William Cronon describes one of the tragic consequences of nature protection. A movement that originally strived to found national parks in the US drove the Native American population out of their homes into reservations. The people who actually considered nature to be their home were forcefully moved so that the natural reserves would appear untouched. This venture reveals a form of self-deception in which advocates of a culture that has become alienated from nature destroy another culture’s harmonious coexistence with it. Through a reading of Cronon’s article, we will discuss these, and other, potentially destructive aspects of the notion of nature as pure or pristine.

Assigned reading: Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Environmental History, vol. 1, no. 1, 1996, pp. 7–28. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3985059. Accessed 11 Mar. 2026.

Bio: Antony Fredriksson (PhD), is an Assistant professor in environmental ethics and aesthetics at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice. His areas of interest include aesthetics, attention, environmental ethics, environmental emotions, film and philosophy, intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, philosophy of perception, and Wittgenstein.