Based on the key notions of environmental thinking in the United States, which are borderthere wilderness and savagery, William Cronon shows that human history unfolds within a geographical framework, thanks to natural resources which have a profound impact on it. Way to remind us that ecology is humanism.
The purpose of environmental history is to “bring nature into the flow of human history.” William Cronon, one of his leading figures in the United States, signed with Nature and Stories. Environmental History Essays an epistemological reflection on environmental history, but also a reflection on its genesis since the end of the XIXe century. A genesis articulated around three key notions of the American story and environmental thought: the border, the wildernesswildness.
Turner and the border
In 1893 a short essay by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) appeared, which remains to this day the work that has probably had the most influence on the American historical narrative, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (“The Meaning of the Frontier in American History”). Turner’s thesis links the particular sociopolitical character of Euro-American society – democracy and egalitarianism – to the existence of a borderin the old sense of “margin”: virgin lands without owners, ready to be conquered.
On this “frontier” the trajectory of civilization was replayed over two generations: virgin land, hunting, grazing, agriculture, founding of cities, industrial expansion. Despite the multitude of criticisms leveled at Turner’s thesis – his neglect of Indians, women, minorities, the dependence of this “frontier” economy on the capitalist urban expansion of the East Coast, the link between democracy and Enlightenment which does not make it a uniquely American event – its strength is in having proposed a coherent story which gave meaning to American history.
No other has come to replace it since, and the stages of the conquest of the West continue to punctuate current stories. Turner, an immense historian who left his mark on generations of students, recognized the limits of what was for him the necessarily circumstantial thesis of an essay intended to be part of a series, even if posterity ultimately immortalized only the latter .
Despite the generally progressive tone of the story, Turner questioned the future of Euro-American society with the completion of internal colonization and the end of the “frontier”, an event contemporary with the publication of the book (the Indian wars ended in 1890 with the assassination of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee).
Muir and the wilderness
Turner’s uncertainties about the future echoed the development of the conservation movement, whose emblematic figure was John Muir (1838-1914), and its central notion of safeguarding the wildernesswild space. Muir, although from another perspective, shares with Turner an observation that is in fact hardly contestable, that of the expansion of the agricultural front at the expense of “wild” spaces. Like him, moreover, he totally ignores the Amerindians.
Muir is worried about the risk of total destruction of virgin and “sublime” nature, in the strongest sense of the term. Muir’s environmentalist concerns are in tune with the times and join those of a conservative American aristocracy – of which Theodore Roosevelt is the incarnation – which also sees in contact and confrontation with wild nature the only way to forge character, and who fears that the disappearance of wilderness does not lead to a moral weakening of the American man – by which I mean the white, Protestant Anglo-American.
In 1890, Congress passed the law establishing Yosemite Park, the first American natural park. Ironically, the United States created its first natural park the same year the Indian Wars ended in massacre. Native Americans were not part of the wilderness. Since that date, the protection of wilderness as a non-anthropized space constitutes the heart of the American conservation policy conducted by the National Park Service (NPS).
This ideology of wilderness intact brings the NPS to erase, on the territories entrusted to it, all traces attesting to previous human occupation, if necessary by destroying buildings and developments. However, William Cronon, through two examples, the Twelve Apostles Islands in northern Wisconsin and the ghost town of Kennicot in Alaska, shows the omnipresence in North America of past human activity, even when it has disappeared, as the connection of local history and global history.
In addition to the fact that, in both cases, the territories had been occupied for centuries by Native Americans, Kennicot contained the richest copper mines in the world (70% copper in the ore). The city was created ex nihilo in response to the tremendous development of electricity. The superb “wild” islands of the Twelve Apostles were the seat of the most advanced fur trading post of French traders, from the end of the XVIIe century. They were colonized in XIXe century by German and Scandinavian farmers, were used as stone quarries and, in places, were almost completely deforested. If Kennicot and the Twelve Apostles celebrate anything, it is not the wildernessbut the extraordinary resilience of ecosystems when humans withdraw.
