3 Citations (Cronon)

1. Cronon uses William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem "The Prelude" to illustrate the previous definition of wilderness. This poem exemplifies terror in the face of the divine sense of nature. Cronin uses this poem to trace the changing definitions of wilderness over time in order to eventually set up the current ideology of wilderness, and then critique it.

2. Cronon uses journalist Bill McKibben’s book "The End of Nature" as a tool: he introduces it merely to criticize it, and thus furthers his own argument. McKibben, an environmentalist focused very much on global warming, published his work "The End of Nature" in 1989. This book is often argued to be one of the first books available to the general audience about climate change. In this book, McKibben argues that humans will eventually kill nature because the human and the natural cannot coexist. In a passage discussing the greenhouse effect at another point in the book, McKibben writes, “We have built a greenhouse, a human creation where there once bloomed a sweet and wild garden” (78). McKibben thus argues that human impact directly contrasts this “sweet and wild garden”, or ‘true nature’. This idea of ‘true nature’, which separates the human and non-human and essentially makes nature the ‘other’, is the very argument Cronon critiques. Cronon argues that nature should not be viewed as this pristine “sweet and wild garden”, something that should not be touched by human activity. Instead, his main argument is that humans are just as much a part of nature as this garden, and our ideology which separates ourselves from nature is inherently limiting. Through the use of McKibben’s portrayal of nature as an ‘other’, Cronon reveals how this can only be the case if we view nature as solely nature if it kept pristine. He therefore argues that the natural is inherently part of human life, and not as separate as our current Western ideology argues.

3. Cronon uses historian and environmentalist Wallace Stegner’s exploration of wilderness in order to help convey his final message that we need to acknowledge that we are a part of nature and then decide what impact we should have on it. Stegner writes that “we are the most dangerous species of life on the planet”, meaning we as humans have a large responsibility because we can impact our environment so significantly. Cronon essentially uses this to feed into his argument that we need to find the appropriate balance between our human creation and the nature that lives within us.