On a spring afternoon in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the ground lies thick with litter: cigarette butts color the playground’s turf, sharp Heineken caps litter grassy strips, and trash cans along the park’s pathways explode with the weight of New York City’s refuse. Joggers adopt an avoidant mindset, averting their eyes from the waste, or simply weaving around it. Parents keep their toddlers strapped tightly in strollers, fearful their curious children might mistake a soiled hamburger wrapper for a yellowing leaf. The scene is small, but telling: in America’s largest cities, nature isn’t sacred. It’s actively deprioritized. 

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Conservation, at its core, has always read as an apology—the movement’s principles of protection and rectification aim to repent for the damage we’ve already inflicted on the natural world. Yet for all our strategizing, restoration has historically prioritized some environments more than others, unequally allocating resources towards the preservation of “wilderness.” The mountain’s crag, the pasture’s grass, the mighty forests: all places of holiness, where we can glimpse the world we abandoned for civilized life. Yet cities? Spoiled, manufactured, and unworthy of redemption. Though the most recent census states 80% of Americans are concentrated in urban areas, these regions experience arguably more environmental degradation than the pristine landscapes we fight diligently to protect. In viewing urban landscapes as topographies of decimation, we devalue the benefits they provide residents, perpetuating a wildland-urban divide that prioritizes frontier terrain over livable environments. This permits the continuous pollution of our cities, threatening not only the health of urban dwellers, but creating systemic cycles of disposal wherein we abuse a beneficial public amenity. Though urban planners and policymakers have attempted to replicate, or build around, nature in cities through the creation of green space, we view these landscapes as artificial, and thus unworthy of our care and attention. In doing so, we deny ourselves the benefits green spaces were designed to provide. Getting back to nature doesn’t require a grand hunting trip or summiting a mountain peak—it can be found in the trees lining your block, the winding paths of a local park. Nature isn’t the opposite of the city; it’s what it’s built upon. Reaping the virtues of urban life requires an environmental ethic that allows us to live sustainably within our own communities, not idealize a distant frontier. We don’t need to escape to wilderness, we need to stop viewing our cities as disposable landscapes. 

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In redefining wilderness, we must first trace the term’s linguistic evolution—how it emerged as a way to describe barren land where humans reckoned with their own weakness, then becoming a space to glimpse the sublime, finally being commodified by urban elites in want of a noiseless, uninhabited playground. Now, we see nature as an entity entirely separate from us, a purity that only exists out there, away from the mess of city life. This myth is tackled by environmental historian William Cronon, whose seminal essay “The Trouble with Wilderness” argues that this separation isn’t merely unrealistic, but harmful. Viewing ourselves as distinct from wilderness enables us to believe that the only “real” nature is that unblemished by humans, making environments under human jurisdiction somehow lesser. This mindset runs deep. Cronon states that “as late as the eighteenth century,” the so-called “wilderness” was associated with a sense of terror and bewilderment: a desolate landscape where savagery prevailed. However, all this had changed by the end of the nineteenth century. Romantic thinkers like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir effectively transformed the wilderness into holy ground: “God’s own temple,” as Cronon states, a place where modern people could cleanse their souls of the dirty metropole. Cronon orients this definition of wilderness around American industrialization efforts: as urbanization and modernization progressed, the longing for a more primitive way of living deepened. The throes of city living—experienced both at the dawn of the industrial age and in the modern day—created “frontier nostalgia” amongst elites, who sought to preserve these sublime landscapes for their own benefit. The cultural view of wilderness tracks linearly with increasing industrialization efforts. When Americans lived with and on the land in greater numbers, wilderness was something to fear. But as society has moved towards an increasingly urban future, wilderness has become a commodity, a place for the rich to revel in its emptiness. Thus, for everyone else, nature became a luxury.  

 

However, for those urbanites who lack the mobility and resources required for wilderness exploration, green spaces—typically seen in the form of public parks—can provide pockets of serenity amidst the bustle of the city. Take New York City as an example—America’s most populous city boasts an astonishing 1,700 green oases across five boroughs. The history of these parks pre-dates the independence of the American nation itself: the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation claims it began when Governor Thomas Dongan officially incorporated New York City in 1686, placing all “waste, vacant, unpatented and unappropriated lands” under municipal control. Bowling Green Park was crowned the city’s first official park in 1733, with three co-leaders responsible for beautifying the park with grass, trees, and wooden fence. From their inception, New York City parks have actively attempted to replicate the feel of wild forests, creating a place for residents to reap the socio-emotional benefits that come from spending time outdoors. The city’s most famous park was unveiled in 1858, after iconic landscape designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s plan for the city’s Central Park was selected by the park’s Board of Commissioners from 33 competing blueprints. The pair later reunited to architect Brooklyn’s beloved Prospect Park, established in 1866. What stands out about the design of these two parks is not only their scale, but the way they bring visitors into contact with nature. 

