The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Conservation

appearing in Cronon’s oft-cited collection Uncommon Ground were focused more on coming to terms with the consequences of the cultural mediation of our knowledge of nature and models of ecological change in postwar environmentalism, Cronon’s own dismantling of the meanings and images associated with the American wilderness idea suggested that the earlier conservation movement was also implicated in the broader critique. In particular, Cronon singled out the nature-romanticism of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, and the primitivism of Frederick Jackson Turner, as examples of how American thinking about wilderness had been saddled with utopian myths that represented a flight from lived human history and an escape from the hard problems presented by modern urban and industrial life (Cronon 1996). If Cronon was right, it meant that our thinking about wilderness had been at best intellectually lazy in its acquiescence to these wrongheaded ideas about our place in the world. At worst, it had been morally irresponsible, especially in its neglect of urban and rural conditions and the men and women who toiled in the fields and in the factories away from an idyllic and imaginary “pristine” nature. Cronon’s criticism of the wilderness concept, and, more generally, the deconstructivist assessment of the commitments and strategies of late20th-century environmentalism, are now part of the conservation canon. They have been joined by a growing and broadly sympathetic literature, including further interdisciplinary critiques of the wilderness idea (Callicott and Nelson 1998), attempts to demystify significant contemporary conservation concepts such as that of “biodiversity” (Takacs 1996), and projects exploring the historically neglected dimensions of class, culture, and authority in the management of parks