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From the reading attached (Cronon, Finney) explain how nature is socially constructed and why this can be problematic. A complete answer will 1) first give a definition of the term, 2) provide an example of how nature or environment is socially constructed, 3) then explain how this has been or may be a problem for understanding human-environment relationships. Please note, the first part of the answer should be only one or two sentences. The second and third parts of the question should be no more than 5-6 sentences each Your entire answer then should be no more than 14 sentences. The point is to write succinctlv.
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22/ UNCOMMON GROUND
‘…
ideas are as good as any other’s, how can we defend some uses (and non-uses)
of nature over others? How can we protect the envi�onment if everything is.up
for grabs? The answer, of course, is that not everything is up for grabs, and nor
all ideas or uses of nature are equally defensible. There are ver_y reaJ material
constraints on our_ ideas and actions, and if we fail to take these into account,
we are doomed to {rusttation if not outright failure. The material nature we
inhabit and the ideal nature we carry in our heads exist always in complex rela
tionship with each other, and we will misunderstand both ourselves and the
world if we fail to explore that relationship in all its rich and contradictory
complexity. The essays in this book try to suggest some of the things we can
learn i£ we reflect as much on oarure as an idea as we do on nature as material
reality. They suggest that environmentalism is as much a cultural prospect as a
“narural” one.
There is perhaps one final reason why this book has provoked some-�aders
into regarding it as an anti-envirorunental tract. We live in a time when politi
cal discussion favors extreme positions and sound bites. In the struggle to
attract attention and support for one’s own views, the temptation is very great
to caricature those of one’s adversaries. The result is a rhetorical landscape of
polariries, in which stark oppositions arise and cartoons become our most com
mon way of conducting what passes for reasoned debate. In such a world,
you’re either for the environment or against it, and any inquiry that points
toward more challenging or difficult ways of framing the discussion can seem
threatening. The crucial rask of self-criticism is all coo easily avoided because it
can seem to lend aid and comfort to the enemy.
Such avers?on to criticism is understandable, but ultimarely disastrous.
There is no question that our pur_pose in writing Vnccmmon Crottnd was to ask
hard questions that would encourage environmenralisrs and others to rethink
some of rheir own most basic assumptions about narure and its meanings.
Confronting such questions is never easy, and we do not claim to have answered
them adequately in the pages of this book. We nonetheless regard this kind of
self-criticism as crucial to the future of environmentalism, and to the human
project of living on the earth in a responsible way. The struggle co live rightly in
che world is finaHy not just abour right actions, but abour the ideas that lie
behind those actions. A!. a time when threats co the environment have never
been greater, it may be tempting to believe chat people need to be mounting the
barricades rather rhan asking abstract questions about the human place in
nature. Yet without confronting such questions, it will be hard ro know which
barricades to mount, and harder still to persuade large numbers of people to
mount them with us. To protect the nature that is all around us, we muse think
long and hard about the nature we carry inside our heads.
Madison, Wisconsin
June 1996
William Cronon
BEGINNINGS
Introduction:
In Search of Nature
W,-//iam Cronon
fr WAS HARD NOT TO BE PREOCC
UPIED BY THE FIRES. NIG
HT HAD ALREADY
fallen by the time rhe jet staned
its approach into Orange County
. As the
lights of Los Angeles began to
glow on the far horizon, I fou
nd myself
gazing toward them with unaccu
stomed watchfulness and anxiety
, searching
for places char might be brighter
, less orderly, more flickering than
che rest.
For several days we had been read
ing about the wildfires rbat wer
e ravaging
the hillsides of southern Califor
nia, and we had even considered
can celing
our gathering when it looked for
a rime as if the campus of the Uni
versity
of California at Irvine might lie
in their path. The news of the past
twenry
four hours h ad been good, how
ever, so I and more than a dozen
colleagues
were now flying into the city with
reasonable assurance that we wou
ld not
g et swept up in the holocaust.
l nonetheless scanned the hillside
s, and will
never forget the Jone mou ntainto
p that still blazed on the city’s
margins.
