John Cronon Wilderness Analysis

Thesis: “We mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem” (1).
I. “You were in the presence of something irreducibly nonhuman, something profoundly Other than yourself. Wilderness is made of that too.” (1) o Cronon begins his essay by defining wilderness as he sees it. While a great deal of his arguments are based off the idea that the wild is unnatural, he wants to clarify what that means—not the wild and nature itself is fake, but rather it is our perception of wilderness and what we associate with it that creates these issues. To begin with he defines the wilderness as an experience—one of being out in nature, seeing something utterly distinct and unnatural to us, an entity that we know is something we could never fully understand. This definition of wild as Cronon presents it leads into his next point: how our concept of wild is what he considers unnatural. This created concept of wilderness is what he later identifies as the being a core part of our rocky relationship with the wild.
II. “Go back 250 years in American and European history, and you do not find nearly so many people wandering around remote corners of the planet …show more content…
He claims we use nature as an excuse, that humans are so set on preserving nature, on not interacting with it more than we have to, that we never consider a way to live in tandem. Later down, he explains that it is not the wild he has an issue with, but rather the mindset through which we think about nature and how we define it. This leads to movements to preserve wild that can lead to tragedies like what the Native Americans experienced, or even a focus on preserving what we think as wild at the cost of what might not fit into that schema of wild plains and great