While humans often think of the wilderness as an entity separate from humans, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” by William Cronon highlights the notion that we can find nature in our own backyards and in remote areas, intertwining humans and nature. This changes the way humans think about nature since it erases the boundary between humans and the environment around them, because the “wilderness” can exist in “civilized” environments.

Humans often depict the wilderness as this grand fantasy where “[t]he torrents of mist shoot out from the base of a great waterfall in the depths of a Sierra canyon, the tiny droplets cooling your face as you listen to the roar of the water and gaze up toward the sky through a rainbow that hovers just out of reach” (Cronon 8). The wilderness becomes this awe-inspiring entity that dazzles and wows us with its grandness. It is on a massive scale where humans feel insignificant to the “roar of the water” and the “rainbow that hovers just out of reach.” In turn, humans feel detached from this form of nature because it is outside our scope of what we deem as civilized because people view it as being formulated by “nature” itself. There was seemingly no human involvement in creating the “mist [shooting] out from the base of a great waterfall,” forcing nature into the category of “other” since it evolved without any help from humans.

However, Cronon dispels this idea when explaining that “[t]he tree in the garden is in reality no less other, no less worthy of our wonder and respect, than the tree in an ancient forest that has never known an ax or a saw” (24). Wilderness becomes something that is part of everyday life as we breathe in the scent of pine trees wafting through the air or sit on the grass in the backyard on a hot summer day. Every tree and blade of grass brings us into the realm of wilderness without having to venture to far off places to experience it since they both arose from the same Earth and conditions. As a result, “the tree in the garden” becomes a symbol for the untamed environments around the world and brings the wild right to our backyard. We essentially live in the wild if we view the tree in our backyard as having a connection with a tree found in a remote area. Here, the separation between nature and humans is blurred when we realize that the wilderness is all around us. Simply because it sprouted in a civilized environment doesn’t mean that it makes the tree, plant, animal, etc. any less part of nature.

By intertwining humans and nature, it shifts the way we think about the environment since it becomes something that is part of our daily lives and all around us. Rather than thinking of wilderness as a foreign place, we can appreciate the wilderness outside our windows. It is then that we can truly create a change by noticing that the “other” (aka nature) is actually part of our lives. This allows us to see the responsibility we have to take care of the environment because it is essentially on our doorstep. The fate of the “other” then becomes the fate of humans, for whatever happens to the environment will then impact the way humans live on the Earth.