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Wilderness and the American Mind

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For a few decades now, Roderick Nash's WILDERNESS AND THE AMERICAN MIND in its various editions has been perhaps the best all around introduction to the history of American attitudes towards nature and about what makes these attitudes unique in world culture. All editions have covered the greater story, beginning with the early attitudes towards wilderness in colonial times, in which nature was viewed primarily in terms of the use to which it could be put and a sense of human responsibility to transform it for human use. Nash then shows how American ideas towards nature gradually altered through the thought of individuals inspired by Romanticism, in particular Emerson and Thoreau. He then describes how Americans moved from a view of nature as possessing value only to the degree to which it can be put to use, to a view of wilderness having intrinsic value entirely on its own. All the major events in American environmental history are covered, from the popularization of wilderness through painters such as Cole, Bierstadt, and Moran, to the work and influence of John Muir, through the creation of the national park and forest system, to the work of 20th century figures such as Aldo Leopold. The book makes all-in-all a fascinating read, and anyone wanting to learn about

In particular, Nash shows how the view of undeveloped wilderness as something possessing intrinsic value worth preserving in an undeveloped state is a uniquely American idea, and one of the great intellectual contributions to world thought. Today, a large number of countries have followed America's lead in establishing national parks and wildlife preserves. All over the world, the notion of wilderness and nature possessing value apart from what human activity imparts to it is commonplace.

For anyone wanting to go beyond Nash's book to read more deeply on the various topics covered will find Nash's Bibliographic Essay to be almost as valuable as the book itself. Nash is an obvious bibliophile, and he provides a rich and varied introduction to every aspect of his subject. After reading this book for the first time, I read a large number of books suggested by Nash in his essay. I later offered some continuing education classes at the University of Chicago on environmental ethics, a subject about which I learned primarily by working from Nash's bibliography. The ongoing value of this book has been enhanced by the recent fourth edition, which has not only added a new preface but has extensively updated the bibliography. I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone even remotely interested in American or environmental history.

Best of all, this book, while impeccable in its academic credentials, is never less than utterly fun and delightfully readable. Definitely not for scholars and students alone.

Those who have been so quick to pronounce the "death" of environmentalism surely have not taken Roderick Frazier Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind into account. With roots in European Romanticism, and blossoming in mid-19th Century writings of Thoreau and Emerson, the idea of wilderness is one of the most important ideas America has contributed to the world.

The wilderness idea has no abler chronicler than Roderick Nash, whitewater rafting guide, adventurer, descendent of Canadian explorers and professor emeritus of environmental studies, who first published this book in 1967 and has taken it through four editions. His entertaining narrative covers the life of Muir and the early preservation struggles of The Sierra Club. He provides special insight into Aldo Leopold and sets the whole discussion of Leopold's land ethic in its historical context.

While wilderness is everywhere under assault, many still understand the continuing need to preserve our wilderness system, a network of wild areas free from all other human activities. In fact, it's difficult to come away from Nash's book without understanding that wilderness is an intrinsic American value.

The most articulate advocate of wilderness was Theodore Roosevelt, who believed the modern American was in danger of becoming an "overcivilized" man, who has lost strength and higher virtue in a trend toward "slothful ease." Nash gives great credit to Roosevelt and shows how his ideas and experiences contributed to later 20th Century concepts of environmental preservation.

America, according to Roosevelt, needed to preserve the remnants of the pioneer environment because, "no nation facing the unhealthy softening and relaxation of fibre that tends to accompany civilization can afford to neglect anything that will develop hardihood, resolution, and the scorn of discomfort and danger."

Wilderness evokes deep sentiments in the mystic chords of American memory. It is not merely a political movement thought up in the 1960s--a trend that will fade as baby boomers age and our present generation of environmental leaders moves on. Nash shows us how wilderness came to be that way and suggests the wilderness idea is likely to endure at the vital center of our national psyche.

