The Gender Trouble with Wilderness

Susan R. Schrepfer. Nature's Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. xii + 316 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $35.00.

Having traveled over hill and dale, environmental historians have struck out into new territory: cityscapes and spatial segregation, the body, climate change, energy, consumption, genetically modified flora and fauna, the technological reinvention of nature itself.¹ They have also probed the cultural and political construction of the wilderness idea, laid bare its class, gender, and racial prejudices, and opened room for investigations of environmental justice in the past.² They have jettisoned the impulse to tell past environmental history as a dramatic conflict pitting "man" against "nature." Environmental historians now search for a more complicated narrative, one that probes the social and cultural differences in the category of "man" and shows how they matter if we are to truly understand the role and place of nature in North American history. Environmental historians are as likely to look at human health as they are to look at efforts to preserve bison, redwood trees, or wild rivers; they are as likely to trace the connections among cockroaches, asthma, and an "urban ecology of inequality" in Harlem as they are to trail a John Muir into the Sierra Nevadas.³ An earlier generation of environmental historians often did just that, becoming camp followers of a sort hoping to inspire themselves and others with the great cause of environmentalism by sanctifying a heroic few who found a way to rise above the industrial din of their day.⁴

In our changed historiographic context, Susan Schrepfer's Nature's Altars may seem to be a throwback. She is concerned with those landscapes certain Americans designated as wilderness. The activities of the Sierra Club and other mountaineering groups are at the center of her narrative. John Muir and David Brower have a prominent role. The nature experience of America's elite are given a certain pride of place. Upon finding that gender is in the subtitle, we might believe that we will get another side of the tale, one that puts relatively unknown figures like Marion Randall Parsons (the first female member of the Sierra Club's board of directors) alongside the well-known male leaders. And we do. But the book is not a tired retracing of wilderness environmentalism, with women simply added into the mix. Instead, Nature's Altars is a fresh and incisive book that may be the best monograph in U.S. environmental history yet to appear to use gender as its central category of analysis. Together with Virginia Scharff's edited collection Seeing Nature through Gender, Schrepfer's book will help propel a new wave of work integrating gender analysis with environmental history.⁵

"Protecting wilderness not only saves biological communities and evidence of earlier inhabitants," Schrepfer maintains, "but also preserves centuries of a multilayered, cultural history, of meanings imposed upon meanings, realities laid upon fantasies, and fantasies set against the force of very special places" (p. 8). In so saying, Schrepfer wedges her own work against William Cronon's substantial critique of American environmentalism, which he entitled "The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature."⁶ Like a climber, she uses Cronon and other's criticisms of the wilderness idea to make her own way up the mountain. At the same time, however, she is pushing away from it. For Cronon, the trouble with wilderness had to do with the way that the idea, as a particular narrative told most consequentially by a groups of men claiming the American landscape for their own purposes, not least of which was as a space to prove the mettle of their manhood, narrowed the way that environmentalists and Americans at large have imagined themselves in relation to nature. In addition to effectively dispossessing Native Americans, the wilderness idea shut out other stories about how people may value the places around them, even if those places...