The Cult of the Wild

For most of the time the West had words for it, wilderness was a curse. It was the howling waste of the Hebrew scriptures, the trackless forest where the lost wandered and the damned were tempted, the moral opposite of the garden and the walled city — land to be cleared, drained, subdued, redeemed. No one went to a mountain to feel closer to God. Mountains were obstacles, the rubble of a fallen world. And then, in the space of a single century, the sign flipped. The same wild that had been the Bible's accursed waste became the holiest ground in the culture. It is one of the great reversals in the history of feeling, and to understand the trouble this chapter is about, you have first to feel how real and how generous that reversal was.

It begins, oddly, with terror. In 1757 an Irishman named Edmund Burke split the experience of beauty in two. There was the beautiful — smooth, small, gentle, the thing you want to hold. And there was the sublime — vast, dark, dangerous, the thing that overwhelms you, the storm and the chasm and the peak, awe braided through with fear. Burke handed Europeans a vocabulary in which a glacier could be thrilling rather than merely dreadful. William Wordsworth, walking the fells of the Lake District as the mills smoked in the valleys below, turned that vocabulary inward and made it a faith. Wild nature, for him, was not scenery but a presence that "disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts" — a cathedral for a reverence the factory age had hollowed out. Across the Atlantic, the feeling caught and turned prophetic. Ralph Waldo Emerson made nature a scripture; his young friend Henry David Thoreau, lecturing in 1851, gave the movement its battle cry: "In Wildness is the preservation of the World." Note the word — Wildness, a quality, not wilderness, a fenced place. Thoreau meant something woven through all living things, including himself. The distinction would be forgotten, and the forgetting would cost a great deal.

The man who would not let the wild go, and could not see past it, was John Muir. He arrived in the Yosemite Valley in 1868 — a Scottish-born wanderer who had swallowed Emerson and Thoreau whole — and he never really left. Muir gave the sublime its full religious register: the mountains were not like a temple, they were the temple. "Going to the mountains is going home," he wrote. Wilderness was where you went to "wash your spirit clean." He founded the Sierra Club in 1892, he walked the high country with presidents, and through sheer evangelical force he helped turn a feeling into law and land. The love was true. It was also a rebellion — against the mine, the dam, the saw, the whole grinding logic that ate a landscape and called the eating progress. Hold that fairly before the turn comes, because the turn is hard: the trouble was never the love. The trouble was what the love had to not see to stay pure.

The feeling became an institution, and the institution was magnificent. On the first of March, 1872, President Grant signed two million acres of the Yellowstone plateau into being as the first national park, "a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people." Yosemite followed as a park in 1890. In 1916, the National Park Service was chartered to keep the scenery and the wildlife "unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." Americans would come to call the national parks their best idea, and the rest of the world copied them. Read the founding words again with a cold eye — unimpaired, a pleasuring-ground for visitors — and the unspoken third word, pristine, behind them. Every one of them quietly assumes the same thing: that no one lives here. The flaw was not a later betrayal of the blueprint. It was in the blueprint.

Because the land was not empty. It had to be emptied. The Yosemite Valley that Muir called untouched was the homeland of the Ahwahneechee, and the West's first act there was not reverence but fire: in 1851, the state-raised Mariposa Battalion rode into the valley pursuing them, burning their villages and their stores of acorn, and the soldiers who did the burning are the men credited with the valley's "discovery." Some Ahwahneechee were allowed to stay on afterward, as laborers and as costumed "Indian performers" for the tourists — until the Park Service, in the late 1920s, herded them into a built "Indian Village," charged them rent by 1935, and banned the old ways of living. And in 1969, when only a handful of cabins remained, the Park Service relocated the last residents and burned the village down as a firefighting training exercise. The homeland's expulsion was bracketed by fire at both ends — militia in 1851, a drill in 1969 — and in between, the place was narrated to the world as nature without people.

The pattern was not local. At Yellowstone the U.S. Army garrisoned the park from 1886 to 1918, and part of the soldiers' work was keeping Native peoples out — Shoshone, Bannock, Crow, Blackfeet, and the Sheep Eaters who had lived on the plateau all along — while promoters spread a convenient fiction that Indians had always feared the geysers and never came. At Glacier the Blackfeet were removed in turn. The historian Mark David Spence found the deepest truth in the symmetry of it: the reservation and the national park grew up "separate but symbiotic," one system to corral people there so that the other could sequester a nature defined by their absence here. The emptiness the visitor mistook for an ancient fact was a recent achievement, and the achievement was then forgotten, so that the awe could rest on an erasure no one was asked to see.