I stumbled across this book in the course of some research on the so-called "Greening of American Religion," ie the reinterpretation of the Bible and other religious works to more appreciate, rather than vilify, the non-human environment. As Nash thoroughly documents in the first chapters of this book, Christianity (or at least American elements of it) certainly bears a heavy cross when it comes to environmental destruction in America. After reading Nash, someone is going to have to do some real creative reinterpretation to convince me that the Bible does not say what generations of Americans have understood it to say: the earth was made for man, and man has every right to control and manage it to his ends, part of which means conquering and "civilizing" wilderness and everything within it. These early chapters are important, because it constructs the anti-wilderness mindset that so thoroughly dominated early American (world?) history (and for that matter continues to influence the thought of millions of Americans). Subsequent chapters chronicle how some Americans-initially only lone voices like Thoreau and Muir-rejected this view and developed the idea of wilderness we generally accept today within the preservationist movement. In the process Nash explores competing "environmentalist" theories such as the "wise use" (conservationist) leanings of Pinchot and TR Roosevelt and the surprising beginnings of some of our contemporary "environmentalist" legislation (e.g. forest reserve system). Later chapters focus on the Hetch-Hetchy controversy and Leopold. As such this book serves as a very readable and well-constructed general history of American environmentalism, a book any "environmentalist" (regardless of how you define that term) should read. As another reviewer notes, some of the scholarship needs to be updated (e.g. the apocryphal "campfire chat" of the "founders" of Yellowstone NP that likely never took place, as discussed in Schullery's recent history of Yellowstone). But overall an excellent resource, one you'll want on your bookshelf if for no other reason than the copious quotes sprinkled throughout the text used to support Nash's arguments. My favorite (from Lord Byron's Manfred: A Dramatic Poem (London 1817)):

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods
There is a rapture on the lonely shore
There is a society where none intrudes
I love not the man less, but nature more.

In the early '70s, I was a student in Rod's Nash's "Wilderness and the American Mind" class at UC Santa Barbara,and we used his book, among many others. The class was transformative, and I now plan to use this book in my own classes. This in combination with Tim Eagan's "The Big Burn" are highly compatible readings that examine envionmental issues from different perspectives. I recommend Nash's book; it is still very timely and captures the essence of the foundations of environmentalism, American attitudes, and the Westward Movement.

As the other reviews will confirm, this is a classic book on the American concept of wilderness. Nash wrote the first version in the 1960s, originally as his dissertation. The main narrative has held up well. Nash has also put the text through regular revisions, so it lacks any embarrassingly outdated claims that might detract from the book.

The first part of the book is an intellectual history of "wilderness." Wilderness may exist as a state of mind or as the product of an intellectual movement (as in Nash). This kind of analysis is invariably subjective and selective. Nash, like others engaged in this kind of history, draws from a subset of all the people who wrote on the topic at a given moment (and, as he recognizes, necessarily leaves out the views of people who don't write them down). Then, like others, he organizes this material, calling it a "Romantic" view of wilderness or whatever.

I find such exercises interesting but generally unpersuasive by their very nature. For example, Nash interprets the Bible and other foundational texts for Western civilization as embodying a "subdue the wilderness" ethos. Fine. But what of Jesus' reference to the "lilies of the field"? Certainly that implies a valuation of nature as beautiful and worthy in itself - - "Romantic," perhaps. My point is that anyone can always do this, and any intellectual history can always be criticized for leaving things out and thus mischaracterizing what it discusses.

That said, Nash is not too objectionable on that front. In fact, his categorization is helpful, and would be especially good as an introduction to these ideas. This is doubtless why this book is used in so many undergraduate ecology courses.

The second part of the book focuses on various battles over wilderness. Here he moves closer to a straight history. His narrative is forceful and engrossing.

The last chapter, on international issues, is really too superficial to be useful. It leaves the impression that he is trying to be complete with each new edition, without really having fresh insights into the subject.

Overall, the book is very well-written and easy to read - - I classify it as the kind of book that is good to read on an airplane (which is in fact where I read it).

Great book for anybody that wants to know about the evolution of wilderness in America.

A must read if you love nature. This is a Great Book for history nerds and tree huggers alike.

