The Trouble With William Cronon’s Wilderness Fallacy
In the quote above, I believe William Cronon is suggesting that to say humans are contaminating wilderness is a contradiction, in that wilderness is (ontologically) a human entity. But I believe the contradiction arises from equivocation (a logical fallacy) on the word wilderness. Let me explain.
It seems to me that the term wilderness in Cronon’s piece has two meanings which he uses interchangeably. The first sense of wilderness is the romanticized, subjective human creation that Cronon artfully articulates and criticizes as being historical fantasy.
The second sense of wilderness is that of the objective, physical phenomena (e.g., trees, soil, animals and their biomes), of which a (small) portion remains (more or less) intact as it was before human impact.
When Cronon argues that wilderness is a “product of civilization” he is referring to the former subjective sense of wilderness. But in the predicate of the sentence where he says that “[wilderness] could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made,” he is using wilderness in the latter objective/physical sense.
But if we distinguish between the two senses of wilderness, the claim makes no sense to me:
The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that [physical wilderness] is not quite what [subjective wilderness] seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, [subjective wilderness] is quite profoundly a human creation . . . [physical wilderness] is 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. Instead, [subjective wilderness] is a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made.
If there were never a human being, then physical wilderness would exist nonetheless; however subjective wilderness, the sense of wilderness Cronon finds most flawed, would not. Therefore, because the two senses of wilderness have distinct ontologies, they must be distinct things. Thus, it seems to me that arguing for protection of physical wilderness from further human impact does not entail contradiction, because humans created subjective wilderness — not physical wilderness.
Now, let’s discuss one sense of wilderness at a time, rather than conflating them. With respect to physical wilderness, it seems correct that indigenous peoples lived in many areas we now call “wilderness” (e.g., Yosemite) for thousands of years. But the fact that we even can consider those areas as possible wilderness underscores the fact that relative to the impact Europeans have had on biotic communities in a few hundred years, indigenous peoples lived largely environmentally sustainable lives — despite comparatively small-scale practices of clearing land, etc. Indigenous peoples did not cause global warming. They did not deposit plastic in the oceans. They did not cause extinction of multiple species nor did they cause the disappearance of range bison and grizzly bear from North America south of Yellowstone.
With respect to subjective wilderness, that cultural views have changed over time seems a reasonable claim. Europeans’ view of wilderness have changed dramatically as they developed technology (and they possess the metaphysical commitments consistent with using that technology) to “conquer” the wilds. They sought to expand their territory and monetize natural resources while making their lives safer and easier — upon the lands to which they then claimed ownership (over the dead bodies and destroyed societies of the existing inhabitants). Once those goals were achieved, wild nature was no longer the enemy, but was spiritualized and romanticized as an anecdote for the dehumanization of industrialization — hence the efforts to preserve the last remaining wilderness (which Cronon now asserts doesn’t exist).
So what is Cronon’s conclusion? From the undisputed fact that European cultural views of wilderness have changed it neither follows that there does not remain at least some objective wilderness worth preserving; that wilderness is a mere fantasy; nor that we might as well turn remaining old growth forests into tree farms. It also does not follow that because Yosemite once had indigenous people living there, that it is forever disqualified as wilderness. Nor is the moral injustice of removing people from the land on which they lived, only to bring them back seasonally as theatrical props, relevant to the question of preserving Yosemite Valley.
Any comments? Am I misreading Cronon? I’m open to disagreement, agreement, praise, or even condemnation!
Cronon, William (1997). Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. _Journal of the History of Biology_ 30 (2):291-302.Photo by Aniket Deole on Unsplash
