wilderness and the transcultural

william cronon from Uncommon Ground, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature":

...[W]ilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest. The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism's most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are -- or ought to be.

But the trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somhow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world. The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living -- urban folk for whom food comes from a supermarket or a restaurant instead of a field, and for whom the wooden houses in which they live and work apparently have no meaningful connection to the forests in which trees grow and die. Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land.

This, then, is the central paradox: wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature is not. If this is so -- if by definition wilderness leaves no place for human beings, save perhaps as contemplative sojourners enjoying their leisurely reverie in God's natural cathedral -- then also by definition it can offer no solution to the environmental and other problems that confront us. To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.

Worse: the extent that we live in an urban-industrial civilization but at the same time pretend to ourselves that our real home is in the wilderness, to just that extent we give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead. ... ◊


...furthermore, here's a link to a most fantastic essay by pramod parajuli concerning a brief history of, what he calls, the "rational" versus "relational" modes of approaching nature, ecosystems, and the economics thereof.

"The whole problem is basically one of lifestyle. There can be no solution unless the conflict between lifestyles, between immediate and future interests, are resolved. Because even when a certain section of the population says the wildlife and forest should be preserved, they have not changed their basic vision of life."

terms and concept he refers to here include
- agro-ecology (such as by wendel berry) -- searches for "a golden mean of stewardship and sustainable use" -- ramachandra guha)
- bioregional consciousness
- deep ecology (arne naess)
- ecological anthropology vs. cultural anthropology
- ecosystem & agro-ecosystem
- ecological ethnicity
- ethno-ecology?
- environmentalism ("what environmentalists defend is the environment but not nature..." -- pramod parajuli)
- foodshed
- restoration and renewal (shiva visvanathan)
- voluntary agrarian simplicity (mahatma gandhi)

i also highly recommend getting a good look at the rest of terrain.org while you're there.



the transcultural antagonism that enters into the ring, where colonialist marginalizations had left many of us feeling safe, must not be taken lightly. we may hold the moneybags, but the tools of service are in fact not tools at all; far from means for humans, they are human beings, and many of them are starving, broke, or flailing helplessly by the undertoe of capitalism towards a maelstrom collapse. the first clues of degeneration appear in the misunderstanding that (once the pocketbooks are closed) comes over the faces of those whose mental images of wilderness aren't accompanied by indigenous conception (as we so often grant them to be). the clues appear in the uprise of empty hands whose only long-term hope for survival now might only lie in a local concession of agro-ecological sustainability. to investigate the clues, we communicate -- and to reverse the process for regeneration, we reflect.

upon reflection, we can see that divisions among the fields, e.g., environmentalism, economics, science, politics, etc., have been conceptually integral to our culture for centuries now, products of our cognitive evolution. now that we must think globally, however, we must face the reality of our limitations, still under the influence of a momentous (mostly still unconscious) colonialist development agenda that has avoided memetic extinction. we must redesign ourselves -- better yet: be redesigned collectively, intra- and interculturally both, by the process that we can call formal learning. (this is the heart of the fight for education.) awareness and mindfulness make us better communicators and reflectors. this is, after all, our only hope as well for a meaningful future.