Resource Management

Since the mid-1990s, the critical turn in environmental thought has highlighted important insights that are still being grappled with today.William Cronon's work is perhaps the best-known example.In his essay 'The Trouble with Wilderness', Cronon critically demonstrated the many ways in which 'wilderness' is not pure or unadulterated or really even that 'wild' in the first place (1995).Instead, it is a term whose conceptual valence only makes sense in a larger ideological framework, one articulated primarily by white, male elites seeking alternatives to industrialism and its perceived threats to spiritual stability, social cohesion, and a narrowly-defined masculinity.Apart from this ideological framework, Cronon demonstrated, wilderness fails to fully cohere.Since Cronon's essay first appeared in 1995, the concept of wilderness has been debated and teased apart without end.Whose wilderness are we even talking about at this point?And is it worth returning to the work of the concept's major architects, whose understanding of wilderness is something not just Cronon, but now also Timothy Morton (2007), Dorceta Taylor (2016), Jedediah Purdy (2015), and so many others have cautioned us about?Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir are three such architects.Take Muir as an example.Politically speaking, Muir was instrumental in building broad political coalitions to win so-called 'wilderness' areas in the United States federal protection.If the National Parks are America's 'greatest idea', as Wallace Stegner famously said, then Muir should be counted among America's greatest 'ideators'.Muir spoke a powerful word for wilderness, regarding its protection as tantamount to protecting places of worship.As a result, Muir is hailed by many as a modern saint: the Episcopal Church includes him in its list of 'holy men and holy women', Muir's writings get published in series with names like Modern Spiritual Masters (2013), and his likeness even adorns the walls of some churches like Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, where

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• The Trouble with Wilderness

  William Cronon•Environmental History•1996

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