Environmentalism is a kind of religion, and that’s OK, William Cronon told an audience of 150 at the Chicago History Museum in late November. Just don’t get fundamentalist about it. To put it another way, Joni Mitchell was wrong: there is no garden, we can’t get back to it, and trying to do so will just make it harder to protect nature.
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As with Chicago, so with you and me. Cronon told his audience that we can see ourselves as part of nature, because we’re products of geology and evolution, or we can see ourselves as outside of nature, because we stand back and judge things in a way rocks and tigers can’t. Both perspectives have value, he said, and we shouldn’t try to reconcile them or carry either one to extremes. He urges environmentalists who are trying to decide where and how to protect nature to ask both the inside-of-nature question (“Can we keep on doing this here indefinitely?”) and the outside-of-nature question (“What would this place be like if we weren’t here?”).
Since then Cronon’s realized that the idea of wilderness in this country as a perfect, unspoiled place is both wrong and dangerous. First of all, it’s been nothing of the sort for a long time. The American illusion of a virgin, unoccupied continent was created by European diseases that killed most Native Americans–who’d been remarkable managers of the land. Second, thinking of people as spoilers isn’t very constructive. To protect nature we have to change human culture to value nonhuman nature more highly and to think longer term, and if environmentalists start by defining human culture as vile, who will listen to a call for change?
In the same vein, he recommends that environmentalists go easy on the apocalyptic rhetoric and be more open to the ideas of supposed adversaries. “Ranchers and loggers know things about nature that backpackers and kayakers do not, and vice versa,” he told his museum audience, and talking concretely about a particular place can help both sides appreciate this. For instance, he said, when the Wilderness Society gets together supporters and opponents to talk about the fate of places like northern Maine, it postpones the discusion of larger issues. Each person is asked to bring an object from the place under discussion and tell a story about what it means to him or her. Seated around the table, three on three, loggers and wilderness advocates often find that they bring the same objects and tell similar stories. “They may still have arguments,” he said, “but they both realize that they love the place.”
