Tournaments of Value: Horses, Wilderness, and the Tasmanian Central Plateau

Abstract

Grey Brechin recently recounted how a geography professor at Berkeley in 1971 told his class of undergraduates that true wilderness no longer existed because all nature was being increasingly modified by human presence and numbers. Brechin thought the claim preposterous -a view he was later to revise significantly as reservations became required to hike the Sierras and I was told to boil its snow to kill the giardia, and well before 'the cultural construction of nature' became a hot topic of academic cultural studies. One backpacked the John Muir Trail and attended geography classes with Edenic innocence way back then, Brechin observed.' idea that we culturally construct notions of nature has indeed become a hot topic. While not a new idea, it is at the heart of a new surge of debate concerned with exploring the meaning of nature in the modern western world. Fundamental to this inquiry is the conviction, as Libby Robin has described, that the natural world is much more than a nafve reality, that nature cannot be understood without first knowing its various cultural representations, and that nature is knowable in many ways.2 debate was prompted by the publication of William Cronon's Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature.3 In this volume, fifteen North American scholars, including literary critics, geographers, and environmental historians, explored the notion of nature and its relationship to environmental debate. central theme of the study is that nature is not a universal reality but is a complex of divergent cultural constructs that different groups and individuals imbue with a range of meanings. book, and especially Cronon's lead essay, The Trouble With Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, generated almost immediate controversy. For Cronon, this was somewhat of a surprise. notion that we culturally construct the world is hardly new. Roderick Nash noted links as far back as Plato.4 In sociology, geography, and anthropology, the notion has been well founded for a number of years.5 heat, it seems, was that when published in the mid-1ggos, Cronon's essay was perceived to be an attack on the environmental movement. assertion that nature is a human idea robbed it of the universal and transcendent authority upon which environmentalists had relied in arguing for its protection.