Do You Want to Learn More about William Cronon?

       Reading "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature" in Uncommon Ground, I could broaden and deepen my understanding of nature. First of all, I was fascinated by Cronon's novel idea that "far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, [wilderness] is quite profoundly a human creation- indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history" (69). I have never thought in a way that wilderness is not an untouched ground that has nothing to do with human but a created ground that is the very reflection of our culture and history. Moreover, I became to advocate his assertion that we are obsessed with dualism. That is, we often tend to have "a set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the non-human, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world" (89). As he claims, we will be able to better understand the nature and world we live in when we explore the middle ground where "we actually live" and "make our homes" (86).

You can see biography, interviews, and photos of William Cronon in the link below.

http://www.williamcronon.net/interviews.htm