 

Winding paths of both dirt and gravel provide easy access to amenities like the reservoirs of the sister parks, and the densely-wooded forests and tree-lined roadways enable closeness with the flora and fauna of these urban spaces. The idea was simple: bring nature to those who couldn’t afford to leave the city. 

Yet the birth of the city park system also created one of the most harmful issues blighting urban communities: pollution within green spaces. A New York Times article that tackles “The Absurd Problem of New York City Trash” tells us that the city has 800,000 residential buildings, which produce approximately 24 million pounds of trash per day, with commercial businesses adding another 20 million pounds daily. Upsettingly, refuse is often found on full display, bursting out of poorly contained trash cans or left loose on sidewalks. Worse yet is the fact that many civilians are now finding trash in the one place in the city promised to be unspoiled: public parks. Following the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, New York Times reporter Sarah Maslin Nir tracked the systemic issues plaguing New York City parks. She saw the New York City Parks Department budget slashed by $84 million amidst lockdown isolation, when residents cited they needed green space the most. The effects were seen almost immediately—maintenance crews got to 400 fewer park sites per week, and the department had “45% less staff,” resulting in the immediate pileup of waste. As a result, New Yorkers saw exceptional levels of trash in parks: one couple in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park discussed scrolling real estate listings while surrounded by “paper plates and fish bones…a triangle of trash….made up of 38 full plastic garbage bags,” while a Crown Heights resident admitted she was afraid to walk her dog after he “sliced his paw on shattered glass in a flower bed.” Some may argue that Americans lack a sense of social responsibility, but I propose that this stems from our distorted view of urban green space as a manufactured landscape, therefore unworthy of protection.

 

By separating the built environment from unmarred wilderness, we not only reinforce separatist notions that allow us to continually pollute urban spaces, but implicitly deny our own place in nature. As Cronon illustrates, our idea of wilderness has transformed from a landscape that had “little or nothing to offer civilized men and women” to an entity that embodied “the awesome power of the sublime,” now a “form of recreation” enjoyed by privileged urban sportsmen. In doing so, he argues that we “give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead,” imagining that if the wilderness is our true home, we can “forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit.” Our collective effort to view the civilized world as distinct from nature demonstrates a desire to absolve ourselves from the guilt we feel about sullying the urban world, but also creating that world in the first place. The wish to return to the frontier isn’t born from a willingness to work off the land—as is evidenced by city folk’s inevitable retreat from the countryside back to the urban—but rather stems from a need to alleviate ourselves from confronting the physical manifestations of humanity’s climate negligence. As Cronon suggests, forgiving ourselves the homes we live in results in systemic issues of waste buildup, as seen in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, with no apparent solution. 

 

In order to ameliorate such environmental issues, it’s imperative we accept a multidimensional view of nature that rejects the concept of urban or “impure” environments as less worthy of protection than what we imagine to be “real” nature. By limiting our definition of wilderness to what Cronon calls “the remote corners of the planet,” we not only deny ourselves the pleasure of finding our place within urban ecosystems, but permit ourselves to mindlessly pollute these spaces. Furthermore, in adopting a dualistic vision of society and nature as entirely separate, our present supposition of wilderness encourages environmentally irresponsible behavior, as is seen in the littered landscapes of New York City’s public parks. For the sake of ourselves and the environments we reside in, we must do as Cronon suggests: embrace the complete continuum of a natural landscape, from the urban to the suburban, pastoral, and deep forest. This recontextualization of nature encourages not only the continuous preservation of “wild” places, but also the protection of urban green space. While none of us can individually solve New York City’s litter problem, we can choose to treat our neighborhood park as landscapes sacred as the distant mountains. The trees that litter your city block are very well the same as those populating national parks across the nation. So, I implore you, why would one be less worthy of wonder and respect than the other?

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Bibliography 

“A Timeline of NYC Parks History: NYC Parks.” A Timeline of New York City Department of Parks & Recreation History, www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/timeline. Accessed 8 Nov. 2025. 

Bureau, US Census. “Nation’s Urban and Rural Populations Shift Following 2020 Census.” Census.Gov, 4 Apr. 2024, 

www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html. 

Badger, Emily and Buchanan, Larry. “The Absurd Problem of New York City Trash.” The New York Times, 2 March 2024. 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/02/upshot/nyc-trash-rules.html. 

Cronon, William. 1996. “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting back to the Wrong Nature.” Environmental History 1 (1): 7–28. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3985059. 

Maslin Nir, Sarah. “Trash Piles Up in Parks, Just When New Yorkers Need Them the Most.” The New York Times, 27 August 2020. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/nyregion/nyc-parks-trash.html. 

“Olmsted–Designed Parks: NYC Parks.” New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/olmsted-parks. Accessed 8 Nov. 2025.