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To show something to be “socially constructed” is to show it not to be natural; in this sense there’s something paradoxical in the thesis that nature is itself socially constructed. The thesis might be understood as meaning that nothing is natural, and that the distinction between the “natural” and the “social” makes no sense. “Construction” has to be understood literally. As natural beings, humans are constantly in the process of transforming their environment: they build it. Our relation to the world is active; we come to know it, as the history of epistemology from empiricism through Kant and Hegel and Marx (and Heidegger) shows, through our social practices. Such practices are prior to any putative distinction between matter and thought, nature and culture, or object and subject.

This chapter explains the considerable difficulty we have in making sense of the world and finding our place in it. To undertake that task we need to start with the most basic questions about how we gain knowledge of the world (epistemology), including the limits on our senses and the inevitable ways we form mental images that shape our understandings. It explores longstanding issues of the composition of the world (metaphysics), particularly the challenges of coming to terms with intangibles, along with the limits on human rationality and the inevitable origins of normativity in human sentiment, genetics, and cultural inertia. It takes up the cultural disorientation brought on by the decline of religion and the claims of Darwin, Freud, Einstein and others leading to the pessimism of such works as Krutch, The Modern Temper from the 1920s. It reviews the three basic definitions of truth, considers how the parts of nature form wholes with emergent properties, considers intangibles and continued claims for the objective reality of morals, and challenges the misleading claims about the social construction of nature. All of this supplies a foundation for a critique of prevailing culture and key institutions and calls for cultural reform.

Wilderness both as place and idea has become contested, and for reasons that, when probed, help illuminate contemporary struggles to understand the natural world and to live well within it. Controversies about whether wilderness really exists—about the social construction of nature—stem from basic confusions about the distinction between ideas and language, which are always human created, and the realities of physical nature, which exists apart from humans even as we face limits on our ability to know it and cannot live without altering it. As a human construct, wilderness as idea and term can take many different forms: by some definitions, many wilderness areas still exist, by other definitions no wilderness remains. How we define wilderness and why we might protect it all call for human normative choices. Those choices in turn are best made through an all-things-considered assessment of how we might wisely distinguish between the legitimate use of nature and the abuse of it, and how wilderness protection might help efforts to keep on the right side of that normative line. It ends considering the ways wilderness and wilderness protection can help foster broader, essential cultural change.