Happy Earth Day! In the past on Earth Day, I have romanticized nature talking about the wilderness that I found to be most worth saving—Glacier National Park. I have talked about its immense beauty and how saddened it makes me that our actions are destroying what I believe to be the most beautiful place on Earth. While Glacier is still my favorite place to be, I have since realized while studying Environmental Studies at Concordia, that it is far from being the most worthy of protection and saving. I have always thought of nature as being a place I have to travel to see, something sublime and untouched by humans; however, William Cronon’s article, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” challenged my perspective by urging me to see nature and wilderness as my backyard. This Earth Day I am looking to romanticize my home as much as I do Glacier. In the Park, I have no problem seeing grizzly bears from inside my car and feeling as if I am fully immersed in nature. I have no problem looking past parking lots and powerlines to see “pristine” lakes and majestic mountains. I am going to start doing that from wherever I am at.
Cronon says the trouble with wilderness is that it has become a human ideal that we created. By creating civilization, we also created wilderness, or a place to escape “our own too muchness”. In creating the idea of wilderness, we created a separation between us and nature. In the environmental movement, this removes a sense of responsibility to protect this wilderness, as we “set too high a stock in wilderness, too much other corners of the earth become less than natural and too many other people become less than human, thereby giving us permission not to care much about their suffering or their fate.” Cronon argues that what needs to happen is a change in how we think about the word “home”. If we see our home as both our hometowns and as earth, it creates that much needed sense of responsibility to protect it.
As I often view Glacier as untouched and sublime, I overlook that it is in fact far from it. For one, it was once home to the Blackfeet and is now overrun by tourists. Yet it is still my idea of heaven. When I think about saving the planet, this is far away, and remote land is what I find myself most compelled to protect. I find myself defining my mission as preserving nature in its purest form. I now realize why this is so limiting and ineffective. Saving the glaciers is not something I can do on my own; however, I can compost within my house and use the compost as fertilizer for my vegetable garden. I can push to protect my local environment. Tuning into the wilderness surrounding us allows us to take responsibility, but also makes it much easier to make a difference.
The first time I experience the feeling of finding wilderness within my home was last spring. About a block from the soccer fields were five baby foxes. Every day after practice I would park across the street and watch them play for hours. A few times I even got to see the mom. I felt an overwhelming connection to these animals. I was so fascinated with them, not only because they were SO cute but also because I had found wilderness within my hometown—a block from where I play soccer, two blocks from my elementary school, ten blocks from my old house. At the time I had not realized why I became so obsessed with theses foxes, but about a month later, my family and I went to Glacier and saw another fox–equally majestic to the mother fox I spent hours watching. The only difference was that this one was hours, rather than minutes away from me. This wildness that I thought had to be remote and untouched was so close to me. It was both here and there.
I have started to incorporate Cronon’s view of wilderness into my fight for environmental justice. If we start seeing the wildness and naturalness within our homes, then maybe we can find the incentive to protect what is ours. Maybe we can reverse that “wilderness tends to privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others” and maybe someday we can experience “justice for all”. If everyone protects their own backyard, there is no place to dump toxic waste, no place to stick polluting factories, and no place or people being viewed as sacrificial. This starts by empowering others to stand up for what they deserve—clean air and water should be a basic human right. Today I vow to protect my home and demand better for the people of my community.
