Cronon's and Thoreau's Different Wildernesses

Upon reading Cronon's perspective on Thoreau's glorified wilderness I became very conflicted as to which author I side with. While Throreau brings about what one can learn from the wild and the importance of connecting with nature in the ways he had, Cronon's belief that the mystery behind nature is one that is self imposed by humans takes away from the majesty of Thoreau's writing.

Cronon's argument traces how nature used to be something related with fearing God and fearing evil to becoming something about beauty and wonder. It changed from a place of hostility to a place of revelation (no pun intended... the book of Revelations... haha). I love his line, "[t]he place where we are, is the place where nature is not." I found that to be the crux of his argument, proving that nature as we have come to define it, to create it, is something intangible so we can never really experience it without projecting our own beliefs of what it should be.

This is something that Thoreau disparages. In the pieces of his writing that we read he describes nature as being a reclusive place, as unaffected by society as it can be, which he resides for a period of time before returning to his community. He describes the enlarging air space as men affect nature and cut down its trees. While Cronon would explain this as men doing what they do and the only loss is not the actual trees but rather the significance that people have begun to attach to those trees.

From an English major's perspective, I found Thoreau's writing to be more textually appealing. It is written with beauty and he utilizes his own words rather than using others to speak for him. Because Cronon's essay (?) is written as a critique or rather a dismissal of several of Thoreau's points, that beauty is lost as he uses straightforward clean-cut words and sentences to convey his point.