The Trouble With Wilderness, by William Cronon is a beautifully crafted academic article detailing the role change that the environment endured as society modernized. The environment began to be seen more as a commodity rather than the true natural world in which we should live and appreciate.

After the Civil War, “wilderness” was less discovered than manufactured by urban elites as a leisure asset, and that invention still distorts environmental ethics by erasing people and responsibility. As railroads carved into “sublime” landscapes, the wealthy turned wild places into curated playgrounds: Adirondack “camps,” dude ranches, guided hunts, resort hotels. They arrived not as producers bound to the land but as consumers purchasing managed roughness, with local guides and workers recast as stage props for frontier fantasies. National parks followed the final Indian wars, fixing boundaries that made violence invisible and Indigenous presence removable. Visitors could then savor a carefully policed “virgin” nature—precisely because those who had lived there were moved out.

This rebranding hardens a dualism: nature is “true” only without us. It’s a seductive story for city dwellers, because it lets us praise wilderness while dodging accountability for the industrial systems that power our daily lives—and our trips “back” to nature. We drive cars to escape civilization, then use the landscape we reached by highway as a moral yardstick against which our world always fails. Policy often echoes the myth: single-species battles stand in for protecting “pristine” places; distant rainforests are imagined as savable only by removing the people who live there. As one historian puts it, “there is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness” (Cronon). A more honest environmentalism starts by naming the myth and placing humans back inside nature’s history. That means recognizing working landscapes and Indigenous stewardship as part of what makes ecosystems flourish. Success shouldn’t be measured by how well we exclude people, but by how well we live with the places that sustain us—owning the infrastructures we depend on, and building conservation that includes, rather than erases, the communities already there.