Which is where Muir stops being a saint and becomes the chapter's hinge. The same man who could write a page of luminous love for a Sierra meadow described the Native people in that meadow as "dirty," as "savages" who "seemed to have no right place in the landscape." His own Sierra Club said as much, plainly, in 2020: that its founder's words had helped make the wilderness a white man's preserve. And this is the unbearable part, the part the chapter must hold without flinching — the love and the blindness were not two faculties but one. His wilderness was sublime because he saw it as empty, and to keep it empty in his mind he had to write the people out. An awe that depends on not-seeing is not yet a whole awe.

The erasure ran along more than one line. The scholar Carolyn Finney has shown that "the great outdoors" was racialized too — that the long American memory of slavery, of lynchings staged in woods, of Jim Crow, taught Black Americans that the forest was not safe and the wilderness not theirs, so that the solitary white figure on the peak became the only body the picture could hold. And the model went imperial. European powers built parks in their colonies on the American plan, and the plan outlived the empires: the journalist Mark Dowie reports estimates of "conservation refugees" — people evicted so that a nature could be guarded from them — ranging widely into the millions, with one reckoning putting Africa alone as high as fourteen million. The Indian historian Ramachandra Guha named the incoherence exactly in 1989: a wilderness ideal born of American abundance, exported to a crowded Global South, becomes a weapon — it fences the poor out of the forests they live in, and distracts from the water, soil, and fuel that are the real environment of the real poor. A pattern true to one terrain distorts another when it is imposed by force instead of tuned to place.

And here the two halves of the wound meet, because "pristine wilderness" turns out to be false twice over. It erases the people — and it erases their work. The ecologist M. Kat Anderson has documented that the parklike groves and dazzling wildflower meadows the first explorers took for untouched California were nothing of the kind. They were gardens. For millennia the Native nations had tended them, and fire was their master tool — by Anderson's account the most significant and widely employed of all their methods for managing vegetation. The deliberate burning fed the people, opened the woods, and prevented the catastrophic blazes the West would later suffer once it suppressed the flames in the name of keeping things wild. The open forests Muir adored were partly made by the very people he refused to see. Many of those peoples have no word for wilderness at all, because the line it draws — nature here, humanity there — does not exist in their world. There is no far side of a wall to worship when you never built the wall.

It took an environmental historian to say the quiet thing out loud. In 1995, William Cronon published an essay whose title was a small detonation: The Trouble with Wilderness. Wilderness, he argued, is "quite profoundly a human creation — indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history." Not the land; the land is real. The idea that the land is pristine, peopleless, and morally pure — that is the invention. And the invention carries a hidden poison: the human/nature binary itself. If wilderness is the only true nature, then the places we actually live — the city, the farm, and the home ground — are by definition unnatural and beneath our care. So the cult of the wild quietly licenses us to neglect the nature we inhabit while we worship a nature we visit. Cronon's repair was not to love nature less. It was to drop the binary and find the wildness in our own backyards, to honor the nature we had forgotten to recognize as natural. His essay started a fight that is not over — biologists like Michael Soulé warned that deconstructing wilderness hands a crowbar to every developer who ever wanted to drill a sacred place — and the fight should stay open, because both fears are real.

But hear what Cronon is really saying, because it is the oldest insight in this book wearing new clothes. The wilderness ideal had taken something true — nature is precious, awesome, and owed reverence — and walled it off into something false: and therefore nature is only real where we are absent. This whole chapter has been about walls, and this is the subtlest one, drawn not across a valley but across the idea of nature itself. The correction is not to deny the reverence. It is to re-nest it: wildness is a quality that runs through the whole living pattern, the human and the domestic included, not a reserve fenced off across the far side of a line we drew. We are not visitors at the glass. We are tending members of the community — among the persons, only some of whom are human, that this book began with. The Ahwahneechee burning the valley to feed it knew that. Kimmerer's grandmothers knew that. The cult of the wild had to forget it to build its temple.

The wall that the Romantics rebuilt — nature on one side, humanity on the other — was the same wall the molecular biologists had just dissolved with a four-letter code, and the same wall the next century would knock down for good. For even as the parks were drawing the line ever sharper, the human hand was reaching into every acre of the planet at once: into the soil, the rivers, the air, the climate itself. Soon there would be no untouched place left to fence. And when that became undeniable, the question would no longer be how to keep nature pristine. It would be what kind of gardeners we had become — whether we knew it or not.