From afar it looked like nothin
g so much as a volcano, the fl am
es massed
into a single enormous blaze, whi
ch made it seem that an entire
forest was
burning at once. Seen from the
comfonable seat of a Boeing 727
, it looked
otherwocld.ly, as if a wayward
band of giants had made camp
for the night
and were still hea ping fuel on
their fire. The orange light fille
d the valley
below as our plane continued its
descent, and I craned my neck
backward
for as long as I could to watch
the flames leaping toward heaven
. It is not
often that one looks down from
the sky to see a ci or a mountai
ty
n burning
in the night.
I did not know it at the time, but
we had come to California to pon
der the
23
24 I UNC.OMMON GROUND
‘…
of
meaning of those flames. !twas October 1993, and tbe ostensible purpose
Two
r.
semina
ic
academ
an
g
plannin
of
one
our meeting was che prosaic
r of the
years earlier I had been approached by Mark Rose, then directo
about
Irv.ine,
in
e
Institut
h
Researc
ities
Human
ia’s
Californ
University of
environ
porary
organizing a residential seminar that would explore contem
tive.
perspec
ry
sciplina
interdi
isric
mem:al problems from a broadly human
seminar
The offer he dangled before me proved irresisrible: I could focus the
collect
could
I
and
n,
attentio
our
of
wonhy
on any quescions that seemed
The
ns.
questio
chose
with
grapple
m
suited
best
seemed
s
whichever scholar
l.ive
would
we
institute would raise rhe f{inds to cover our expenses, and
the
for
Irvine
at
ia
together on the campu� of the University of Californ
rwo
only
have
would
We
.
research
spring semester of 1994 to conduct our
atiihich
primary responsibilities: we were co hold daylong weekly meetings
posed,
we
ns
questio
the
of
tanding
unders
our
e
advanc
to
we would struggle
would
�hat
r
rogeche
time
our
of
end
che
at
book
a
e
produc
to
and we were
an
was
It
other.
each
share with the rest of the world what we learned from
om
come
never
surely
almost
extraordinary opporrunity, one that would
leapt at
way again, which is why I and virtually every scholar I approached
1
the chance to participate.
filled
Mose of us had never met each other as we gathered in the smokeer
Octob
fuse
that
air and the furnace-like heat of the Sama Ana winds for
bunch,
eclectic
an
were
we
te,
meeting. True co our interdisciplinary manda
from ecol
represenring academic -fields ranging from hisrory to geography,
al stud
nment
enviro
co
crure
archite
pe
landsca
from
ogy to literary,fficicism,
rubric
e
b
c
under
r
togethe
come
had
We
law.
co
theory
ies, from critical
g less
nothin
was
es
“Reinventing Nature,� and the task we had set ourselv
seem
this
LeSt
world.
n
moder
than co rethink the meaning of narure .in the
have
that
s
insight
key
o
w
c
re
departu
of
coo grandiose, we rook as our point
cen
quaner
past
the
over
ts
scientis
and
s
scholar
of
emerged from the work
cum.
in
chem
discuss
tury. Let me
is
Fi�st, recent scholarship has clearly demonstrated that the natural world
human
wich
led
entang
more
far
and
far more dynamic, far more changeable,
typically
hiswry than popular beliefs about “the balance of nature” have
ed on
premis
are
nment
enviro
the
about
ideas
r
popula
acknowledged. Many
capa
nity
the conviction chat nature is a stable, holistic, homeostatic commu
s
human
only
if
itely
ble of preserving its natural balance more or less indefin
tion.
assump
matic
proble
deeply
a
can avoid “disturbing” ir. This is in fact
twentieth
The first generation of American ecologists, led at the start of rhe
every
that
d
believe
ts,
Clemen
ic
Freder
t
scientis
ska
Nebra
century by the
as
much
nity
ecosystem tended t0 develop toward a natural climax commu
and
nts
Cleme
to
ing
an infant matures into an adult. This climax, accord
ing
his followers, was capable of perpetuating itself forever unless someth
.
