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William Cronon - The Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature

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In William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90. The time has come to rethink wilderness. This will seem a heretical claim to many environmentalists, since the idea of wilderness has for decades been a fundamental tenet—indeed, a passion—of the environmental movement, especially in the United States. For many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth. It is an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness. Seen in this way, wilderness presents itself as the best antidote to our human selves, a refuge we must somehow recover if we hope to save the planet. As Henry David Thoreau once famously declared, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” (1) But is it? The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is n

William Cronon - The Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature William Cronon The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature by William Cronon Print-formatted version: PDF In William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature , New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90. The time has come to rethink wilderness. This will seem a heretical claim to many environmentalists, since the idea of wilderness has for decades been a fundamental tenet-indeed, a passion-of the environmental movement, especially in the United States. For many Amer

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