MODULE 5: Is wilderness a social construct?

 AGENDA

1. Recap
2. Wilderness & wildlife -- disappearing
3. Is wildness something to value?

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Recap

1. Schedule, reports
2. Urban wildlife trips
3. Loving nature 

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Wilderness & wildlife are disappearing

• wilderness = areas relatively untouched by humans, working according to their own logic
• wildlife = animals not bred or tamed by human beings
• Nature article (look at maps and images)
• World Wildlife Fund

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How is wilderness/wildlife loss bad? -- Module 1

1. bad for humans (Baxter)
2. bad for animals (Singer, Palmer)
3. bad for plants (Taylor)
4. bad for whole ecoystems (Leopold)
5. bad that species are disappearing (Russow)

New idea: wildness itself is valuable, so loss of wildness is bad

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Overview of views on the value of wildness--

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VALUERS OF WILDNESS

Henry David Thoreau

E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

Do you value wildness?

the wild Antarctic

from a brochure about visiting

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SKEPTICS ABOUT WILDNESS

William Cronon 

•     "The Trouble with Wilderness" (1995) -- original 
•     NYT essay

Cronon's main arguments 

1. Wilderness is a human creation
2. Wilderness is literally made, not found
3. Privileged people long for wilderness and thus invade it
4. Valuing wilderness makes us devalue local nature

1. Wilderness is a "human creation"

The general idea (NYT p. 2)

Much of history (and in some places today), wilderness is thought of as terrifying, savage, deserted, bewildering  (original p. 2)

Little Red Riding Hood

But at the end of 19th century, wilderness thought of as garden of eden   (original p. 3)

  

Bierstadt, "The Rocky Mountains" (1863)

Wilderness seen as positively sacred, a place to have religious experiences--though with an element of terror (original p. 4-5)

Henry David Thoreau (1846), writing about climbing
Mount Katahdin in Maine

Another view: wilderness as comfortable church (original p. 6)

John Muir writing about Yosemite valley

Wilderness as playground for the rich-- impressive lodges in National Parks (original p. 8)

St Mary lodge, Glacier National Park

Wilderness as a frontier where rugged individualism can flourish (original p. 7)

Monument Valley, Utah (where many westerns were shot)

Wilderness as a place for authenticity--where you can be yourself (p. 11)

Anything else?

2. Wilderness was actually made, not found (p. 10)

• Removal of native Americans from national parks (article and video)
• We will look closely at this issue Friday and Monday
• Recent example:  removal of Maasai from wilderness areas in Tanzania

3. Privileged people long for nature and thus invade it

• NYT passages -- p. 3-4

3. Overvaluing wildness has bad consequences

• It teaches us to value certain things and then makes them distant and unattainable (original p. 17)
• We search for pristine wilderness and don't notice equally impressive nature nearby (original p 18-19, below)