Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

I sometimes thought of this as the Madonna/whore theory of landscape: human contact was imagined as inevitably violating a vulnerable, passive nature that was inevitably degraded by us. White people were imagined as discoverers of a place that lay waiting, before history, before culture. Beyond this binary lay other ways of being human, other ways of being in the natural world. Being an environmentalist was coming to mean, at last, recognizing and respecting the first dwellers in these places and that human impact—hunting, harvesting, fire management techniques—had to be factored into assessments of what had constituted the ecosystems before Euro-American arrival. That is to say, these new frameworks and voices transformed nothing less than history, nature, and culture in far-reaching ways. For me there was tremendous hope in the reemergence of people grounded in something other than the Judeo-Christian and European worldviews, who had lived in places for millennia without, for the most part, devastating them.