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Customer Reviews of Wilderness and the American Mind, Fourth Edition

Wilderness: One of America's Most Important Ideas
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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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." <
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>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. <
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Not perfect but still a classic thanks to regular updating
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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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). <
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Better for Environmentalists then Others
I believed that this book would be an exploration of the concept of "wilderness" as it relates to the American mind. And it is, for about one hundred pages. Since this is a four hundred page bok, that leaves a lot of space to fill.

I found the first two hundred pages to be interesting, the last two hundred to be a slog. Nash spends an interminable amount of time covering "contemporary" environmental struggles. Were it my book, I would have omitted the chapter about Alaska. I imagine that most who read this book have a grasp on the environmental struggles of the recent past.

As I mentioned before, the reason I read this book was to gain a perspecitve on how these struggles came about.

This book is, I suppose, a classic in the field. I guess, ultimately, it's just a field (environmentalism/ecology) that doesn't interest me that much. So I'm glad I read it, but I wouldn't recommend it to others, unless those others consider themselves dedicated environmentalists. Then you HAVE to read this book.