Reading William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness” made me realize that our era of “aesthetics” has always existed. He describes the wilderness as “not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization.” I thought this was really funny and so accurate to refer to human civilization as a “taint” contaminant because anything we touch and access we ultimately destroy. Our idea of wilderness is a fragment that we created. Cronon continues by noting that “As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires.” Our perception is flawed because we only see through the lens of our own cultural experiences and desires. Cronon highlights this by pointing out that “what brought each of us to the places where such memories became possible is entirely a cultural invention.” I found this to be interesting because at one point in time, the idea of wilderness was cultivated around a biblical meaning, and it was associated with terror and fear. As society progressed and people and politics became more secular, the idea of wilderness followed that secular path.