Monthly Archives: August 2021

Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” II

Continuing on from the previous post. I found this paragraph also quite in line with what haiku aims for:

The task of making a home in nature is what Wendell Berry has called “the forever unfinished lifework of our species.” “The only thing we have to preserve nature with” he writes, “is culture; the only thing we have to preserve wildness with is domesticity.”  Calling a place home inevitably means that we will use the nature we find in it, for there can be no escape from manipulating and working and even killing some parts of nature to make our home. But if we acknowledge the autonomy and otherness of the things and creatures around us—an autonomy our culture has taught us to label with the word “wild”—then we will at least think carefully about the uses to which we put them, and even ask if we should use them at all. just so can we still join Thoreau in declaring that “in Wildness is the preservation of the World,” for wildness (as opposed to wilderness) can be found anywhere: in the seemingly tame fields and woodlots of Massachusetts, in the cracks of a Manhattan sidewalk, even in the cells of our own bodies. As Gary Snyder has wisely said, “A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth. It is a quality of one’s own consciousness. The planet is a wild place and always will be.” To think ourselves capable of causing “the end of nature” is an act of great hubris, for it means forgetting the wildness that dwells everywhere within and around us.

Unfamiliar with Berry and Snyder? Both are American writers and environmental activists. Berry’s side job is farming; Snyder is a bit of a wandering poet-scholar-saint, or is certainly inspired by such people.
I am pleased that Cronon calls attention to nature as something that is inescapable, not somewhere apart or somewhere to go. At their finest, haiku poets would agree, and indeed many, I imagine, find solace in linking their subjective, emotional experiences with the moods and shifts exterior to themselves. Haiku doesn’t let you forget that there is nothing pristine and untouched. (Sorry about the double negative.)
This leads off in various directions–poetic and not. I’ll stop here, though. It’s just some ideas.

(Wendell Berry, Home Economics (San Francisco, California: North Point, 1987), pp. 138, 143. Gary Snyder: New York Times, “Week in Review,” 18 September 1994, p. 6.)

Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” I

 

I am considering adding William Cronon’s essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” to the syllabus for my course on nature and culture in Japan. I’m interested in hearing students’ comments on it, particularly on how much it helps us think about historical Japanese views of “wilderness” in Japan.

Wilderness — Creation — Change — 造化

I am particularly interested in this sentence:

[Wilderness] is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny. Indeed, one of the most striking proofs of the cultural invention of wilderness is its thoroughgoing erasure of the history from which it sprang. In virtually all of its manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from history.

Not, I daresay, a description of the way natural phenomena are used by haikai poets. Kigo 季語 (season words)/kidai 季題 (seasonal topics) are inevitably conventionalized, not raw and wild. While it’s not wrong to say that haikai — and waka and renga, for that matter — allude(s) to “nature,” it’s always processed, pre-digested. One might argue that haikai poets sought no flight from history in “nature,” since their nature was really a collection of words. Or maybe they did, in a way, believing that accurate deployment of words erased the time that had lapsed between theirs and that of past poets whose work they admired.

It also occurs to me that Cronon makes a nice case for a perfectly haikai view of nature here:

He could be defining 田園詩 “fields and gardens” poetry; a genre of Chinese verse that has a lot in common with the aims of many modern haiku poets. Here is the venerable Professor Stephen Owen giving a short introduction to the famous Tao Qian 陶潛 verse “Returning to dwell in gardens and fields.” （日本語＋中文＋日本語の動画は此方).

To be continued in the next post, Wilderness (soon).