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Title: Wilderness and the American Mind, Fourth Edition by Roderick Frazier Nash, Roderick Nash ISBN: 0-300-09122-2 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 September, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.88 (8 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Better for Environmentalists then Others
Comment: 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.
Rating: 1
Summary: The Most Serious Form of Pollution is Mind Pollution
Comment: This is an epic book about the American wilderness and what the author believes to be the causes leading to the degradation of cultural landscapes in America. Required reading for most environmental history and ecology courses, the book has been reprinted 19 times and revised 7 times since its publication in 1967 and is the largest selling book from Yale University Press. Unfortunately, the basic premises in this first edition, while reflecting popular wisdom during the Vietnam era, are unsupported, poorly documented, and perpetuate an "us versus them" environmentalist argument. Shame on academia today where these prejudices are propagated as mandatory reading without critical review: the theories of this first edition have not stood the test of time, rather clearly document the biases and ego the author deemed valid at 28 years old.
The most serious form of pollution is mind pollution and it started with Wilderness and the American Mind. Roderick Nash makes brash statements supported by unreliable secondary sources, incomplete research, gross generalizations and contradictory logic. He asserts that Americans "regarded the wilderness areas of this continent as a moral and physical wasteland to be conquered and fructified in the name of civilization, Christianity, and progress" (inside dust jacket). He further asserts that Americans were searching for a national culture after their independence from England. Without citations, Nash does express in the preface a legitimate concern that through a gradual transformation, these attitudes have largely been replaced with "one of appreciation." Without a formal classical language education and using Nelson's Bible Concordance (NY, 1957) to document the ancient meaning of Greek and Hebrew text, he erroneously quotes Scripture out of context to make general inaccurate arguments such as: "for the Christian, wilderness has long been a potent symbol applied to the moral chaos of the unregenerate" (p. 3); the Christian man "dreams of life without wilderness" (p. 9, without source); when the Lord wanted to punish people, "he found the wilderness condition to be his most powerful weapon" (p. 14); and because the Devil tempted Jesus in the wilderness, "wilderness retained its significance as the environment of evil and hardship" (p. 17). Ironically, he contradicts these statements by acknowledging that "the importance of wilderness as a sanctuary was perpetuated in Christianity" (p. 17). After making a deductive argument with these inaccurate references, he concludes that Eastern cultures did not fear and abhor the wilderness because they were "freed from the combined weight of classicism, Judaism and Christianity" (p. 21). Nowhere was "classicism" addressed or proven that classicism, Judaism and Christianity somehow are in concert.
Roderick Nash's evidentiary support of civilization and man's progress are similarly flawed. Using secondary sources for sporadic primary quotes, such as "William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower into a 'hideous and desolate wilderness,'" Nash concludes that the early settlers' "anticipations of a second Eden were quickly shattered against the reality of North America."
After rambling on of European events quoting personal experiences of William Bartram, William Byrd, Daniel Boone, James Pattie, and others (pp. 63-66), Nash proposes that the "appreciation of wilderness began in the cities" (p. 44). The flawed logic results from an assumption that only those in the city had the appropriate awareness of the wilderness. Nash states, "It was widely assumed that America's primary task was the justification of its newly won freedom" (p. 65). (Without a source, it is incomprehensible where this came from.) Trying to add credibility to an absurd argument, Nash sprinkles in a few quotes from David Thoreau and John Muir. Again, however, Nash is original in suggesting that Thoreau's "shocking" experience in the Maine woods (p. 91) caused Thoreau to lead "the intellectual revolution that was beginning to invest wilderness with attractive rather than repulsive questions." Nash should have stopped here.
Over the next 200 pages, he wanders aimlessly in literary wilderness. Chapters six through ten discuss history wilderness preservation efforts. Another Nash original idea is that Muir had an "intellectual debt to Thoreau and to primitivism" (p. 127). He gives Olmsted and Eliot token credit for the "patches near cities" (p. 155) as if to infer that urban landscape architecture has a relationship to wilderness. He further confuses the reader with his concept of the "great chain of being" developed since the Greeks. In this argument, he is unwilling to drop his prejudicial treatment of Jews and Christians, stating that the "Christian belief in the imminency of the end of the world make efforts to protect nature seem futile" (p. 193). Quoting Aldo Leopold, "the two great cultural advances of the past century were the Darwinian Theory and the development of geology,": Nash unequivocally states without evidence that "Both helped tear down the wall Christian thought had so carefully erected between man and other forms of life." (p. 193). Maybe Nash felt throwing rocks in the wilderness was a form of geology that might make his case more convincing.
If given a choice, any edition of Wilderness and the American Mind would not be on the list of required reading materials for a course in Environmental History. There are many more recent texts that make convincing logical arguments and are well supported. If the prospective reader wants to truly understand the issues related to religion and ecology, Nash lacks the credentials to make an argument. The most compelling indictment against Nash's credibility was his glaring absence at a series of seminars addressing the Religions of the World and Ecology held at Harvard University - his alma mater. Over a three year period, from 1996 to 1998 when Nash was a Professor of History and Environmental Studies at UCSB, the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions conducted research with "the direct participation and collaboration of over seven hundred scholars, religions leaders and environmental specialists around the world." (http://www.hds.harvard.edu/cswr/)
Another excellent book on this subject is a series of documents and essays compiled by Carolyn Merchant, a professor in Environmental History at the University of California at Berkeley. The book titled, Major Problems in American Environmental History. (Lexington: DC Heath and Company, 1993) provides a more objective view of the issues in American ecology and traces development of landscapes from the earliest Indian civilizations to present. Merchant avoids the antagonism between religion and ecology by addressing both the good and bad realities in a sensitive and purposeful way.
This review was of the first edition. While subsequent editions have been published, the basic tenets of this review remain valid.
"The serious form of pollution is mind pollution," quote by Roderick Nash.
Candidate for Masters in Architecture and Landscape Architecture
University of Colorado in Denver
Rating: 5
Summary: Still the best introduction to American ideas about nature
Comment: 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.
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Title: The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology by Max Oelschlaeger ISBN: 0300053703 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: February, 1993 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature by William Cronon ISBN: 0393315118 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 1996 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (History of American Thought and Culture) by Roderick Frazier Nash ISBN: 0299118444 Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press Pub. Date: January, 1990 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold ISBN: 0345345053 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 12 December, 1986 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
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Title: Wilderness Management: Stewardship and Protection of Resources and Values by John C. Hendee, Chad P. Dawson ISBN: 1555918557 Publisher: Fulcrum Pub Pub. Date: July, 2002 List Price(USD): $65.00 |
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