The Wilderness
Who Gets to Enjoy the Outdoors
The natural world. The great outdoors. The wilderness. Nature. Our home. The interconnectedness of all things.
Land. Property. Territory. Country. Nation. State. Empire. The arbitrary parameters humans place on space. Space that belongs to all of us, yet is kept away from most of us.
. . .
Years ago, I had a conversation with someone, one that I will never forget. I didn’t know the person very well at the time, but I was getting to know her. This woman, let’s call her Lala, and I were talking about our experiences as biracial people of color (her mother is white and her dad is from India), what we enjoyed doing, how we saw the world. We had so much in common; I was surprised when she said that she identified as white. When I asked her why, she said that she liked “white people stuff, like being outdoors and going hiking.”
I can’t remember exactly what I said in response, but let’s just say that I did not have the language then to express my thoughts as I do now.
It was so obvious to me, but I couldn’t explain: It’s not that white people like the outdoors more than people of color. It’s that white people have, for generations, had more access. Access that they did not share with anyone else.
Whether by force, generational wealth, gatekeeping, or simply—or not so simply—leisure time, the result has been the same: access to nature.
It’s strange to think about nature—the environment that surrounds us—as being inaccessible, but it has been rendered so. The stuff of adventures, manifest destiny, subject of countless narratives; nature has been commodified, and we know what happens to commodities in a capitalist culture.
The Wilderness
Nature has been stolen, monopolized, pillaged, “preserved.” If it is not deemed as protected space, it is subject to decimation and extraction to the point of exhaustion. When every drop is squeezed out, what remains?
Though squeezed to the very last drop, the land is rich in blood. Nature tells us the story of America, the blood beneath every boulder, running through every stream. There is perhaps no land, even the protected or preserved land, that has not been harmed, harmed by those who claim to protect it.
John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and known as the “Father of the National Parks” (there are woods nearby in Marin County named after him), was a naturalist and conservationist, and also a staunch white supremacist. Though he is quoted as saying, “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike,” he did not mean everybody. He meant only those who looked like him.
Muir’s “actions and writings contributed to an American land ethic that has long romanticized and idealized the heroic white man alone and at peace in the wilderness, leaving little room for Indigenous relationships with their ancestral lands or for the participation of other minorities in conservation efforts” (Britannica). He deemed Native American and Black people as “dirty and lazy,” barring them from his precious Sierra Club and disregarding Indigenous peoples’ stewardship of their land, viewing them as a “blight” in their native Sierra Nevada.
To champion stewardship of the land and in the same breath disavow the people who were already stewarding it is textbook white supremacy nonsensicality.
Nonsense it may be, but the history runs deep, and it manifests in the present day, in the mind of an Indian American woman who says that she’s white because she likes the outdoors. Outdoors = whiteness.
This is by design. White men did not stop at stealing land from Indigenous people and claiming it as their own. The practice continued (and continues), like the Manhattan Beach resort property that was stolen from the Black family who owned it in 1924, one of countless instances of not only land theft but also a systematic dismantling of access to, and enjoyment of, leisure in relation to land.
If we think of whiteness when we think of nature it is because nature and the enjoyment of it has been co-opted by white supremacy, and because much of the literature on nature has been written by the people (you guessed it, white men!) who had the means and leisure time to enjoy it.
Walden, writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau’s famous meditation on nature, exists because he had the means to build a home and spend “two years, two months, and two days” on the shores of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. It’s not because Thoreau’s white that he enjoyed this; who wouldn’t want to spend two-plus years witnessing the wild beauty around them? But it is because he was white that he had the access and leisure time to opt out of society, to offer a blueprint for what is now arguably #vanlife.
Unlike Muir, Thoreau was not a white supremacist, going so far as to protest the government for supporting the Fugitive Slave Act and aiding enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad, yet his whiteness provided him with the space and freedom to live a creative life. His whiteness permitted him the privileges of not paying his taxes in protest of the government and living to write about it.
. . .
It’s not that we don’t enjoy the outdoors. It’s that we’ve had to fight to enjoy them. It’s that we’ve been prevented from enjoying them, from connecting with what belongs to all of us as inhabitants of this planet.
Because of this, when you think of land conservationists, you probably think of white people. It wasn’t until I was doing research for this newsletter that I discovered Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her work. “In addition to her conservation work, Maathai was also an advocate for human rights, AIDS prevention, and women’s issues,” and was an unpopular activist in her home country for “stepping far outside traditional gender roles” with her outspokenness (Britannica).
Maathai is the kind of conservationist everyone should know about, an exemplar of intersectional activism. It’s impossible to divorce conservationism from human rights (sorry, Muir!); viewing ourselves as separate from the planet is what got us into this mess in the first place. Not to mention, climate change disproportionately impacts people of color.
I wonder if the woman I used to know would look at herself differently if she had learned about Maathai in school or read about her in the news. If she would still view her love of the outdoors as a white pastime.
. . .
Beyond Muir’s legacy, the commodification of nature serves to reinforce Lala’s worldview. Think about it: Patagonia. REI. The outdoors is an industry, and the industry is whitewashed. There are barriers upon barriers if you want to enjoy the outdoors. I always think of that old Portlandia sketch, where you have to “get the gear” to simply go for a walk. You need the gear, the car, the money for parking or an annual parks pass, the time off from work. It’s a production to simply be in nature.
Again, this is by design.
Settler colonialism indicated that land, as far as the eye could see, belonged to the white man who claimed it. Who stole it, plundered it, “protected” it, “preserved” it. From cutting down forests to declaring forests as preserved space, nature and how it is perceived in America has been controlled by the “fathers.”
I am more interested in how nature has been stewarded by the “mothers.” If we orient our gaze toward women like Maathai, to everyday people, to people of color, we see that nature is for all of us, that it always has been.
Though our country’s history has been written by those who attempted to erase the true inhabitants of the land, to control the land, to forcibly bring human beings from another continent to work the land, to harm the land and then decree that the land must be protected, this history does not doom us. It can galvanize us. To claim our enjoyment, our connection, to protect what is sacred to us, to live in right relationship with the land, and with each other.
The Finds
Action. “Bring meaning into uncertainty and chaos by maintaining grounding practices and developing new ones.” Yes! Magazine on the power of ritual.
Listen. “How Long ‘Til We’re Home” by Ego Ella May.
Breaking news at 6 pm
Disappointed by government
Rich get richer as poor ones weep
Same depiction on every screen
And it’s like the whole world
Is running away from the burn
Watch. Send Help. Talk about wilderness! Coming to streaming soon, we saw this dark comedy/survivalist thriller in the theaters and were completely enthralled. Starring Rachel McAdams (love her) and directed by Sam Raimi, Send Help follows an underestimated employee (McAdams) and her boorish boss (Dylan O’Brien) as they fight to survive after their plane crashes. Nothing will prepare you for how this one ends.
Read. Bunny by Mona Awad. In anticipation of the recently released sequel, We Love You, Bunny, I finally got around to reading this 2019 dark academia novel and can safely say that I have never read anything like it. Samantha is a grad student in an MFA program, bemoaning her fate listening to the insipid insights of her cohort, a group of young women who call each other Bunny and wear pastel, cupcake-esque attire. But somehow, the more Samantha learns about this group of women, the more intrigued she becomes, falling under their rainbow sparkle spell until all hell breaks loose. I didn’t love the ending, but I seriously could not put it down and can’t wait to read the next installment from Awad’s twisted mind.
Thank you for being here. See you next time.
In solidarity,
Emma