An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

by Ed Yong

In 1995, environmental historian William Cronon wrote that “the time has come to rethink wilderness.” In a searing essay, he argued that the concept of wilderness, especially as perceived in the United States, had become unjustly synonymous with grandeur. Eighteenth-century thinkers believed that vast and magnificent landscapes reminded people of their own mortality and brought them closer to glimpsing the divine. “God was on the mountaintop, in the chasm, in the waterfall, in the thundercloud, in the rainbow, in the sunset,” Cronon wrote. “One has only to think of the sites that Americans chose for their first national parks—Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Rainier, Zion—to realize that virtually all of them fit one or more of these categories. Less sublime landscapes simply did not appear worthy of such protection; not until the 1940s, for instance, would the first swamp be honored, in Everglades National Park, and to this day there is no national park in the grasslands.” Equating wilderness with otherworldly magnificence treats it as something remote, accessible only to those with the privilege to travel and explore. It imagines that nature is something separate from humanity rather than something we exist within. “Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home,” Cronon wrote.