Far from being the 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. As Henry David Thoreau once famously declared, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” ( 1)īut is it? The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. 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. 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. For many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth. 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. In William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the The Trouble with Wilderness or, Getting Back to
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