1 Additional Consideration

One very important revelation came up as I was researching and reflecting on the environmental sustainability of visiting National Parks and its this: while we can visit natural places, we do not feel as though we can live within it.

This idea was talked about in my Environmental Studies discussion section. And the fact of the matter is, when we think of nature, we tend to think of it as mutually exclusive from where we live.

For example, when I think of nature, I think of a beautiful green area with trees that I can walk around in. When my friend, who grew up on Lummi Island, thinks of nature, it's the Cascade Mountains near her home. Growing up in well developed cities, I thought of Lummi Island and my friend's home as nature. But for her, she wasn't living in nature, just near it. To be in nature, she had to be away from the built environment, such as her home and the roads around the island. The closest area she could call nature was the mountain you could hike on her island; because, while there was a dirt trail and a wooden fence at the peak (so no one would fall), no one lived up there.

View from the top of the mountain on Lummi Island

View of Mount Baker (a mountain in the Cascade Mountain Chain) from her backyard

The fact that she lived in a house with electricity and other man-made amenities excluded her house from being in nature. This is just another example of the pervasiveness of our attitude toward nature; we simply cannot be a part of it. There's just always something more natural that makes it so that we cannot associate our current environment as natural. Humans destroy our perception of what is natural.

What's more, our notion of what nature is changes when we become accustomed to our conception of nature and it becomes the norm. For example, when I am in Providence, my source of nature is India Point Park. It’s a beautiful park located very close to Brown University, by the bay and has a wonderful trail that loops around a green area with a playground. Unfortunately, it’s situated right next to the highway and zooming cars can be heard in the distance. Yet, it’s close by, has a lot of trees, and is a lot more scenic that a lot of Providence, so I consider it nature.

View of the bay from India Point Park

The pedestrian bride and highway next to the Park

So, when I was in Providence this past summer, I went to India Point Park almost every other day to run in the morning. After a while though, I wanted to go somewhere else to get my dose of nature.  India Point Park wasn’t enough nature for me anymore and so I biked 13 miles one way to Colt State Park in Bristol, RI. While there were no negative environmental impacts from this (i.e. – I didn’t drive), it illustrates our problem with nature; when we are in it, we only feel that way for a period of time.

This feeling of separation from nature was expressed by all of my classmates in my discussion section. Those who grew up in a more rural area felt they needed to return to a more undeveloped area to consider themselves as being in nature while those coming from completely urban settings, such as New York City, felt that a city park with a couple of trees was enough.

Nature for a city dweller

Nature for country folks 

So why is it that we are unable to think of ourselves as being able to live in nature? Why must nature be mutually exclusive from where we live?

Environmental historian William Cronon provide us with a pretty provokative yet logical explanation in The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.

Nature preservation grew out of our nostalgia for the frontier that occurred from urbanization. People used to have this frontier where they would live off the land. However, with industrialization, we became more urbanized, urban sprawl occurred, people moved into the cities and the frontier life slowly disappeared. The passing away of the frontier led to the desire to protect the wilderness as nostalgia creped in. Society was too urbanized and clustered. People were not as happy being in the urbanized cities. In the frontier, there was more individualism, more freedom, and more liberty. The frontier became idealized as a safe haven from urban civilization and people began to seek out this idealized wilderness as a place for leisure, a place to relax and escape home. In doing so, not only was a false conception of the wilderness created, but they pushed the Native American inhabitants out of the land away because they wanted the wilderness to be in its pristine, original state. 

“To this day, for instance, the Blackfeet [Native Americans] continue to be accused of “poaching” on the lands of Glacier National Park that originally belonged to them and that were ceded by treaty only with the proviso that they be permitted to hunt there.” (10)

Thus, we've reconstructed nature as something that is inherently separated from civilization by creating this myth that it is a grandeur place of what the world really is and ought to be. While India Point Park and other city parks are still within civilization, it is still removed enough for us from the urban landscape that some of us are able to consider it our "frontier".  This separation is definitely engrained in our minds. My previous blog posts definitively illustrate this problem as I continuously mentioned escaping to nature. And what's worse, National Parks foster this skewed perception of nature by limiting human involvement. For example, the Grand Canyon National Park has created rules restricting the number of people who are allowed to raft along the Colorado River.

What is the implication of our perception of nature?

Well, it prevents us from discovering how humans could live environmentally sustainably in nature. How can we, if we do not believe that we can live in nature? Research by Randolph Haluza-Delay found that because participants did not feel that nature could exist at home, they felt diminished motivation to take care of their home environment. Moreover, the research concluded by stating that trips to the wilderness (such as going to a National Park) have the tendency to reinforce the dichotomy between nature and civilization by illuminating the stark differences between the two settings.

Cronon and Haluza-Delay both seem to contradict the benefits of National Parks visits that were mentioned previously. However, as I will mention in my next post, they do not entirely disregard the benefits of a National Park visit as there are solutions available for our problematic conception of nature.