Response:Trouble with Wilderness

Yosemite Valley

When I began reading The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature I actually started to become fairly upset. How could the place that I love and long to go to to leave society and all of its constraints be created by the society that I’m trying to flee. When I read further I began to agree with Cronon. We have “set up” wilderness as an escape a false sense of pristine, but really we need to learn from the wilderness that we have distanced ourself from.

I really enjoyed how Cronon brings the wilderness home instead of leaving it as a mystical place. I agree with Cronon that “Wilderness is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be.” There are many times when I have tried to “find” myself in the wilderness and there is no other place I would rather do it.