Wilderness and the American Mind
by Roderick Frazier Nash
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Book Summary Information
Author: Roderick Frazier NashEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-09-01
ISBN: 0300091222
Number of pages: 426
Publisher: Yale University Press
Book Reviews of Wilderness and the American Mind
Book Review: A classic for any environmentalist's library
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
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