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Cronon, William, Samuel P. Hays, Michael P Cohen, and Thomas R. Dunlap.  "Forum: The Trouble with Wilderness." Environmental History 1 (1996): 7-55.

In his article “The Trouble with Wilderness or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Cronon argues that because of the culturally constructed nature of wilderness, the wilderness as we imagine it has no relation to nature. In a sweeping overview on the history of the sublime in Western culture and specifically of the Frontier in US society and thought, Cronon shows the combination of “the sacred grandeur of the sublime [and] the primitive simplicity of the frontier” in the overused category of the wilderness. He states that in our Western culture, we exclude nature from our day-to-day life and, therefore, he pleas for the recognition of our surroundings as nature. Only if we stop thinking of wilderness as “a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural” can we find solutions to our environmental dilemmas. While Samuel P. Hays criticizes Cronon’s piece for its too general analysis of wilderness as a cultural construct, both Cohen and Dunlap value its provocative argument for its detailed analysis; however, both authors critically admit that Cronon’s discussion remains on a purely abstract level. This article and the three responses (plus Cronon’s response on the three criticisms) show that the role of nature in our culture is a difficult and contested one and that we have to be careful with the usage of the term nature, especially in the analysis of a cultural landscape where discourses of power and cultural determinations of nature intersect. [I. Cserno]