Analysis Of Trouble With Wilderness Per Cronon

In the three articles, we are exposed to a dilemma of this false ideology that we, citizens in this western culture, have placed on nature. We have caused a division between us and nature, a dualism. This is a recent development that has resulted from the development of a modern world. We don’t see nature in the cities and towns that most of us spend our lives in, we have an illusion that the uninhabited nature is pure and desirable. In Trouble with Wilderness, Cronon educates us about the term wilderness. Per Cronon, wilderness is a term that is a result of social construction that we have made and modified for our desire. For what was once a term for undesirable land that proposed challenges in stories of Jesus and Moses, we now have wilderness
refer to the alluring nature of the pure and uninhabited land.
The reference to nature as pure has been very pointed in this post, Alex Johnson in How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time exposes a mythos of nature is pure. He exposes this thoroughly in his discussion of David Quammen’s The Miracle of the Geese. Here geese are idealized, praised as possessing ‘liberty, grace, and devotion’. Johnson exposes the queer side of geese’s nature, the side that we often think as unnatural. That is very ironic to me, to judge nature as unnatural.
There is one last topic that I would like to touch on after reading these three articles this week and that is nature is with us in everything we do and everywhere we go. The ‘built’ world as described in the Elegy for a Garden is still part of nature, our lives (our bodies, our actions, our achievements) are also part of nature. Humans would be nowhere without nature, and nature wouldn’t be the same without humans. Humans are not separate from Earth and nature, as dualism seems to allude, we are in this together. We have a moral responsibility to accept that we are responsible for taking care of all of the nature, not just the pristine forests that we are attracted to in pictures.