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Comment: The Trouble with Bill Cronon's Wilderness

Bill Cronon's "trouble with wilderness" is ostensibly an assessment of the role the wilderness idea plays for environmentalists in the United States. But his "trouble" is far less with that wilderness idea and more with his own. He is wrestling with a wilderness idea that is confined to a few writers rather than with wilderness devotees who actually do it. Hence his account is well off the mark. For this rejoinder, I draw on two sources of evidence, quite different from Cronon's. First is my own experience in the eastern wilderness movement running through the decade of the 1970s. I was one of a considerable number of easterners who thought that there was wilderness in the East. We studied USGS topographic maps; identified large, roadless sections; scouted them out; drew up proposals for their protection as wilderness areas; and presented the plans to our congressional delegations. Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Roderick Nash were never mentioned. We had no thought of preserving "virgin" forest, since almost all of it was cut-over. It was the Forest Service who argued that none of it was wilderness because it wasn't "pristine." We retorted that it wasn't how it came to be that was important but what it looked like now, and we quoted that provision of the 1964 act that spoke of wilderness as a place where "human intrusion is relatively unnoticeable." What's more, we thought of it all as part of our own "backyard," not as something far away and remote. At about the same time I decided to find out about the wilderness movement in the country as a whole, joined several dozen organizations (western as well as eastern) to obtain their newsletters and documents, and proceeded to build an archive of wilderness activity. I found out that it wasn't much different "out there." People became interested in large roadless areas they knew about; they wrote about their "backyard;" they didn't try to persuade others to read "major thinkers" to get their support but, just like we did, to expose them to it through slide shows and directly by taking them there. The dynamics of human engagement with wilderness was the same: people living in an urbanized society who felt that wilderness areas would enhance the quality of their life while enjoying modern material standards of urban living. As I observe it, the dynamics of Bureau of Land Management wilderness, today's political "hot spot," are much the same.