Uncommon Ground

Uncommon Ground

Monthly Archive: October 2026

The trouble with wilderness

In an earlier post on industrial tourism, I struggled with how to balance the desire many of us have to protect wilderness with our concern for those who cannot enjoy its pleasures. I argued that those of us who want to protect wilderness must recognize and respect the values of those who want easier access just as much as they must recognize ours. I also argued that we need to trust one another. I don’t know how we build trust, but I have two ideas to share that might help us understand each other better.

The first idea traces to William Cronon and his essay The trouble with wilderness: or, getting back to the wrong nature:

The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. 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 contaminating 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. (emphasis added)

Those of us who value wilderness have to recognize that valuing wilderness is a recent historical development. Cronon argues that before the 19th century wilderness “was a place to which one came only against one’s will, and always in fear and trembling.” Wilderness became a place that we value because most of us were no longer struggling against a wild nature to survive. It became a place we had left behind, a place we could value because it no longer threatened us. Wilderness is there because we made it, not because we discovered it.

Those who value access wouldn’t understand any of that. They may never have had a pleasant experience in wild nature. They still see it as forbidding and threatening. Think of a friend or a relative whose idea of nature is a well-manicured public park or golf course. They might be literally frightened for their life if they were to find themselves on a hiking trail in the Rocky Mountains.

At the same time, we need to recognize that

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire , p. 162

So the person who doesn’t place a value on wilderness now, might be persuaded to change their mind. But we’ll only be able to persuade them if they trust us, and we’ll only be able to persuade them if we trust them enough to open our minds to the possibility that we might learn something from them too. We’ll especially need to keep in mind Jonathan Franzen’s advice.

We can’t make a reader care about nature. All we can do is tell strong stories of people who do care, and hope that the caring is contagious.

Franzen was writing about nature writing, but the same principle applies to conversations about nature. We have to meet people where they are, not where we want them to be. We have to hope that if we tell strong stories of people who care about wilderness, the caring will be contagious.

October 26, 2026 Environment 0 Read more >

Nature writing

Who am I to give advice on nature writing? No one. I couldn’t write a readable essay about nature if my life depended on it. But I have read a lot of nature writing,1 and more importantly I was recently reminded of Jonathan Franzen’s essay, The problem of nature writing. I won’t offer my own advice about nature writing, I’ll just pull a couple of suggestions from Franzen’s essay, and I won’t be at all offended if you follow the link to Franzen’s essay and never return. He is, after all, an accomplished writer.

The phrase under the title captures Franzen’s key insight:

To succeed—to get people to care about preserving the world—it can’t be only about nature.

To succeed, nature writing has to capture not only those of us who are already captivated by it, but also those who think they don’t care about it, maybe even those who find nature scary (or at least messy). And how do we do that? By telling stories. Stories capture an audience.2 So nature writing needs to be story telling, but not just any story.

Narrative nature writing, at its most effective, places a person (often the author, writing in first person) in some kind of unresolved relationship with the natural world, provides the character with unanswered questions or an unattained goal, and then deploys universally shared emotions—hope, anger, longing, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment—to engage a reader in the journey.

Effective nature writing involves a story about people, usually the author. Whether it’s Thoreau at Walden Pond, Abbey at Arches, or Dillard at Tinker Creek, effective nature writing tells a story about the author and their intense personal relationship with nature.

We can’t make a reader care about nature. All we can do is tell strong stories of people who do care, and hope that the caring is contagious.

If you’ve read this far, you owe it to yourself to read Franzen’s essay. It’s not long, and you’ll learn much more from it.

  1. Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Edwin Way Teale, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and others ↩
  2. If you don’t believe me, read through a few of the articles on Randy Olson’s Substack, ABT Agenda ↩

October 18, 2026 Writing 0 Read more >

More thoughts about industrial tourism

Edward Abbey was undoubtedly right about industrial tourism. It deadens us to the world, and it disconnects us from the sublime. But does that mean that all national parks should ban cars? Protecting wild areas where human influence is minimal is undoubtedly important, and Abbey is right that cars trailers “tend to separate [us] from the world around [us].” But cars also provide access to parts of the world that some people would never see without them. Cars and wildness are incompatible. How do we choose between them?

The answer can’t be that every national park must completely exclude cars, if only because we’d have many fewer and much smaller national parks than we do now. The answer also can’t be to allow cars anywhere we can build a road, because that tramples on the interests of many people, like me, who value wildness. The answer must be that we balance the need for wildness with the need for access. But how do we do that?