interfered with its natural balance
of this
Popular ideas of the natural world still reflect a fairly naive version
ntsian
Cleme
n
belief, even though professional ecologists began t0 abando
In t r o du ct i o n I 25
ideas almost half a century ago. By the 1950s, as M.ichae1 Barbour explains
in his essay for this volume, scie.ocists were realizing chat natural systems are
not-nearly so balanced or predictable as· the Clemencsian climax would have
us believe and char Clemencs’s habir of talking about ecosystems as if they
were organisms-holistic, organically integrated, with a life cycle much Lke
char of a living animal or plane-was far more metaphorical than real. 2 Fur
thermore, the work of envi.ronmemal historians has demonstrated that
human beings have been manipularing ecosystems for as long as we have
records of their passage. All of this calls imo question the fam iliar modem
habit of appe-aling to nonhuman nature as the objective measure against
which human uses of nature should be judged._Recognj_zJ!lg the�_n�rnism
of the natural worlfi,in �bon,__..–pecience at the
upper end of the Richter s cale shakes one’s faith in fatalism.
But interesting problems lurk beneath the surface here. It is not a�ll
clear, for instance, that even earthquakes are as natural as the previous para
graph would suggest. The Northridge quake affected different neighbor
hoods and structures in very different ways. Sometimes this was because of
underlying strata and fault systems that concentrated the shaking motion in
unexpected places like Santa Monica. But neither the underlying geology
nor anything else in nature explains why some of che most severely damaged
buildings were apartment complexes with unreinforced garages on their fast
floors. Such architecture is the product of economy and culture, not nature.
Likewise, no feature of the natural environment can explain why some
neighborhoods-Balb oa Boulevard in Granada Hills, for instance-were
able to rebuild so quickly following the quake, while ochers-Hollywood
Boulevard near W!srern Avenue, for instance-became virtual ghost towns.
These differences in the way the earthquake affected the built environment
reflect differences in the social environment, not the natural one. 6 M ost sug
gestive of all, perhap s, is the reminder that some of the worst effects of the
quake occurred in places where people had consciously chosen to ignore
key features of the local landscape. In che San Francisco quakes of 1906 and
1989, some of the most severe damage happened where people had built
houses and highways on landfills in old wetlands. In the Northridge quake
of 1994, no single effect was more disruptive to the lives of more people
than the closing of the heavily trafficked Santa Monica Freeway. And yet
the only place where that highway collapsed was a stretch of ground that
bears the place-name La Cienaga-“swamp” in Spanish. 7 Although it may
be pe.rfeccly natural in an eanhquake for wetlands to shake more vi olently
than drier gro und, there is nothing natural–common though it may be
about building h ighways or houses in such places .
The cardboard sign on that U-Haul trailer did not specifically blame
nature for its authors ‘ flight from California. Instead, it mocked what it
called the California Dream with a litany of disasters that for more than jus t
this one famiJy had turned the dream into a nightmare. The sign made no
distinction berween natural and unnarural hazards; and this surely says
something important about the way people often think about the environ –
Introduction I 31
ment in general. Problems like smog, which represent the rriingled effects of
compl ex natural and human causes, are so diffuse in their origins and so
normal a feature of life in the Los Angeles Basin that they might as well be
natural. After a while they become second nature to us, and we do our best
to ignore them. For someone who fears being trapped inside it, even a traffic
jam or a riot can seem like a force of nature-vast and inescapable, some
thing we can accept or flee but not change. Treating such things as normal
and inevitable in effect naturalizes them, placing them beyond our control
and excusing us from having to take responsibility for them, making it easier
to pretend that they have li_ttle or nothing to do with our own actions.
