A Review
Nash draws a line between conceptual wilderness and the
real thing and by doing so he makes a strong argument for realigning
socio-cultural ideas to better reflect the interchange between humans and the
natural world.
In his prologue, Nash plays with the etymology of the
word “wilderness,” not as an intellectual aside, but rather to clearly show
that humans – creatures who conceptualize the world via language – are subject
to the capriciousness of words. The word wilderness cannot shed its own
history. So, wilderness has more to do with ideas (and ideologies) than with
any given ecosystem in which humans may find themselves. Understanding and
acknowledging that wilderness is primarily a social construct seems like a
crucial first step toward re-conceptualizing humankind’s relationship to
nature, kind of like an addict who, on the way to rehab, must first admit that
he has a problem.
In fact, our notions of wilderness lay much further back
than even Old Norse or proto-German. Long before recorded history humans
struggled in the “wilderness,” a world where survival of the species meant
subjugating the environment. This message was driven home forcibly by the God
of the Old Testament, and Nash’s brief foray into Biblical interpretation based
on the landscape of the Near East is, if nothing else, thought-provoking. But
the bottom line is that, because of the profound impact of the Bible and the
Genesis story on western minds, the idea of subjugation provided the milieu for
western interaction with North
America.
Those first interactions often seem stumbling and
blundering, and often downright stupid if not evil, from a perspective in the
twenty-first century. But those newcomers carried a lot of baggage that
hampered their progress, cultural baggage that shaped their views of the
“hideous and desolate wilderness” that William Bradford believed stood between
him and the establishment of God’s new kingdom. It was no accident that the
first settlers couched their descriptions of the advent of “civilization” in
military terms.
Nash-esque
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