ABSTRACT
Nature in this sense contrasts with culture, which in the modern world typically has the shape of technology. The liberating and disburdening character of certain phases and forms of technology is obvious and significant. It seems at first that the procurement of commodities through technological devices is an endlessly voracious and inherently unstable process that will eventually devour its natural base. The European and the American experiences differ in what they reveal and obscure, and, when seen together, cancel some of their concealments. The American experience obscures the fact that the conquest of nature entails of necessity the destruction or loss of genuine culture. While the American experience with wilderness challenges the technological conception of nature, it provides no setting where an intimate relation between culture and nature had been worked out just prior to the rise of modern technology.
