Manifest Destiny

 Since Europeans made the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, the white man has been under the impression that America was an empty land, teeming with wild vegetation and foreign animals. What the newcomers did not realize was that this new land was peppered with Native Indians of whom were caretakers for this American landscape.  To the Old World settlers, the terrain was unkempt and savage, truly an uncultivated land. The ignorance that played into their initial impressions of America made a resounding impact on how their successors ultimately viewed the landscape they were settling. America’s wilderness was interpreted to be a cultural construct due to the various interpretations of what nature means to different individuals. Nature exists as it is in its natural state, however, the wild aspect is up to the interpretation of these natural spaces being a sublime setting or a frontier of some sort. Based on the various evaluations made by humans, nature’s rugged wilderness was preserved in a subjective manner as land use changed over the course of America’s historical timeline. Still, the preservation of wilderness in its inherent form is not possible without the acknowledgment that the land Europeans believed to be wild was in fact, always populated and managed by the indigenous people that preceded their arrival. 

Wilderness, as it is conceptualized by humans is the essence of untouched nature. As settlers moved further west and witnessed new monumental landscapes, a relentless search for virgin nature came to be fruitless. As discoveries were made and realizations were had, it was evident that “discovering” terrestrial environments that have not been significantly modified by human activity was a difficult task. According to the Wilderness Act of 1964, “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.” The definition provided by Congress was vague in determining what was considered “untouched by man”, leaving the Act up to interpretation by man. The newly declared Americans wished to use nature as a commodity. The depopulated forests were vast and brimming with new species the white man had never before seen. As forests laid victim to the lumber business, the freshly harvested land was clear for agricultural practices. This chase across the country of clearing trees and planting crops eradicated much of the pristine wilderness the future environmental activists wished to protect.Domesticating the wilderness while also marketing the landscape as natural, gave Americans the go-ahead to exploit other, less pristine environments with no sense of compunction. The frontier idealization of nature removed humans, regarding the wilderness as a commodity belonging to man. Society’s domination of the natural world as a whole in regards to the functionality of the economy. In doing so, the actual frontier became a place of conflict. The myth of the wilderness as seen as a virgin, uninhabited landscape had always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indian who had called the land home. No wilderness could be set aside without displacing the Indians from land they claimed as their home territory.