Essay - How is ‘Natural’ defined by society? A comparison of Yellowstone National Park to the Amazon Rainforest

Science, Nature and Environment essay, Spring 2026. Mark: 65

Introduction

Within society, the term ‘wilderness’ and the concept of a ‘natural’ state in nature are often derived from an image of landscapes devoid of human footprints and anthropological impact. However, natural is a complex cultural construct formulated for possession and commercial use whilst erasing Indigenous history. Through the comparison of Yellowstone National Park and the Amazon Rainforest as examples of conservation, this essay examines how the idea of what is natural is a societal construction. By exploring society’s construction of sublimity and the frontier (Cronon 1995), natural, as it has come to be defined as an anthropological absence, is depicted. This essay argues that to define natural as having value only in human absence contributes to the marginalisation of Indigenous communities and renders natural a possessive tool for resource commodification. Ultimately, discourse about semantics of the term natural and whether or not it connotes anthropological activity decreases the importance of these locations’ protection. 

I. The Romantic sublime constructing possession

To begin with, an understanding of how the Romantic era and sublimity have led society to reject coexistence with nature will be analysed. In 1872, the National Park Protection Act rendered Yellowstone the first national park on the globe, with the term ‘national’ placing it under federal control (Tyrell 2012) and setting an early model for national parks’ tourism as a means of profitability for the American government. Its formulation would lead to the creating of other national parks like Sequoia and Yosemite (Mackintosh et al. 2018) and indicates how society’s view of the natural world was gradually defined not by coexistence of humans peaceably with nature, but by the emergence of “control over nature” (Nash 1970) as symbolised by the formation of parks and, as would follow, their stewardship of them. The build-up to this developed from an American search for identity stemming from the Romantic era, the era in which artistic fascination for America’s landscapes connected the “sublime character of wilderness” to a “uniquely American identity” (Tyrell 2012). This deliberately countered European feelings of historical and architectural superiority. American patriotism became expressed through artistic fascination with the remote and the sublime that encouraged preservation of nature, with the aesthetic of wilderness giving the government the perceived moral right to preserve it. However, this drive to protect thus-far “unspoiled” (Spence 1999) wildernesses negatively associated it with Native American “violations” despite generations of maintenance via hunting and making purposeful fires. Societal fixation on the “American[ised] wilderness” (Spence 1999) demanded the gradual erasure of Native Americans to render an image of untouched, abundant nature more complete. The desire to shape nature as such indicates how the term natural constructs a falsified history, one of land unimpacted by humans. This absence doesn’t exist, yet it is glorified to render within individuals’ mindset an image of what the world looked like before frontierism, or the spread of human activity over the landscape. Frontierism reimagined the wilderness as an empty space awaiting civilisation and by extracting the Native American narrative of sovereignty, possession of Yellowstone and other spaces became justified. Natural being not just a definition open to change but an ability to construct reality of nature via Indigenous erasure is shaped by American colonists and Romantic era thinkers for profit.

While Yellowstone National Park’s realised borders conserve its pristine myth, the Amazon Rainforest serves to globalise the term natural within society. Both develop definitions of the term natural to have control over these territories. From the 18th to the 20th centuries the Amazon Rainforest was depicted by artists, thinkers and explorers as a virgin wilderness and an “Eden” (Cronon 1996), in which scattered Indigenous tribes left little to no mark on the land (Heckenberger 2009). For example the early ecologist Alexander von Humboldt described the Amazon as an “Urwald” or a primeval, primitive forest in which “Man never laid a destroying hand” (Humboldt 1849), a terming of the Amazon that would define its value as an untouched, natural space. This narrative argued that the separation of anthropological cultivation within wildernesses is what gave nature its ultimate value. The fascination with primeval forestry indicates continuing disillusion with the urbanised modern world, as Western society re-termed natural in order to encompass its imagined history as unchanged by humans and valued more deeply as a result of its “virginic” (Cronon 1996) nature.

Similar to Yellowstone National Park, natural as a state without human influences is a construction of Yellowstone’s identity that would increase its profitability potential, as it enabled European capitalists to take advantage of the Amazon’s wealth of resources. During the Rubber Boom of 1860 to 1920, depiction of the Amazon as a landscape lacking in anthropological influence allowed its conceptualised natural space to function as a tool for dispossession. By using the narrative of sublime pristineness to frame the Rainforest as a wilderness devoid of human agency, its resources were treated as ownerless, and allowed for the enslavement and debt-bonding of its inhabitants to suit excessive demand (Coomes and Barham 1994). Here, the means by which natural was defined by a perceived lack of anthropological influence allowed for the idea of natural to become a possessive term in its relation to wildernesses. Romanticism of these spaces assisted in cultivating Indigenous erasure from spaces they had, in fact, influenced and changed for generations. Through this appropriating outlook shaped by the colonialist lens, the desire to control a landscape for profit indicates a culture of erasure fixated on the delineation of sovereignty from Indigenous Amazonians and Native Americans, as is shaped by erasure to facilitate gain from a falsified narrative. 