Nash chronicles American attitudes toward their country's wild places in hopes of answering the big question: What role does thou unspoiled, unaltered, natural place serve in our society? As I read Wilderness & the American Mind, I found not only is this answer politically & emotionally charged as say the question of creation versus evolution, but the answer changes depending on where and when you ask it.

The book masterfully depicts the dramatic periods of change in the American psyche about nature and wild places. Nash brings all the reference and research of a disciplined historian to bear, but always manages to keep you interested. He creates an engaging read by calling on the most influential players and the most controversial settings of the American "environmental movement." We get treated to chapters on Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold along with a supporting cast of characters like Teddy Roosevelt, Edward Abbey, and David Brower (Oh, let's not forgot the feds.) The settings, just as tasty, depict the epic battles for preserving Little Yosemite Valley (aka Hetch Hetchy), the Colorado River, and of course, the congressional battle to preserve a major chunk of Alaskan wilderness from development.

After I read this book, I noticed all the pages I dog-eared; this book is bejeweled with great quotes! Nash brings us the thought-shapers, but gives them their voice. I'll leave you with on of many outstanding quotes. This one compliments of Aldo Leopold:

Shallow-minded modern man... who prates of empires, political and economic" lacked the humility to perceive this truth. "It is only the scholar who appreciates that all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values." This initial bedrock was "raw wilderness." To posses it he thought, but most importantly to understand it ecologically as well as aesthetically, was the key to health--of land and also of culture.

I wanted to like this book, but it's just too verbose. I find myself trying to summarize the author's ideas in my head instead of actually enjoying what I'm reading. There are some fascinating ideas and facts in it, but the author's way of presenting them are roundabout and, to me, unnecessarily long-winded. If I didn't have to finish this book for a college course, I probably would have stopped reading it by now.

While not a perfect book, this is one of the few books I know which I would call "required reading" for people in the environmental movement and ecology. It's not a science book, which is one of my minor problems with it, but I titled this review comment with my opinion prior to taking the first of 2 classes (1974) by one of Nash's student colleagues and then Nash himself. I, and a slew of my colleagues in 1970 really needed to have read this during the organization and preparation for what was then termed "The First Environmental Teach-In" now called ridiculously "Earth Day."

I felt this way in 1974, because I could see that we had retrod ground done by Brower 2 decades earlier and Muir seven decades. And then I learned of names I had never heard before like G. Pinchot and the roles of people like John Wesley Powell independent of the Grand Canyon survey and Stephen Mather and the Natl. Park PR machine (not all bad). This book is part of why students are supposed to take history classes.

The 2nd ed (pub. 1973)., which I had and still have, covered events I lived and can confirmed happened. That's toward the end of the book. The beginning of the book are about pre-American precursors in Europe such as the Romantic movement and various humanist issues like painting and writing. Some of these parts were were a little slow for me (I did read Rousseau), but it did put the Black Forest in perspective more than a type of cake. And that helps with understanding forestry schools.

Nash is good in showing the development of the conservation movement (incl. soil reclamation and forestry [and why hunters and fishers are conservationists]) to the shortcoming of conservation and the start of preservation (Muir, Mather), and the latter shortcomings of "loving wilderness to death" and the rise of environmentalism and ecological biology (Nash likes Leopold, I prefer Rachel Carson, we agree on reading Ed Abbey).

Rod is good at tying together art, literature (here your transcendalists in American Literature come in), popular culture (recreation), religion (See his Rights of Nature book for more depth), and science (barely). He has a good bibliography, one of the finest that I have seen if you want more depth and references, but the field is pretty vast and Nash's text is already thick so his survey is at best described as shallow (supplementary reading like Doug Strong's The Conservationists helps).

Alaska in the 3rd ed. is important to the future. I have been given by Rod in the past "seed" copies, and I purchase "Wilderness" as gifts. I stopped doing that until recently when I was surprised a bio prof friend was unaware. I know he will enjoy reading "Would you flood the Sistine Chapel to get closer to the ceiling?"

I wish that Gaylord Nelson (then Sen., Wisc.) had had us read this book. I think that we would have gone further on that day in 1970. The book is just a shadow of the class experience, I leave lots of book detail out in this review/summary.