The invention of wilderness

http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html

The page shows an excerpt from Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, edited by William Cronon, copyright 1995.

The text is pretty dense and intimidating-looking, but interesting. Below is my summary of the ideas, rearranged  a bit.

• We take for granted these days that wilderness is a good thing, better than a civilized urban area. And we can all think of beautiful experiences associated with wilderness. But this wholly good way of looking at wilderness is culturally determined and quite modern.  The word 'wilderness' used to mean  'wasteland'. Historically, wilderness was a scary, useless place; modern ideas about wilderness are ideas about escape.
• In the Bible wilderness was sacred, sublime, or supernatural in addition to being wasteland. The creation of the first national parks in grand places (not swamps) reflects the notion that God can be seen best in grand places. Sublime wilderness was historically conceived (by Thoreau, Wordsworth, and John Muir, for example) as sacred but terrifying and supremely inhospitable to humans.
• By the end of the 19th century, Americans had gotten very sentimental about wilderness, and had started creating national parks. In the first decade of the 20th century, people all over the country were opposing the construction of a dam that would increase the water supply to the city of San Francisco. (The dam was built anyway.) After the Civil War, rich city people increasingly went to the wilderness as tourists for recreation. Thus they lacked a realistic an image of wilderness.
• Ironically, as wilderness was set aside for preservation, it was made less wild. Frontier areas had been the site of conflicts and the home of native tribes. Now they were empty and safe. Civilization is compared to wilderness as if wilderness is an ideal and found lacking. But empty, safe wilderness is a fantasy and a luxury; it is the product only of societies that can afford to create it!
• As the American frontier disappeared, it became more valuable and more idealized. Wilderness was seen as key to American rugged individualism. Frontier life was seen as male; civilization was seen as a female threat to maleness. Preserving wilderness was a civilized man's way of trying to preserve his masculinity.
• Another factor in the re-imagination of wilderness was the rise of primitivism, a desire to retreat from civilization to simpler, supposedly happier times. When primitive people, idealized by civilized people, become civilized themselves, they are considered fallen.
• In various ways, Americans redefined wilderness as a romantic concept loaded with positive emotions similar to the positive emotions inspired by religion. Environmentalists use those powerful emotions to promote agendas that may or may not even relate to wilderness per se. There's a tricky relationship between preserving wilderness and preserving species, for example.
• Defining wilderness strictly as space without humans creates problems. 
• When we hold wilderness as an ideal, we take the benefits of civilization for granted. 
• We confuse debates about conservation. 
• One journalist has argued that because humans have interfered with the entire globe, nature doesn't exist. Nothing is untouched anymore. (But historically we've always been touching nature, and nature undergoes vast changes without our help or consent.)
• The obvious solution for preserving wilderness is to get rid of ourselves! This is as obviously absurd as it is obvious. (Yet environmentalists accept the notion that human beings don't deserve to exist, while nature does. Even farming is considered corruption and sin. Surely we wouldn't consider a global return to hunter-gatherer life a victory?)
• The romanticization of the wilderness pushes the issue of preserving it past all other issues that affect only humans, since preserving wilderness affects nature, which is more important. [In the issue of Rachel Carson's bird eggs vs. humans bit by mosquitoes, clearly the bird eggs would be seen as more important, since they are part of nature and humans aren't.]
• Protecting remote wilderness inconveniences the humans living there.
• The poor suffer the most; they don't have the luxury of treating wilderness as a place for recreation, and they have no resources to spare for conservation efforts.
• We should strive for a more correct view of wilderness.
• Wilderness is part of reality that simply exists. We didn't create it. We can't fully control it. 
• We should appreciate the existing bits of nature that are actually in our lives, not just grand bits of nature in far-off places.
• We should see some of our choices as better or worse for the environment, rather than seeing civilization as wholly bad. 
• Thinking of wilderness as nonhuman helps us remember responsibilities towards nonhuman life. 
• Whatever we do, we will change the world. So we must decide how we wish to change it. 
• Reflection can create sustainable behavior.

If anything, I think the author is too sympathetic to environmentalism, but the notion of wilderness as an artificial, modern luxury is mind-blowing.

I like it that the author comes close to saying that environmentalists are hypocrites for insisting that others comply with impossible ideals conceived in comfort.

I also appreciate it that he touches on the relevance of voluntary human extinction, an extreme seldom mentioned---or considered relevant---in conversations about environmentalism. Kudos.

I'd perhaps like to get my hand on the book, Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, unless it's mostly about enlightened sustainability. Even enlightened sustainability, I suspect, would trip the red flag that signals unnecessary guilt.