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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Former U.S. Secretary of the Interior James Watt may have seemed only a passing nightmare in his day, but he acted out of a very old tradition of American attitudes toward the land and its proper use. So did Henry David Thoreau. So did Edward Abbey. Americans have been arguing about the environment since the first boats landed at Jamestown, and by all appearances they'll keep right on arguing into the next millennium. The Idea of Wilderness packs the centuries-old story into a lively narrative with its full complement of heroes--Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold--a few choice villains of the robber-baron and bureaucrat persuasion, and a few middling souls like Gifford Pinchot, founder of the United States Forest Service. Max Oelschlaeger writes persuasively on the philosophical and religious underpinnings of various environmental positions, showing that indeed there's nothing new under the sun.
From Publishers Weekly
It is the Kantian idea of wilderness--its teleological meaning--that occupies the author here. From the minds of five "poetic thinkers and thinking poets," namely, Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder, Oelschlaeger, professor of philosophy at the University of North Texas, brings new dimension to such matters as the origin and uses of the natural world. Against a dubious reconstruction of the Paleolithic notion of a sacred, shared wilderness, the author deconstructs the modernists' concepts of wild nature as "matter in motion." The scientific revolution in particular is shown to have widened the fissure in our cultural idea of wilderness, between the idea of nature as our "magna mater"--an organic model of the cosmos--and modernist models in history, cosmology, philosophy, and even in the author's survey of today's ecology movement (from "resourcism" to eco-feminism). Oehlshlaeger is a cautious critic and reluctant prophet; nonetheless his proposed "postmodern idea of wilderness" swims against the currents of our intellectual history and invites criticism from members of many disciplines. But Joseph Campbell readers should be able to hear, underneath Oelschlaeger's academic style, the faint heartbeat of an older wilderness mythos in his thesis.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Former U.S. Secretary of the Interior James Watt may have seemed only a passing nightmare in his day, but he acted out of a very old tradition of American attitudes toward the land and its proper use. So did Henry David Thoreau. So did Edward Abbey. Americans have been arguing about the environment since the first boats landed at Jamestown, and by all appearances they'll keep right on arguing into the next millennium. The Idea of Wilderness packs the centuries-old story into a lively narrative with its full complement of heroes--Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold--a few choice villains of the robber-baron and bureaucrat persuasion, and a few middling souls like Gifford Pinchot, founder of the United States Forest Service. Max Oelschlaeger writes persuasively on the philosophical and religious underpinnings of various environmental positions, showing that indeed there's nothing new under the sun.
From Publishers Weekly
It is the Kantian idea of wilderness--its teleological meaning--that occupies the author here. From the minds of five "poetic thinkers and thinking poets," namely, Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder, Oelschlaeger, professor of philosophy at the University of North Texas, brings new dimension to such matters as the origin and uses of the natural world. Against a dubious reconstruction of the Paleolithic notion of a sacred, shared wilderness, the author deconstructs the modernists' concepts of wild nature as "matter in motion." The scientific revolution in particular is shown to have widened the fissure in our cultural idea of wilderness, between the idea of nature as our "magna mater"--an organic model of the cosmos--and modernist models in history, cosmology, philosophy, and even in the author's survey of today's ecology movement (from "resourcism" to eco-feminism). Oehlshlaeger is a cautious critic and reluctant prophet; nonetheless his proposed "postmodern idea of wilderness" swims against the currents of our intellectual history and invites criticism from members of many disciplines. But Joseph Campbell readers should be able to hear, underneath Oelschlaeger's academic style, the faint heartbeat of an older wilderness mythos in his thesis.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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