#william cronon

[sicknessinmotion]

THE WOLVES BIT THEIR WAY OUT; ON NATURE

@gnawgag // william cronon // william shakespeare // @gnawgag // jack london // reg saner // sunlightafterdark (instagram)

[probablyasocialecologist]

The Nature You See in Documentaries Is Beautiful and False

Nature documentaries mislead viewers into thinking that there are lots of untouched landscapes left. There aren’t.

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 “solutions” to environmental problems, such as kicking indigenous people out of their homeland. In truth, wilderness doesn’t really exist.

In his famous 1995 essay, “The Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” the historian William Cronon demolished the concept of wilderness. Cronon argued that European settlers in North America had transformed their inherited idea of “wilderness” as worthless, scary, and unimproved land by reimagining it as a sublime, prehuman Eden. “The myth of the wilderness as ‘virgin’ uninhabited land had always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once called that land home,” 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 Americas’ landmass; human-caused fires maintained grasslands and prairies; hunting, foraging, gathering, and replanting—sometimes in new places—regulated 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 “save the planet” with a wilderness mindset has been all about self-exile. It offers “little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like,” as Cronon wrote.

[arisingonmorningsinnocent]

--William Cronon, "The Trouble With Wilderness"

[wellconstructedsentences]

All human groups consciously change their environment to some extent—one might even argue that this, in combination with language, is the crucial trait distinguishing people from other animals.

Changes in the Land by William Cronon

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Reframing Narratives With Ecocriticism, With Dr Jenny Kerber

In this episode, Ariel discusses the topic of ecocriticism with Dr Jenny Kerber, Associate Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University. What is ecocriticism? Why is it important, especially for environmental activists and solarpunks, as a narrative reframing device? Solarpunks work very closely with speculation and imagination and as architects of the narratives by which we live our…

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[passengerpigeons]

The removal of Indians to create an "uninhabited wilderness" - uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place - reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is. ... Indeed, one of the most striking proofs of the cultural invention of wilderness is its thoroughgoing erasure of the history from which it sprang. In virtually all of its manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from history. Seen as the original garden, it is a place outside of time, from which human beings had to be ejected before the fallen world of history could properly begin. ... Seen as the sacred sublime, it is the home of a God who transcends history by standing as the One who remains untouched and unchanged by time's arrow. No matter what angle from which we regard it, wilderness offers us the illusion that we can escape the cares and troubles of the world in which our past has ensnared us.

William Cronon, "The Trouble With Wilderness," 1995.

[faustonomy]

On critical thought.

William Cronon, in his piece “Only Connect...” discusses what it means to be a liberally educated person. What one gathers after reading this piece is that being a liberally educated person means more than just attending a four year university program and holding a degree. I’d like to situate this within the context of the continuously diminishing humanities that we are witnessing, at the very, least here in America. Cronon lists some characteristics that someone who is thoroughly liberally educated might have: such as, nurturing and empowering the people around them, being able to listen effectively and actually hear what someone else has to say without only preparing a refutation or counter-argument, and respecting rigor as a way of seeking truth. Of this list, what stuck out to me the most was the characteristic of being able to talk with anyone. To me, this means more than just talking to someone you meet on the street or a friend of a friend. This means the ability to talk to someone who has an entirely different life and cultural experience than you, this means someone who has entirely different linguistic patterns or philosophical and theological views than you. I think that this is where critical thinking comes into play most commonly for those who use critical thinking. What I mean by critical thinking, in this case of being able to talk to anyone, is being able to identify points of difference and points of commonality and  furthermore being able to actively engage those points of commonality without treading disrespectfully upon those points of difference. This is no easy task. And in my case has involved engaging with religious theory that has a scholastic orientation outside of the Western philosophical enterprise - theory I would not have come across had it not been for my being able to take humanities focused classes. Specifically, engaging this theory from a religious studies point of view, in my opinion, was particularly effective in cultivating critical thinking skills insofar that religious studies exposes the student to traditions where notions of truth and reality are constructed in ways that can be diametrically opposed to the ways we construct them here in the Western world.

[sodomyaspraxis]

“The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation — indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It 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, it is a product of that civilization.”

-William Cronon