JUG320S: The Canadian Wilderness

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JUG320S The Canadian Wilderness

• Week 2 What is Wilderness?
• Professor Emily Gilbert
• http//individual.utoronto.ca/emilygilbert/

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Todays Themes

• I Defining Wilderness?
• II Cronon on the Trouble with Wilderness
• III The Canadian Wilderness

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I WHAT IS WILDERNESS?

• Conservation International 2002 study of Earths
  wild places
• Wilderness
• fewer than 5 people per km2
• 70 original vegetation
• Size at least 10,000 km2
• 46 of earth is wilderness (176 million km2),
  comprising only 2.4 of worlds population (144
  million people)
• only 7 of this wilderness land is protected

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II CRONON AND THE TROUBLE WITH WILDERNESS

• The time has come to rethink wilderness.

William CrononFrederick Jackson Turner Vilas
Research Professor of History, Geography, and
Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin -
Madison
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Why rethink wilderness?

• Far from being the one place on earth that
  stands apart from humanity, it is quite
  profoundly a human creationindeed, the creation
  of very particular human cultures at very
  particular moments in human history (69)
• we mistake ourselves when we suppose that
  wilderness can be the solution to our cultures
  problematic relationship with the nonhuman world,
  for wilderness is itself no small part of the
  problem (70)

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Anglo-western legacy of wilderness

• 18th c. deserted, savage, desolate,
  barren, a waste -- bewilderment or
  terror (70)
• King James bible
• where Moses and his people wandered for 40 years
• where Christ endured temptations of Satan for 40
  days
• where Adam and Eve were exiled
• early US settlers have aversion to wilderness
  landscape to be tamed through settlement

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19th century transformations

• Increase in tourism eg Niagara Falls,
• Creation of national parks in US Yosemite
  (deeded in 1864) Yellowstone (1872)
• Damming the Tuolomne River in the Hetch Hetchy
  valley in Yosemite National Park (completed 1923)

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Why the change in perspective?

• Influence of idea of the sublime and the frontier
• Sublime
• The transcendent in the landscape power,
  heroism, awe, veneration
• Importance of 18thc. romanticism emotion,
  imagination, freedom, individualism
• sublime landscapes were those rare places on
  earth where one had more chance than elsewhere to
  glimpse the face of God

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William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

• The Prelude (1850)
• The immeasurable height
• Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
• The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
• And in the narrow rent at every turn
• Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
• The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
• The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
• Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
• As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
• And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
• The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
• Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light
• Were all like workings of one mind, the features
• Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree
• Characters of the great Apocalypse,
• The types and symbols of Eternity,
• Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.

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Henry David Thoreau (1817-62)

• An Essay on American Civil Disobedience (1849)
  Walden (1854)
• Transcendentalism intuition, mystic
  spritiualism, rejection of traditional authority
• In 1862 wrote famous line In Wildness is the
  preservation of the World
• It was vast, Titanic, and such as man never
  inhabits. Some part of the beholder, even some
  vital part, seems to escape through the loose
  grating of his ribs as he ascends. He is more
  lone than you can imagine Vast, Titanic, inhuman
  Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him
  alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine
  faculty. She does not smile on him as in the
  plains

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John Muir (1770-1850)

• John Muir, father of US National Parks, a founder
  of the Sierra Club
• Said Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for
  water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches,
  for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by
  the heart of man

• These blessed mountains are so compactly filled
  with Gods beauty, no petty personal hope or
  experience has room to be. Drinking this
  champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breathing
  the living air, and every movement of limbs is
  pleasure, while the body seems to feel beauty
  when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or
  sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but
  equally through all ones flesh like radiant
  heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure glow
  not explainable

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Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932)

• Frontier thesis at 1893 World Columbian
  Exposition
• the frontier helped immigrants to shed the
  trappings of civilization, rediscover their
  primitive racial energies, reinvent direct
  democratic institutions, and thereby reinfuse
  themselves with a vigor, an independence, and a
  creativity that were the source of American
  democracy and national character
• But The frontier has gone, and with its going
  has closed the first period of American history

