Nature documentaries mislead viewers into thinking that there are lots of untouched landscapes left. There arenāt.
By consistently presenting nature as an untouched wilderness, many nature documentaries mislead viewers into thinking that there are lots of untouched wildernesses left. I certainly thought there were, before I became an environmental journalist. This misapprehension then prompts people to build their environmental ideas around preserving untouched places and to embrace profoundly antihuman āsolutionsā to environmental problems, such as kicking indigenous people out of their homeland. In truth, wilderness doesnāt really exist.
In his famous 1995 essay, āThe Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,ā the historian William Cronon demolished the concept of wilderness. Cronon argued that European settlers in North America had transformed their inherited idea of āwildernessā as worthless, scary, and unimproved land by reimagining it as a sublime, prehuman Eden. āThe myth of the wilderness as āvirginā uninhabited land had always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once called that land home,ā Cronon wrote. In reality, the Americas had already been thoroughly shaped by the nearly 60 million people who lived there when colonists first arrived. Agriculture and other intensive human use was widespread, covering 10 percent of the Americasā landmass; human-caused fires maintained grasslands and prairies; hunting, foraging, gathering, and replantingāsometimes in new placesāregulated the populations and ranges of dozens of species.
The wilderness myth is simply factually inaccurate, in the Americas and elsewhere. It has also been a real stumbling block for conservation. With wilderness set as the gold standard for nature, any human influence has come to be seen as negative by default. The myth has thus ruled out any approaches to saving nature except walling it off and keeping humans out. Trying to āsave the planetā with a wilderness mindset has been all about self-exile. It offers ālittle hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like,ā as Cronon wrote.
This misconception has also had DRASTIC effects on peopleās mental health and spiritual worldview:
when the only āhealthyā environment is depicted as one without people, many people internalize the (easily bent towards ecofascism) view that ultimately, people do not belong on Earth, Earth would be better without people, etc. It feeds very well into forms of self-hate and misanthropy.
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