Wilderness appreciation was an elite urban leisure projection, not a rural ideal.

Evidence

The irony, of course, was that in the process wilderness came to reflect the very civilization its devotees sought to escape. Ever since the nineteenth century, celebrating wilderness has been an activity mainly for well-to-do city folks. Country people generally know far too much about working the land to regard unworked land as their ideal. In contrast, elite urban tourists and wealthy sportsmen projected their leisure-time frontier fantasies onto the American landscape and so created wilderness in their own image. — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 36

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to class analysis in the polyad — who gets to define nature and for whom. — connects to: Wilderness is a cultural construction, not an untouched natural sanctuary — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 5; Wilderness recreation is a class privilege that devalues rural land-based labor — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 65; Modern environmental awe of nature is secularized religious worship. — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 41 (+2 more)
• recurring: this claim recurs 3 times within its source

Related

• Wilderness recreation is a class privilege that devalues rural land-based labor (similarity 0.91)
• Wilderness is a cultural construction, not an untouched natural sanctuary (similarity 0.88)
• Wilderness is a cultural construct, not a place that exists apart from humanity (similarity 0.86)
• Wilderness protection has historically been affiliated with wealth and class privilege (similarity 0.86)
• Wilderness is a state of mind defined by wonder, not a fact of nature (similarity 0.84)
• Wilderness wonder is a cultural state of mind, not a natural fact (similarity 0.84)
• By the late nineteenth century the wilderness sublime had been domesticated into sentimentality (similarity 0.84)
• The word wilderness once meant desolate wasteland, not sacred refuge (similarity 0.83)
• Before the nineteenth century, wilderness meant wasteland and evoking terror, not beauty (similarity 0.83)
• Every landscape, from city to wilderness, is both cultural and natural (similarity 0.81)
• William Cronon — The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature (similarity 0.81)
• Wilderness originally signified biblical places of moral peril and exile (similarity 0.80)
• The sublime and the frontier jointly remade wilderness into its modern form (similarity 0.80)
• Solving environmental problems requires an ethic for the home landscape, not just remote wilderness (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Wilderness is a cultural construct, not a place that exists apart from humanity #expands (0.80) — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 5