Here one is-reminded of another California nightmare listed on that sign :
wildfires like the ones still burning as we gathered in Irvine for our first
meecing·that October. When we walked over to look at the apanmenrs in
which most of us would live, we tried not to chink about the blackened,
smcildering hillsides we couldn’t help seeing on a horizon that was far r oo
close for comfort. Several months later our resident ecologist, Michael Bar
bour, would take us on an extraordinary field trip to the site of the Laguna
Canyon fire, which had burned nearly 14,000 acres and devastated dozens
of homes before dying out less than,a mile fr om the Irvine campus . Such
fires are, of course, a natural feature of California’s coastal chaparral ecosys
tems, which contain some of the most flammable vegetation on earth. Stand
ing amid the ruins of once beautiful houses, surrounded by plants that were
already sending up vigorous green shoots from the ashes, we could see all
too easily why the buildings had gone up in smoke. Indeed, we were able to
pinpoint the_ area where the next chaparral fire is almost certain to occur,
given the age of the vegetation and the accumulated fuel load. It too will
destroy many h omes. If the rains cooperate in just the wrong way, such a
fire will be followed by devastating mudslides like the ones we saw at Mal
ibu, producing landscapes without so much as a blade of grass. At Malibu,
the mud fl owed down in knee-deep rivers through the posh beachhouses
that blocked its path to the sea. California Dream indeed!
The ir ony is that the people who build in exposed locations like these-
the locations most susceptible to the fire and mud-are often those with the
gr eatest ability not to do so. Hillside real estate with ocean vis tas command s
prices in Los Angeles that only the wealthiest homeowners can afford. The
engineering and architectural feats that permit houses to stand with elabo
rate props on slopes that would make even a mountain goat think twice
before ascending are nothing less than astonishing for anyone accustomed
to living on flatter ground. To spend millions of dollars co live suspended
in midair above fire-prone vegetation on soil with only the mos t tenuous
commitment to remaining in place, all within a few dozen miles of the San
Andreas Fault, would seem t o make no sense at all. And yet even while
standing in the ashes with scenes of devas tation in all dir ections, one can
easily s ee why people build here anyway. The views from these places are
breathtaking. The sight of such a landscape each time you s tep out yo ur
32 I UNCOMMON GR O UND
“”‘
In tr o du ct i o n I 33
Gfl’E ‘fBE
C1NY()NS A IIIU�1U1
1�1tt,1�
n
Foundations of burned houses overlooking Laguna Canyon fire area. (Photograph by
William Cronon)
front door i3ta reminder of what it means to be alive-even if that reminder
ultimately lulls you. Since ‘Qodd�War 11, roughly 75,000 upper-income
homes have been built on hillside lots by people seeking a room with a
view. 8 They presumably have at least some inkling of the attendant dangers,
though it is surprisingly easy to forget the quakes and the fires and the mud
while gazing our on the intoxicating blue of the Pacific. Why do they do it?
They put themselves and their families at risk for the simple reason that they
want to be close to nature.
This is the chief paradox of southern California, the feature of its environ
ment that makes it such a perfect place for meditating on the complex and
contradictory ideas of narure so typical of modernity. Many oh-he vices for
which the region is most infamous-indeed, virtually every item on chat U
Haul sign-are simply the mirror opposites of the virtues for which it onee
was, or still is, famous. Without the faults and the quakes, the landscape
would never have acquired its astonishing physical relief, tbe mountains that
climb so abruptly out of that stunning ocean. The slopes chat offer such
breathtaking views also tilt the shaccered bedrock and unconsolidated soil
well past their angle of repose, tempting them co head downslope at the least
invitation. The vegetacion keeps che sight lines open, without cluttering the
horizon with trees, and is often the only thing holding the soil in place-
but it js also very fond of burning. The glorious climate, with its endless
sunny days, rarely provides the rainfall that might clear the air of smog, or
WBA’f 1fi
HAPPEN
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“Give the Canyons a Break!
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of Orang•
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other Nildoraraaa
-hlh, tho
canyon a hoal_
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ll:!.IU.kt•,111\I.I Ie ” natural” and ” unnatural” to
apply to such a place. The texts that follow consist of
excerpts fr…
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