If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature--gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to it, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. How wild is wilderness and how wild are our experiences in it, asks Jack Turner in the pages of The Abstract Wild. His answer: not very wild. National parks and even so-called wilderness areas fall far short of offering the primal, mystic connection possible in wild places. And this is so, Turner avows, because any managed land, never mind what it's called, ceases to be wild. Moreover, what little wildness we have left is fast being destroyed by the very systems designed to preserve it. Natural resource managers, conservation biologists, environmental economists, park rangers, zoo directors, and environmental activists: Turner's new book takes aim at these and all others who labor in the name of preservation. He argues for a new conservation ethic that focuses less on preserving things and more on preserving process and "leaving things be." He takes off after zoos and wilderness tourism with a vengeance, and he cautions us to resist language that calls a tree "a resource" and wilderness "a management unit." Eloquent and fast-paced, The Abstract Wild takes a long view to ask whether ecosystem management isn't "a bit of a sham" and the control of grizzlies and wolves "at best a travesty." Next, the author might bring his readers up-close for a look at pelicans, mountain lions, or Shamu the whale. From whatever angle, Turner stirs into his arguments the words of dozens of other American writers including Thoreau, Hemingway, Faulkner, and environmentalist Doug Peacock. We hunger for a kind of experience deep enough to change our selves, our form of life, writes Turner. Readers who take his words to heart will find, if not their selves, their perspectives on the natural world recast in ways that are hard to ignore and harder to forget.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Much contemporary environmental literature names as enemies of the wild corporate agriculture, logging, mining, and ranching. For mountain guide/philosopher Jack Turner, these will not do. He dislikes even more the abstractions that divorce us from the natural world, which cause us to create pseudo-wild locales like Yellowstone National Park and Grand Canyon, places that resemble nothing so much as Disneyland. Wilderness advocates who do not make themselves at home in the wild, he believes, cannot hope to understand the object of their desires, for only from that "complete immersion in place over time" can there arise the "wisdom that cannot emerge from tourism in a relic wilderness." This sometimes blistering, provocative book is an eco-radical manifesto of a kind, and every reader concerned with wilderness issues should pay attention to it.
From Publishers Weekly
These eight provocative essays turn on a common theme: how wildness (once but no longer the essence of wilderness) has been mediated, micromanaged and abstracted nearly out of existence. The essays include rants against the status quo, memoirs of wild places and a tribute to Doug Peacock, who dared to live among grizzlies. Turner, a former academic who's now a mountain guide in the Grand Tetons, infuses his writing with a restless anger, best felt when read fast. At times, he exhibits a penchant for hyperbole ("Yosemite Valley is more like Coney Island than a wilderness"), and his tone can run a bit high-handed, as when he loftily compares his mountaineering to the predilections of pelicans. He is most persuasive when relying on the language of experience: coming upon a wall of prehistoric pictographs in a Utah canyon, tracking a mountain lion in Wyoming, listening to the clacking of soaring white pelicans. One essay, "Economic Nature," starkly reveals both Turner the pedant, excoriating the language of economics that controls the way we see the world, and Turner the meditative poet ("Dig in someplace.... Allow the spirits of your chosen place to speak through you. Say their names."). Both are persuasive. In the end, Turner has produced a manifesto that defends the wild by passionately restoring its good Thoreauvian name.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finding the Wildness at Our Core,
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This review is from: The Abstract Wild (Paperback)
Jack Turner's "Abstract Wild" is a book that runs past most Nature or Environmental writings at full bore, surpassing the standard let's save some of it for the future motto. A former professor of Philosophy, Turner abandoned his post to concentrate on his passion... climbing, and is now a guide in Wyoming. He was prodded into writing this book as more and more people he knew realized the importance of his message.
Turner dives to the heart of the matter when it comes to the Wild, the Environment, Preservation, Conservation, etc. We as a society have become disconnected with the world at large and the Wildness at its core. This Wildness has become an Abstract concept for for most of us. This book and a few other core titles (i.e. Abbey's "Desert Solitaire" and "The Monkey Wrench Gang" and various works by the likes of Rick Bass, Barry Lopez and Bill McKibben) would make for a very important class in the Preservation of Wildness that all students should be encouraged if not required to take. >>>>>>><<<<<<< A Guide to my Rating System: 1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper. 2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead. 3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted. 4 stars = Good book, but not life altering. 5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This kind of writing is rare,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Abstract Wild (Paperback)
I got this book when searching for something for my biodiversity class to read that would hook them to the subject and move them the way "Sand County Almanac" did me back in my college days. Wasn't able to read it at the time, but I picked it up this fall, thought I would read an essay at a time before bed, like I usually do with essay books. Sometime in the wee hours I realized that I had to stop reading or I would head out into the dark night and wander until I found the wilderness again. Few modern writers, or writers of any age, have so clearly and eloquently expressed what it means to love the wild, what we are about to loose, and truly why we are loosing it despite efforts to the contrary. Turner's solution is one I believe in, but rarely find seriously advocated, probably because it would work. Frankly, if you haven't gone wild, you may not "get" this book. If you want to really know what the wild is about though, read this book and if you like the sound of things, go seek it out. If you are wild, this will be one of the few books on the topic you can stand to read these days. I haven't been so enlightened since I read "The Practice of the Wild" by Gary Snyder. Five stars means a great book. Some books are beyond that, this is one for the ages.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Where other books raise questions, this one answers them,
By
This review is from: The Abstract Wild (Paperback)
An outstanding book that will have special relevance to anyone who has had an experience in the wild that brings an awakening of spirit. Exactly the kind of experience not attainable at Disney World, which is the author's point. He has remarkable answers to questions that trouble any environmentally-concerned person. Questions raised in the exceptional book "Wild Echoes" by Charles Bergman, are answered in the Abstract Wild. Anyone who has been put down for having strong views about man's destructive nature will find solace in this book. Turner knows it is OK to rant for wilderness, and only if we all rant together can we possibly make a difference.
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