In this blog post I want to explore Banana Island and how the different amenities it offers is described on its website. I want to see if the resort follows the theory of ‘wilderness’, and if the argument William Cronon provides regarding ‘wilderness’ concords with how the resort advertises itself to the world.
Cronon in his “The Trouble with Wilderness” describes how “wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth” (1). But he says that, while it may appear as though the wilderness is so very different from the human world, it is actually very connected to it because we are the ones who characterized what it is, and then we simply interact with that fictitious characterization of ‘wilderness’ (1). One way that ‘wilderness’ is characterized is through the work of Romantics who connected wilderness to religion, and thus the idea of wilderness being ‘sublime’ came to be (Cronon 4). The wilderness being sublime means that anything that is the wilderness is like “those vast, powerful landscapes where one could not help feeling insignificant and being reminded of one’s mortality” (Cronon 4). They are places that can make someone feel that they are no longer in the realm of humans (Cronon 4) and have been “in the presence of the divine” (Cronon 5).
The second way that people have characterized the ‘wilderness’ is as a place that people would want to go to as a way to resolve the consequences that modernity caused on the person, and this is the Primitivism theory (Cronon 7). However, Cronon argues against both Romantic and Primitivism theory because both of them push away the idea of human coexistence with nature (11). Cronon explains that, first, the concept of “nature, to be natural, must also be pristine — remote from humanity and untouched by our common past (13), is wrong because “everything we know about environmental history suggests that people have been manipulating the natural world on various scales for as long as we have a record of their passing.” (13) Cronon explains that we cannot only consider something to be nature if it makes someone feel the way that Romantic theory describes wilderness to be like (17), because it places nature upon a pedestal and makes it seem as though we cannot have an “ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature” (11).
Banana Island seems to apply some of Cronon’s theories but not others. On the one hand, Cronon does not want nature to be treated as though it is merely a place to go to as a vacation for people “enjoying their leisurely reverie in God’s natural cathedral” (11) but that seems to oppose what Banana Island precisely is – and even what it describes itself as. On the Banana Island website, it is described as “your private luxury island getaway in Doha” and enunciates that one must arrive “by private catamaran” and that it is an “escape for family adventures”. These words, and also what Banana Island is, seems to follow what Cronon describes to be an incorrect way of conceiving of nature. It is in Qatar, but it is a place that advertises itself as a way for someone to move away from normal life in a place of nature, because it is an artificial island. But there is a contradiction in this statement. Banana Island might be something like nature because it possesses an ocean for instance, and with a beautiful view one might consider it to be the ‘sublime’ as Cronon described. But Banana Island also has a “VIP cinema, bowling alley”, which does not follow the idea of nature being non-human. Banana Island advertises itself as something that Cronon explains nature should not be like, but at the same time it is not exactly ‘nature’ as a thing which is not related to people. In essence, by being a resort, it is a place which invites people to itself.
Banana Island is therefore a very interesting case study because it almost picks and chooses from the theories that Cronon discussed and is an amalgamation of theories of nature and non-nature in simultaneity. The questions that are raised from this application of Cronon’s theory to this case study are what ‘sublime’ would mean in a resort, in a place that might have beautiful views but that is still in the realm of humans.
Works Cited
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon, New York: W.W Norton & Co., 1995, 1 – 24.
