Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 139bad’. Against this, Cronon argues that the wilderness idea reflects thecultural values of increasingly industrialised and urbanised societies inwhich the natural environment seems to be fast disappearing. To quotehim once more: ‘The way we describe and understand the world is soentangled with our values and assumptions that the two can never be fullyseparated’ (1996: 26). For Cronon, wilderness is almost a stereotypeor ideal against which those who are anxious about the course of modernsociety evaluate that society.This is confirmed, Cronon argues, if we lookat the history of the wilderness idea. For instance, in the pre-independenceperiod, European settlers in the eastern USA saw wilderness as threatening,unruly and fickle – something to be conquered rather than embracedor protected (see Oelschlaeger 1991, Rothenberg 1995 and Nash 2001for more on the idea of wilderness).Not surprisingly, Cronon’s views on wilderness have been seen as aprovocation by several environmentalists in North America who tendtowards the greener end of the ecocentric spectrum (see Box 2.3).Theseenvironmentalists have accused Cronon of being an anti-realist (denyingthe reality of the non-human world) and a moral and aesthetic relativist(supporting the view that all values are relative to the whims of a person,community or culture so that no values are better or worse than others –see Callicott and Nelson 1998 and Snyder 1996). I don’t propose to assessthe validity of these criticisms. However, I would point out that Cronon isnot ‘anti-wilderness’. His argument, rather, is that environmentalistsneed to be more honest about the source of their beliefs. For him, thesebeliefs do not emerge from wilderness but are imposed upon parts of thenon-human world by certain cultures who have forgotten the particularityand constructedness of their values. In this sense, Cronon shows thatwilderness is cultural ‘all the way down’. For him there is no space outsidecultural value systems in which areas like Alaska can be comprehendedor evaluated. In the same spirit as Cronon, the cultural analyst AlexanderWilson (1992) has examined North American discourses about theenvironment, while Ramachandra Guha (1994) has offered a comparativeperspective on the wilderness idea. More generally, the cultural criticAndrew Ross (1994) has examined how ideas of nature are always culturallysaturated and specific, while Cosgrove and Daniels (see Box 3.2) pioneeredgeographical investigations into the cultural constructedness of landscape(one of nature’s collateral concepts).