“The time has come to rethink wilderness” (Cronon 1). The time has come indeed to rethink the concept of wilderness. What does it mean to experience wild places, or to even assign land with the word ‘wild’?

It is a concept which is completely constructed though human consciousness, with traceable origins. As William Cronon tells us in his essay The Trouble with Wilderness, “Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history” (Cronon 1). The meaning attached to Wilderness flows through various stages of human concepts of good and evil. Words like savage, deserted, desolate, and barren are all associated with Wilderness pre-19^th century, even early 19^th century, American and European culture. Judeo-Christian religion, which controlled much of society in western civilization, speaks negatively of the wilderness. Christ spent 40 days and 40 nights fighting the devil and his band of demons in the wilderness, Adam and Eve were cast out of The Garden of Eden into the harsh wilderness, and Gods people were lost in the wilderness for years before finding the land flowing with Milk and Honey. For all pretense and purposes, the wilderness was not a place you wanted to be. “Wilderness, in short, was a place to which one came only against one’s will, and always in fear and trembling” (Cronon 2).

Mid to late 19^th century, the concept of wilderness as the devil’s territory flipped. It became the place where you could see the face of God. The likes of John Muir and Thoreau became conduits for rushing in the new concept of wilderness, no longer dark and dreary, it was likened to Eden itself. It became Heaven on Earth. “To gain such remarkable influence, the concept of wilderness had to become loaded with some of the deepest core values of the culture that created and idealized it: it had to become sacred. This possibility had been present in wilderness even in the days when it had been a place of spiritual danger and moral temptation. If Satan was there, then so was Christ, who had found angels as well as wild beasts during His sojourn in the desert” (Cronon 4). Those core values though were only given to very specific geological structures: mountaintops, waterfalls, the chasms, the rainbow, sunsets and sunrises. These are the sublime features where you could see the face of God.

Even today these are still sites of National Parks, The Everglades being the only swamp land and no national parks in the grasslands. We have very strict regulations as to what constitutes the right wilderness.

As US citizens pushed West, the Frontier became the new wilderness. A wilderness that was masculine in form, a 180 from historical perceptions of nature, which is always a feminine or mother figure. The US frontier was rough and to take part in the taming of it you had to be a man’s man.

As the frontier became tamed, more and more of the Elite and Wealthy of America started to explore West. “For them, wild land was not a site for productive labor and not a permanent home; rather, it was a place of recreation. One went to the wilderness not as a producer but as a consumer, hiring guides and other backcountry residents who could serve as romantic surrogates for the rough riders and hunters of the frontier if one was willing to overlook their new status as employees and servants of the rich. In just this way, wilderness came to embody the national frontier myth, standing for the wild freedom of America’s past and seeming to represent a highly attractive natural alternative to the ugly artificiality of modern civilization” (Cronon 9). This course would shape the wilderness into the very object it sought to escape, civilized society.

To many tourist and visitors in the West, the lands were uninhabited and untouched. This has never been the truth. Native peoples have lived on the continent for at least 10,000 years if not more. The wilderness had been shaped long before colonizers landed ashore. As the push for National Parks started in the late 19^th century it set forward that myth. “The removal of Indians to create an “uninhabited wilderness”—uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place—reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is” (Cronon 10). And so, on the heels of the Indian Wars our National Park system was set in motion. The blood shed was over, the wilderness was tamed, and it was time to set order within the boundaries.

The Huna-Tlingit people today still must fight to harvest within Glacier Bay National Park, recently they regained the right to harvest gull eggs within park boundaries. There is a push now to heal old wounds and let the people re-connect to land in the park but like Cronon reminds us, “there is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny. Indeed, one of the most striking proofs of the cultural invention of wilderness is its thoroughgoing erasure of the history from which it sprang. In virtually all of its manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from history. Seen as the original garden, it is a place outside of time, from which human beings had to be ejected before the fallen world of history could properly begin. Seen as the frontier, it is a savage world at the dawn of civilization, whose transformation represents the very beginning of the national historical epic. Seen as the bold landscape of frontier heroism, it is the place of youth and childhood, into which men escape by abandoning their pasts and entering a world of freedom where the constraints of civilization fade into memory. Seen as the sacred sublime, it is the home of a God who transcends history by standing as the One who remains untouched and unchanged by time’s arrow. No matter what the angle from which we regard it, wilderness offers us the illusion that we can escape the cares and troubles of the world in which our past has ensnared us” (Cronon 10).