II. Profit and anthropological impact

Yellowstone National Park’s being declared a natural, primitive state stemming from Native American erasure enabled it to profit off of the term wilderness through tourists, who, in an echo of Romantic era thinking that bolstered individual value of large wildernesses, visited parks to experience nature as it ‘should’ be for themselves (Spence 1999). However, in the modern age, this narrative is undone by the presence of park rangers maintaining the landscape in the same fashion as the Native Americans, and utilising rewilding efforts to manufacture a specific aesthetic of wilderness. Rangers patrol the park and maintain Yellowstone’s so-called natural state through controlled bush burning and management of its bison and elk populations (Yonk et al. 2018), much as the Native Americans once did. In George Monbiot’s novel Feral: Rewilding the land, sea, and human life he describes globalised national park maintenance as retaining nature in a state of “arrested development” and reliant upon intense intervention rather than allowing these parks to maintain themselves in a natural form (Monbiot 2014). The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone Park in 1995 is an indicator of continuing colonialist definition of the park (Kauffman et al. 2010). By their reintroduction, the argument that Yellowstone is being returned to its natural status before the eradication of wolves in 1926 is enforced, whilst bypassing a history of Indigenous management in the park. Although the subsequent trophic cascade– or the top-down changes to an ecosystem– favorably noted a decrease in elk populations and an increase in vegetation like willow and aspen, its actions enforce the idea of a primitive landscape “restored” to appeal to tourism (Kauffman et al. 2010). By first substantiating the narrative that Yellowstone was a wilderness left alone in its natural status for the modern American tourist to enjoy, then re-cultivating its interior environment through species maintenance, the term natural in society is rendered a falsified depiction of what aesthetics in wilderness should be. This serves to separate humanity from the natural world by suggesting that the two must exist separately rather than coexist. William Cronon’s The Trouble with Wilderness describes the dualistic vision of wilderness in which humans, by romanticising the wild and idealising its mythic, exist outside of it. Preservationist ideas of retaining nature in its primitive state not only erases Indigenous history that had, through managing wildlife populations and burning terrain shaped the landscape seen today (Spence 1999), but alienates human existence at all from nature. In 2025, Yellowstone saw over 4 million visitors (NPS 2025) which allows search for the “authentically wild” by tourists (Cronon 1996) to be profited off via Yellowstone’s possession. As Cronon himself notes, though, it is not the preservation of these spaces that is inherently harmful, but how their primitive fetishisation drives the belief that humans are separated from the natural world. But, despite the indication that profit determines intrinsic value, the massive numbers of tourists visiting tell another story: that although society has distinctly framed what is natural as the separation of humanity and wilderness, it is large-scale efforts towards nature as profitable that should be interrogated, and not the individual’s relationship with nature. 

III. Extraction of resources

Similarly to Yellowstone, the aesthetics of the term natural within the Amazon Rainforest and its importance in defining the Rainforest’s treatment by humans exemplifies how the construction of a definition shapes reality. In the modern age, scientific advancements in the study of the Amazon’s civilised past redefine it as heavily cultivated by anthropological activity, as seen in Fig. 1. 

Fig. 1: Kilamope site. A survey of the Amazon’s terrain indicating anthropological activity (Rostain et al. 2024)

The acknowledgement of a past shaped by anthropological impact forces the term natural to be refined to fit new information that indicates more dense civilisation, through ancient roads and platforms as seen above. The recent discovery of dark terra preta soil, or nutrient-rich soil good for plant life, is now thought to have been cultivated by Indigenous tribes going back several thousand years, that indicate small-scale farming of the landscape rather than, as previously assumed, Indigenous tribes remaining nomadic (Rostain et al. 2024). This dismantles the narrative that the Amazon developed free from anthropologic influence, as the Amazon itself was seeded by edible crops. In spite of proof that humanity and wilderness can coexist, there is a continuing possessive mindset within society traversing from the 18th century’s ‘cabinets’ and ‘rooms of curiosity’ that displayed objects, plants, and preserved animals collected from around the globe (Lane 1996). This trend continues into the 21st century, when social media use promotes individual experience of magnificent territories in an attempt to find meaning within wildernesses perceived as free from humanity. This indicates that the individualised value of nature as a static image to be collected rather than interacted with bolsters superiority over what society renders as natural. Through this, the interest of Western self-defining through wilderness exploration separates Indigenous peoples from autonomy of their own landscape, and transforms the image of what is natural within society into one that prioritises individual experience over Indigenous sovereignty. However, the Westernised ability to profit off of wilderness exploration is only achievable due to society’s desire to experience a more natural state of the world via experiencing a perceived naturalised wilderness. The divide between urbanisation in the modern world and what society views as the static natural world introduces opportunity for profit, and renders the definition of natural as a separation between anthropological values and the inherent wilderness to which many strive to return. 

IV. Conclusion

Ultimately, societal defining of nature does not depict a reality of the histories of these territories, but renders both spaces sites for commodification that retain distance between the natural world and the anthropological one. Rather than relying on Indigenous history to encourage coexistence and preservation not drawing on boundaries of human perception, natural is repeatedly re-defined through erasure to mask massive injustice wrought on Indigenous communities. Through indicating the divide between sublimity and frontierism, taking advantage of Indigenous communities for profit, and depicting natural as the ultimate removal of humans from nature, natural is utilised to mask true anthropological history and cultivation of these regions for gross profit and moral superiority. Western society uses the idea of natural as a means of enjoying untouched spaces, but fixating on the human-nature divide rather than co-integration feeds the argument, rather than facilitates finding solutions for coexistence.