Wyoming, indeed the West in general, offers an unprecedented view of the natural world, with grand mountaintops and towering forests, huge grass prairies and sagebrush fields. Ecosystems stacked together, and working in perfect harmony. As a child, I spent a great deal of time in nature. I understood and had a clear view of it. I viewed it as a thing for man, a thing we were fully in control of, but something that came with the caveat that we shouldn’t take advantage of our blessing of being set at the top of the evolutionary chain. But the older I get, the more reading I do, the more that I experience, I realize that nature is not solely a utensil for our own use and advancement as a species.
Wallace Stegner’s “Wilderness Letter”, written to the outdoor Recreation and Resources Review Commission, outlines his views of the natural world and of wild places. He states that nature is valuable because it helped to shape us into what we are today. In reading Stegner’s letter I found that I agreed with a great deal of his ideologies. He
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There are those who believe that Cronon would disagree with Stegner when he says that we “need wild country available to us” and that we, man, can appreciate only that it’s there, and find happiness in that. They say that Cronon would argue that our separation from wilderness, and therefore our reverence for the sublime and our indifference towards the frontier is part of the problem. However, if we look again to Cronon’s ‘Trouble with Nature’ we find him saying that when he comes closest to finding religion in nature, he celebrates that nature is all around us, for all eyes to see, and that he does not object to the setting aside of wild lands for their preservation. He later continues on to say that “[his] principle objection to wilderness is that it may teach us to be dismissive or even contemptuous of such humble places and