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• Frontier
• Romantic attraction of primitivism vigor,
  independence, direct democracy, freedom
• Anti-urbanism and anti-modernization
• Place of national interest monuments to US past,
  tribute to future
• American exceptionalism and drive for expansion

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Cronons critiques of wilderness

• Masculine and elitist creating wilderness in
  their own image

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Cronons critiques of wilderness
I have no more land I am driven away from
home Driven up the red waters Let us all go Let
us all go die together   -- Anonymous Creek Woman

• Erasure of Aboriginal peoples

"This war did not spring up on our land, this war
was brought upon us by the children of the Great
Father who came to take our land without a price,
and who, in our land, do a great many evil
things... This war has come from robbery - from
the stealing of our land." Spotted Tail, Sioux
Chief
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Cronons critiques of wilderness

• Illusion of escape
• The flight from history that is very nearly the
  core of wilderness represents the false hope of
  an escape from responsibility, the illusion that
  we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past
  and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly
  existed before we began to leave our marks on the
  world (80)

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Cronons critiques of wilderness

• Human and nature are separated
• Claims for biological diversity remote areas and
  modern imperialism
• Bill McKibben (1989) The End of Nature

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• Dave Foreman, Earth First!
• we must return to being animal, to glorying in
  our sweat, hormones, tears and blood
• The preservation of wildness and native
  diversity is the most important issue. Issues
  directly affecting only humans pale in
  comparison

Are you tired of namby-pamby environmental
groups? Are you tired of overpaid corporate
environmentalists who suck up to bureaucrats and
industry? Have you become disempowered by the
reductionist approach of environmental
professionals and scientists?
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Cronons conclusion

• If wildness can stop being (just) out there and
  start being (also) in here, it if can start being
  as humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can
  get on with the unending task of struggling to
  live rightly in the worldnot just in the garden,
  not just in the wilderness, but in the home that
  encompasses them both (90)

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Critiques of Cronon

• Cronons use of cultural representations is
  selective
• Wilderness is not an attempt to create a role for
  humans amid nature, but to create a role for
  nature amid humans
• Environmental problems extend beyond ones own
  backyard
• Wilderness spaces and the wilderness ideal are
  conflated
• Questioning wilderness opens the door to
  anti-environmentalists

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III THE CANADIAN WILDERNESS

• Wilderness and Canadian identity exclusivity
• HIREN MISTRY What is the language of Canadas
  wilderness and how is it already set up as a
  barrier, for instance, to a South Asian family
  moving to Mississauga? Why do they not get
  excited about it? Does it have something to do
  with the language of experience? Land, we are
  told, is something that is appreciated
  universally. But the thing is, in certain places
  youre taught to love the land in very particular
  ways. However, if you do not love the land in
  those particular ways, is the land really open to
  you?

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• PHILIP What interests me is that the language
  of the wilderness has been so influenced by the
  European. Im convinced that people from Africa
  or the Caribbean or people from rural areas in
  Asia would be able to relate to certain aspects
  of how First Nations people view the land. For
  instance, in the Caribbean, you can go outdoors
  and pick the herbs you need to make a cup of bush
  tea to use as remedies. So there would be those
  areas of resonance for many of the peoples who
  come here, in terms of how First Nations people
  live and work within what is called the
  wilderness. But because the European has settled
  it in such a way and has developed this myth of
  the wilderness, its almost like an unknown
  language for us which we cant penetrate unless
  we own a cottage or a boat

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• PHILIP There are so many images of Africans
  being hunted in the woods by slave catchers
• MISTRY The metaphor of the Canadian wilderness
  is not neutral, but rather it is a powerful and
  power-wielding symbol
• PHILIP You contain it wilderness or you
  create these parks that really arent what
  Canadas all about. What interests me is memory.
  Whose memories get celebrated and what do you do
  with your memory when you move into that space?