The inalienable land: American wilderness as sacred symbol.

It is one of the enduring paradoxes of American culture that this nation, with its unparalleled record of exploitation, desecration and destruction of the natural environment, should nevertheless have developed in its national and state wilderness parks, recreation areas and monuments, the most elaborate system for preservation of natural lands in the world. From a tradition almost universally hostile to any land which could not be developed for economic purposes, Americans evolved an ethic that values such "useless" areas as mountains, canyons, deserts and virgin forests sufficiently to generate legislation to save them and to foster an ever-growing preservation movement dedicated to expanding the system. We unite today, as Paul Shepard says, in "one society--the world's most ferocious destroyers and yet the most fanatic preservers of wilderness parks and endangered species" (89).The perpetual conflict between the environmental movement and those in government and industry who would develop all potential resources, regardless of the cost to wilderness preservation, has become a permanent feature of our economic, political and cultural life. Reflecting a contradiction in values between our appreciation of nature and our national commitment to "progress" that destroys natural environment, tension is implicit both in the ways we identify, segregate and preserve wilderness parks and areas--the physical organization of space--and in our interpretation of the meaning of wilderness landscape--the semiotics of wilderness. Understanding the significance of wilderness in contemporary American culture requires equal attention to these two distinct but related manifestations of the national preoccupation with the natural landscape.It is axiomatic that a socially constructed reality reflects the ideas and values of the constructing culture rather than some objective or cosmic "truth." Considered in this context, nature--of which "wilderness" is our foremost symbol--reflects us in what we make of it. In the words of Gyorgy Luckacs, "Nature is a societal category. That is to say, whatever is held to be natural at any given stage of social development, however this nature is related to man and whatever form his involvement with it takes, i. e. nature's form, its content, its range and its objectivity are all socially conditioned" (234).The historically based Oxford English Dictionary defines a "wilderness" as "a wild or uncultivated region or tract of land, uninhabited or inhabited only by wild animals," while a contemporary American dictionary definition of the same term includes such adjectives as "uncultivated," "uninhabited" "waste," and "barren." None of these descriptive terms precisely describe the North American continent at the time of first European contact. Though there is some question as to the extent of Native American cultivation and forest management, most authorities agree that, in the preconquest era, indigenous Americans combined farming with hunting and gathering and practiced range management through burning to improve forage for animals (Sauer). More to the point is Roderick Nash's observation that "the New World was...wilderness at the time of discovery because Europeans considered it such. They recognized that the control and order their civilization imposed on the natural world was absent and that man was an alien presence" (Wilderness 7).(1) In the course of American environmental history, the natural landscape would be radically reshaped to conform to the idea of wilderness brought to the new land by our European forebearers.The Puritans saw their new surroundings as a hostile, alien and--in its natural form--uninhabitable land, and used the term "wilderness" interchangeably with "desert"--also implying a barren, inhospitable and empty landscape--to describe a continent inhabited and in many places cultivated by large numbers of aboriginal inhabitants who were destroyed or removed as the landscape was reshaped in accordance with European values. …