RITUAL OF RETURN

subject to such profound and sustained degradation?
Paradoxically enough, in order to understand the ideology
that gives allowance to environmental debasement,
you have to investigate the very origins of the Western
concept of nature itself. In “The Trouble with Wilderness”,
William Cronon, an environmental historian, examines the
development of our modern idea of wilderness. When you
think of nature, it’s likely that images of forests, mountains,
and untouched landscapes will enter your mind. What most
people don’t realize is how artificial this conception of
wilderness, of nature itself, is.
“Welcome to the Anthropocene.” This is just one of the
many texts we read as a class to begin to unpack and
synthesize the social, ecological, and economic crises of our
time. The issues of environmental decline, institutionalized
racism, and exploitative capitalism on the surface can seem
like disparate issues, but upon further inspection become
inextricably linked within a larger historical context.
In June of 2020, as a reaction to the murder of George
Floyd, The Sierra Club, an environmental nonprofit
founded by John Miur, published an article titled “Racism
is Killing the Planet” that beings to unpack this tangled
web. The author, Hop Hopkins, makes the poignant
statement that the climate crisis will never be solved if
we do not simultaneously dismantle white supremacy and
its insidious systems of exploitation and oppression. A
complex declaration made very clear by his central claim
“You can’t have climate change without sacrifice zones, and
you can’t have sacrifice zones without disposable people,
and you can’t have disposable people without racism.”
(Hopkins). The degradation of the environment for the
sake of economic gain can only happen when you are able
to rationalize certain parts of the earth and its inhabitants,
both human and nonhuman, as disposable.
When a place and its people become conceptually
disposable to titans of industry, it is easy to rationalize
behavior that results in water becoming poisoned, the air
becoming noxious, and land uninhabitable. “If we valued
everyone’s lives equally, if we placed the public health and
well-being of the many above the profits of a few, there
wouldn’t be a climate crisis. There would be nowhere to
put a coal plant, because no one would accept the risks of
living near such a monster if they had the power to choose.”
(Hopkins). It leaves us to question, how does this even
happen? What allows for entire populations, entire swaths
of the earth, to become so conceptually other that they are
“Wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place
on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly
a human creation. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last
remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature
can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the
taint of civilization. Instead, it is a product of that civilization, and
could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made.
Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more
beguiling because it seems so natural.” (Cronon).
To Cronon, the history of Western wilderness ideology
evolves from being a place that evoked feelings of fear and
wrathful awe to “more and more tourists [seeking] out the
wilderness as a spectacle to be looked at and enjoyed for its
great beauty” (Cronon). Herein lies the root of our major
misconceptions of nature. That nature is something
separate from humanity altogether. A place you merely visit
as opposed to a complex web of reciprocal networks you are
woven within. Cronon elaborates:
The myth of wilderness as “virgin”, uninhabited land had always
been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians
who had once called that land home. The removal of Indians to
create an “uninhabited wilderness”-- uninhabited as never before in
the human history of the place-- reminds us just how invented, just
how constructed, the American wilderness really is. There is nothing
natural about the concept of wilderness.
The wholesome and awe inspiring image of nature held
in our collective consciousness is a false conception
inseparable from the history of racism and white supremacy.
The Grand Canyon, Zion, Mount Rainier, Yellowstone; they
were all once the sacred lands of indigenous populations,
now playgrounds for those with the luxury of disposable
time and income. What we are left with as a society is a
complicated relationship with the natural world. Not only
does this shallow conception of nature rest on the backs of
decimated Indigenous populations, but results in a “dualism
that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles” (Cronon).
A dualism that reduces the nonhuman world to something
that is ours to dominate, control, and exploit for profit.