William Cronon — The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature

20 published claims from this book.

• Before the nineteenth century, wilderness meant wasteland and evoking terror, not beauty
• By the late nineteenth century the wilderness sublime had been domesticated into sentimentality
• Early romantic writers experienced the sublime as terror, not pleasure
• Every landscape, from city to wilderness, is both cultural and natural
• Honoring wildness requires critical self-consciousness, non-use, and gratitude
• Modern environmental awe of nature is secularized religious worship.
• Solving environmental problems requires an ethic for the home landscape, not just remote wilderness
• The garden tree is as wild and wondrous as the forest tree
• The sublime and the frontier jointly remade wilderness into its modern form
• The word wilderness once meant desolate wasteland, not sacred refuge
• Tourist spectating converted sublime terror into comfortable sentiment
• Wilderness appreciation was an elite urban leisure projection, not a rural ideal.
• Wilderness is a cultural construct, not a place that exists apart from humanity
• Wilderness is a cultural construction, not an untouched natural sanctuary
• Wilderness is a state of mind defined by wonder, not a fact of nature
• Wilderness originally signified biblical places of moral peril and exile
• Wilderness preservation grew directly out of the vanishing-frontier lament.
• Wilderness protection has historically been affiliated with wealth and class privilege
• Wilderness recreation is a class privilege that devalues rural land-based labor
• Wilderness wonder is a cultural state of mind, not a natural fact