The first step must be for those of us who value wildness to understand that there are those who value access as much as we value wildness and that their interests deserve respect from us in the same way that our values deserve respect from them. That is very hard. I shudder when I see a hillside covered with ATV or dirt bike tracks, but the people who made those tracks are people—human beings who deserve to be treated with the same respect and dignity that expect from them. Given enough time I might be able to persuade them that their interests would be better served by enjoying the outdoors on foot or on horseback. But until I succeed, I have to respect their interests and seek a way to accommodate them without doing unreasonable damage to my own. Of course, they must do the same with me—respect my interests and find a way to pursue theirs that leaves wild spaces for me.

That first step is big. It requires trust on both sides. It requires me to trust that ATV riders will respect my interests because if I don’t trust them, I can’t trust any agreement we reach. If I don’t trust them, I will believe that they are taking advantage of me even if I can’t see how they’re doing it. And they, of course, have to trust me for the same reason. If you think about it a bit more, that first step I proposed is really the second or third step (and there are more steps to come).

The first step is to recognize that the problem isn’t to choose between cars and wildness. It is to find the balance between cars and wildness. Or to say it differently, it is to realize that cars and wildness are only partially incompatible.

The second step is to build trust among those with different interests. In taking the second step, we’ll cycle back and forth between building trust and building understanding. We may even circle back to the original conflict and find a new way to describe it that makes our interests more compatible than we originally thought.

October 12, 2026 Environment 0 Read more >

Do we need to worry about writing?

Joe Cruz, Chair and Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Cognitive Science at Williams College, writes that “we think best by speaking, answering and defending our ideas.” He points out that good teachers rarely, if ever, read lecture notes verbatim. Instead, they speak extemporaneously, engage students in discussion and debate, and guide students to mastery through practice and feedback. But he misses several important points.

First, Cruz minimizes the challenge of implementing the practice he recommends: 45-minute oral exams of each student in a course. He admits “there will be challenges of scale,” but he teaches at a college where the total enrollment is about 2300. The two introductory courses for biology majors at UConn enroll over 600 students per semester. That’s 450 hours of oral examinations per semester. If you wanted to schedule all of those exams in final exam week, that’s 9 hours a day for 10 examiners. If the examiners were graduate assistants, it would take 22 1/2 of them. They can’t work more than 20 hours per week.1

Second, Daniel Drezner argues more effectively than I can that “writing is pretty damn important.” If you need to be convinced of that, click through to read his post on Substack. Cruz admits that “writing remains an essential life skill, and we will continue to do it,” but he underestimates how important it is and how important practice is to doing it well.

Third, Cruz seems to miss the point about “writing is thinking.”2 John Warner puts it much better than I do:

One of my mantras about writing is that writing is thinking. Writing is simultaneously the expression and the exploration of an idea1. As we write, we are trying to capture an idea on the page, but in the act of that attempted capture, it’s likely (and even desirable) that the idea will change.

Writing your ideas down forces you to struggle with them. You can’t write a clear sentence or paragraph unless you understand, really understand what you’re writing about.

Fourth, discussion and debate involving people who genuinely seek knowledge enhances understanding because both sides see in real time where the holes in their arguments are. But discussion and debate also favor those who are quick on their feet. A faulty argument produced quickly and expressed confidently often prevails over a sound argument produced later.3 I worry about the weight quick responses get in discussions and debates. Would you rather listen to someone who responds quickly but is wrong or someone who responds slowly but rarely makes a mistake?

  1. Our graduate students are unionized, and the 20 hours per week of assistantship duties is mandated by the contract, but it is also consistent with longstanding practice based on the federal requirement that international graduate assistants work no more than 20 hours per week. ↩
  2. I say “seems to miss” rather than “misses” because Cruz is obviously very smart. I find it difficult to believe that he doesn’t understand the point I’m about to make, but his op-ed provides no evidence that he understands it. ↩
  3. Or a sound argument that isn’t produced at all because the debate has moved on before the person with the sound argument had a chance to express it. I won’t claim that all of my arguments are sound, but anyone who’s been in a graduate seminar with me knows that I am often silent. It’s partly because I want students to take the lead, but it’s also because I don’t think quickly. Unless the subject is something I am already intimately familiar with and have well-formed opinions on, I am not likely to have an observation worth sharing before the discussion has moved in a direction that makes my observation relevant. ↩

October 5, 2026 Academics 0 Read more >