"Rethinking the Human Place in Nature"

The environmental historian William Cronon wrote an essay "The Trouble with Wilderness" of which I was reminded of during the Ecological Urbanism reading. Cronon, an environmentalist, is critical of the environmentalist notion of designating certain places as "wilderness" and the problems that arise when you separate man from nature. 


Some of the themes from the essay

• It creates a situation where nature cannot exist within civilization, and the idea that civilization must destroy nature in order to exist. 
• By not developing land in certain parks and preserves, It allows us to justify to ourselves the destruction of the landscape elsewhere
• The notion of "wilderness" is itself ironically a manmade invention. By doing this we are inventing and designed what is "wild" 
• By compartmentalizing nature to wilderness areas, we have removed the accessibility to nature by many. 
• The idea of "wilderness" invents a false narrative that an unmaintained landscape where humans don't exist is the natural state of the world, where in fact humans have been around and have evolved with and maintained the environment for millions of years. That our natural place is in the landscape.