The Trouble with Environmental Framing: How William Cronon Challenges Framing in “The Trouble with Wilderness”
What is wilderness? Ask many pivotal nature writers, including the likes of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, and they would likely say it is a pristine location untouched by the filthy and greedy hands of civilization. They would also say that wilderness is a place to which people can escape the wickedness of urban areas, though this would admittedly taint the inhumanity of the “natural world” of which those writers hold in such high esteem. William Cronon, a self-proclaimed wilderness enthusiast, takes issue with the current framing to which the term “wilderness” belongs. In his essay The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, he argues that the beliefs most humans have built in their minds in regards to wilderness, and nature more generally, are entirely human creations, formed over time by historical events. This dualism, between humans and wilderness, civilization and nature, is a separation that is both intangible and utterly false.
Much of Cronon’s essay explores changes in environmental framing which have already occurred over the past few centuries, especially in regards to how humans view wilderness. three centuries ago, wilderness had quite the opposite connotation that it does now, mainly due to Biblical texts. Wilderness was considered a desolate place, a wasteland outside of Eden (where humans resided) that humans would only venture into if forced. Cronon quotes passages from the Bible, as well as popular literature from the time such as Paradise Lost by John Milton, as representations of the distaste and often fear that humans felt towards wilderness.
In the mid and late 1800’s the framing changed, with the help of Thoreau, Muir, and William Wordsworth, among others. It became a place for the supernatural, where one could encounter either God or the devil, and later where one could just encounter God. Wilderness, in its supposed pristineness, where a human could feel they were the only being on earth, was akin to God’s temple. Then, again, there was a shift in the framing of wilderness as the American “frontier” began to vanish. Cronon states that “the modern environmental movement is itself a grandchild of romanticism and post-frontier ideology”. Both ways of thinking have led to the idea that wilderness is a place untouched by humankind, the exploration of which allows humans to be reinvigorated by escaping the confinements of civilization. This is a view with which Cronon vehemently disagrees.
In the continuum of environmental thought, Cronon’s views fall on the eco/biocentric side, in line with social ecology. However, he draws the line at comparisons to deep ecology. Cronon argues that deep ecologists, such as Earth First! founder Dave Foreman, have built frames not so different from the romanticism and frontier ideologies. They too believe that wilderness is a virgin landscape for which civilization must be abandoned. By comparing these sometimes opposing views, Cronon displays parallels of thought that continue to be pervasive in current framing of the environment. These views regard issues that primarily affect humanity as exceedingly less important than those affecting “wilderness” areas, and by doing so entirely miss the point of caring for the environment. Larger environmental justice issues are ignored because in these issues nature and humanity coexist. By opposing all of these ways of framing, Cronon hopes to emphasize the crucial bond that links humans to their environment.
Above all, he argues that humans are inseparable from nature as it cannot be untouched by our passage. Cronon presents the views of past nature writers and environmental thinkers who have painted wilderness as an inhuman experience, and asks that we abandon the dualisms we have created to separate ourselves from our world. In short, the trouble with our framing of the environment, and with the frames that wilderness conjures in our minds, is the false separation we have created. The human-nature dualism allows us to be dismissive of our own environments because we fail to acknowledge the part we play in our own ecosystems. When we do this we outright ignore the larger environmental issues our world faces in light of human actions. A better approach — and one backed by other environmental writers and activists such as Aldo Leopold, Andrew Light, and Val Plumwood — is to accept ourselves as parts of nature, to see humans within and around other organisms. To understand that we are never outside of nature, the wild, the environment. Consider the following example of a walk through “wilderness” and an interaction among the organisms that live there:
Small oval pine cones drop to the ground, their landing muffled by needles and other debris that coats the base of the tree. Two squirrels chitter and run up the next bough, chuckling as you dodge their woody bombs. A trio of furry troublemakers descend the next tree over, scurrying to the ground and pausing a foot away from their tree. They sniff the air, black noses twitching in response to faint aromas impossible for you to discern, tails morphing in and out of complex curlicues as they ponder their next action. Suddenly they all bounce on the needle-dusted floor, going no particular direction, much like children in a bouncy castle. A soft, slow wind rolls through, tickling your cheek and fluffing the squirrels’ tails. You smile and the squirrels flinch, then dart back up the tree.
Sharp chirping catches your attention. You tilt your head up and turn, searching the dense boughs for the source. Your gaze settles on a petite grey and red bird. It cocks its head, staring at you, waiting for you to move. You settle back against your tree and gaze back. Satisfied, it chirps again and glides to the ground, accompanied by three cousins that had been silently waiting in the canopy above. They spread out across the grass, alternately looking blankly in various directions and stuffing their heads into the dirt. One, the first bird, pulls out a thin worm, flecks of dirt dropping off of it as it squirms. The other birds chirp in approval. Then a louder, forceful call of a larger bird pierces the air. The grey-red birds scatter upwards, noiseless except for the frantic flap of their wings. You lean against the tree and wait. You hold your arm out from your body, and in a few moments a passing ladybug alights on your wrist. It explores the back of your hand and jumps off of your index finger. As it flits back into the air, you sigh and pad slowly from the tree, pine cones and needles crunching under your feet.
This description, of trees, birds, squirrels, might typically invoke images of an evergreen forest, deep in some human-forgotten land that you just happened to stumble across. It might be. It could also be an experience on the Oregon State University campus, or bench-side observations in an urban park. Importantly, the narrative does not depict the environment as pure, human-less. The “you” is human, both observing and engaging in their experience of this environment. Does this make it any less of a wild place? Cronon would think not. He stresses the importance of developing a new way of understanding wilderness. He states that we have to “honor the Other within and the Other next door as much as we do the exotic Other that lives far away”. Call it what you want: nature, environment, wilderness, the wild, the other. Our framework has been inundated with dichotomies; we cannot continue to view humans as separate from the other that surrounds and sustains us.
The distinction in importance that we make between humans and wildlife, cities and undeveloped areas, is a perverse oversimplification, a fiction that we have believed for far too long. Cronon uses his exploration of the history of wilderness to explain how we have been taught to think about nature, and in doing so persuades us that our frames are incorrect. He ends his essay with the hope that we stop seeing wilderness as the exception to humanity, a pristine and remote area untouched by humans to which we can escape civilization, and instead use the current understanding of wilderness to remind us of the “nature we had forgotten to recognize as natural”. When we begin to see the similarities between a tree in the forest and a tree in our backyard, the salmon on our plates and those slicing through the ocean, we will finally begin to understand and appreciate that the wilderness is not a separate nearby entity, it is our home. Only when we can respect it as the place where we and all the other creatures on this earth live can will our minds be set towards positive change.