Leopold and the “wilding”
Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) offers another vision of the wilderness by being interested in ordinary and invisible nature. It is omnipresent, as soon as we take the trouble to look at it and give it space. Leopold and his family became “gardeners of the wild”, which Leopold summed up in the following formula:
The oldest task in human history: living on a piece of land without damaging it.
This idea leads to a more flexible and fluctuating conception of wildernessby being less interested in a static nature, in permanent balance, than in a dynamic nature capable of reconstituting itself, as soon as we give it room or support it – which will lead much later , in the 1990s, to talk about rewilding (wilding). A “nature policy” becomes not a one-off conservation policy with a view to preserving a wilderness witness, but a general policy favoring wildness in all places. In Europe, we can discern this movement in the way in which cities seek to demineralize, in the movement of “incredible edibles”, the guerrilla gardening.
William Cronon directly inscribes his work as an environmental historian and his environmentalist commitment to Leopold’s thinking. The stories of man and nature are intimately intertwined stories. From Turner, whatever the criticisms that were made to him, William Cronon retained this idea, which was not new, but which tended to be neglected at the turn of the century. XXe century, according to which human history unfolds within a geographical framework and thanks to natural resources which deeply mark it.
In return, the myth of a wild nature from which isolates of wilderness (moreover too often determined according to their exceptional landscape character) prevents us from thinking about our real link to the otherness of nature and from observing the reality of an autonomous life which constantly unfolds in our midst. The philosophy of wilderness hinders the development of a truly ecological society in Leopold’s sense.
The moral meaning of environmental history
William Cronon’s passion is to report on the intimate history between man and nature, its tragedies of course, but also its successes and its redemptions. An acknowledged ecologist, he claims a social function of the historian: “The particular task of environmental history is to affirm that stories about the past are better, all things being equal, if they make us more attentive to nature and the place that people occupy there. » Refusing a polarization which would require one to decrease so that the other can increase, his work pleads for profitable coexistence. His ecology is humanist in the sense that, without denying the destructive nature of certain forms of society and relationships with nature, he does not make it inevitable.
Wisconsin unites Muir, Turner, Leopold and Cronon. A state where everyone has passed at some point in their lives. A state without exceptional nature, rather rural, which saw the development of tourism very early on, “one of the most powerful cultural forces reshaping landscapes throughout the world”. It is this inseparable character of human history and its environment, in which space bears the traces of man and where the destiny of man is linked to the resources of space, which allows Cronon to assert that “history is what you see, wherever you look. »
Nature and Stories is not a single text, but brings together several short essays by W. Cronon addressing both a notion like wildernessthe importance of Turner or the function of environmental history. William Cronon loves nature, even ordinary nature. He also loves the man and he becomes the narrator of the sometimes troubled history of relations between Euro-Americans and this territory from which they practically exterminated the Amerindians. A dramatic story in many ways.
At the end of a course, however, and collecting the opinions of the students, he read their dismay, almost their despair. This was not the message he wanted to convey; he therefore devoted his last class to a fiery plea for possible and desirable coexistence. Cronon’s vision of the relationship between man and nature sounds strangely familiar to the ears of a European, in this small, quickly saturated part of the continent where, year in and year out, communities have strived to find a balance. by constituting what the French call a territory, a terroir.
However, if wilderness translates poorly into French, “territory” has no English equivalent. However, it is a territory that Cronon is talking about, when he mentions Wisconsin. In this sense, and whatever the approximations, Turner’s prophetic vision seems to be verified. By completing the conquest, by making the borderby reaching the limits of abundant natural resources, Euro-Americans have completed the first chapter of their history. Devoid of wildernessthey will have to “invent” their territory. Let us hope that Turner is wrong about his second intuition: that democracy is linked to the existence of a “border”!
In short, a very sweet book to read – like a Wisconsin landscape – and a response to authors who claimed that ecology was antihumanism.