“The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”, by William Cronon, discusses our long and ever-changing history with the wilderness and nature. Cronon explains that nature has become a place for us to escape our own lives and civilization, the wilderness “stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth”. However, the wilderness is a human creation, “a product of that civilization”, and its definition has changed greatly throughout our human history. Nature acts as a mirror which reflects ourselves, and our own constructed civilization.

I found that evolution of the word “wilderness” interesting. It used to mean “barren/desolate”. In a religious sense, the wilderness used to represent a place far from god that held the temptations of satan. The word now means the complete opposite, both literal and in a religious context. With popular environmental writers, such as Thoreau and John Muir, feelings toward the wilderness changed, “Satan’s home had become God’s own temple”. With changes in civilization during the Victorian era and the introduction of romanticism, nature became a place to protect instead of conquer. Yosemite was declared by California as a wildland park in 1864, and Yellowstone became the first national park in 1872. The wilderness becomes a place we must protect from ourselves, or protect from civilization.

This prompts the question of whether we are part of nature, or separate. Cronon says “In the wilderness the boundaries between human and nonhuman, between natural and supernatural, had always seemed less certain than elsewhere”. I enjoyed the inclusion of William Wordswort’s poem about his personal, almost religious experience of the sublime in the Alps, “Were all like workings of one mind, the features, Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;” We are nature but also separate, nature and religion come together, “mountain as cathedral”. Is nature still the other, are we part of nature, or have we become too far separated. Is the sublime in the power of our own minds, or the power of nature and the wilderness.

This was very interesting to read, by learning and attempting to understand our relationship with the wilderness and nature, we can understand our own history. Our relationship with nature has changed, both in definition and feeling, are we part of nature, or separate? Our own notions of nature reflect human history.