavior on the part of the Boulder residents “rational” or “well-considered.”