Our Conservation Across Boundaries crew is wrapping up their last week on course, and we are really looking forward to their final presentation this Sunday. One of the prominent themes on this course is the concept of wilderness; we ask our students to think about questions such as, How do we define wilderness? and, Are human beings a part of or separate from wilderness? In pondering these questions, our students dive into William Cronon's essay, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature". In it, Cronon states, "For many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth. It is an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness. Seen in this way, wilderness presents itself as the best antidote to our human selves, a refuge we must somehow recover if we hope to save the planet." He then asks, "But is it?...Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation...It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the containating taint of civilization. Instead, it's a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural." We're sharing this excerpt to encourage you to think about this subject in the same way our students do and question your own understanding of wild spaces and what it means to be human in these spaces. | 
