Review by Ed Quillen
Wilderness – July 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
Wilderness and the American Mind
by Roderick Frazier Nash
Fourth Edition
Published in 2001 by Yale University Press
ISBN 0-300-09122-2
(With new material not found in the previous three editions: 1967, 1973, and 1982)
This is a book that I was prepared not to like, mostly because I didn’t have much use for the author after hearing him speak in Gunnison about a decade ago. Roderick F. Nash told us how we should tread lightly upon the earth. He also talked about his house in Santa Barbara, Calif., and his other house in Crested Butte, and his family-sized boat that sounded a lot like a yacht, and his many flights to various spots in Europe. And I decided I didn’t need lessons in environmental ethics from someone who consumed more resources in a week than I did in a year.
But you can’t judge a book entirely by its author, and this is generally a fine book, no matter how you feel about wilderness. In essence, it’s a history of how Americans have thought about wilderness.
Since immigrants brought considerable cultural baggage with them, the story starts with classical and biblical attitudes. But the tale can’t start much before that, because wilderness and civilization are two sides of the same coin. A nomadic hunter-gatherer society, like the Utes, has no need to define wilderness, at least not in the sense we do. They hunted and foraged everywhere, and camped where it was convenient.
But modern scholarship does demonstrate that the Indians were not passive inhabitants in the landscape — they shaped it to their own ends, to the extent their technology permitted, digging quarries for their flint and setting fires to move the game. Thus, North America was not a pristine zone untrammeled by humans when Europeans arrived, but a continent that had for millennia been shaped by its inhabitants.
(For more about this, see an article in the March 2002 edition of The Atlantic Monthly: “1491: America before Columbus was more sophisticated and more populous than we ever thought — and a more livable place than Europe,” by Charles C. Mann.)
The invention of agriculture meant that the environment around humans became divided into “places we cultivate and protect,” on one hand, and on the other, the “places where the wild creatures roam” — in a word, wilderness.
American pioneers brought the Bible with them, and it offered two views of wilderness. Wilderness was both a frightening place where beasts and perhaps demons ran at large, and a solitary refuge where prophets could restore their spiritual energies. For the first three centuries, wilderness was generally the enemy, something to be conquered, but the other tradition emerged on occasion, as in the works of Henry David Thoreau.
Nash connects those conflicting attitudes to the present, when our concept of wilderness also contains contradictions. For instance, the literature often cites “the freedom of the wilderness,” but today some wilderness areas require permits, and come with rules about where and how you can travel and camp.
The literature also talks about the primitive, non-technological experience. But even on foot, today’s wilderness traveler may carry an abundance of modern technology, from water-purification tablets to global positioning systems.
Some say their favorite aspect of wilderness is the solitude, but as the lure of wilderness grows, solitude diminishes. Indeed, that leads to another dilemma that Nash mentions. When more people venture into wilderness, there tends to be more political support for wilderness areas, but the presence of more people diminishes the solitary aspect of “the wilderness experience.”
And because it’s a wilderness, the land managers can’t build privies or pave trails in order to diminish the environmental degradation caused by crowds, so the resource — which was supposed to be “protected forever” — is damaged due to the popularity that results from its “protection.”
Although Nash is obviously an advocate for wilderness, to his credit he takes a remarkably clear-headed approach to the social history of wilderness, and his writing is lucid and accessible:
“But antiwilderness views also arose from quite different circumstances. Eric Julber … is a Los Angeles attorney and, as he styles himself, ‘a former member of the Sierra Club.’ He was also, formerly, a wilderness ‘purist’ who hiked the two hundred miles of the John Muir Trail with a fifty-pound pack ‘feeling vastly superior to the rest of humanity.’ But Julber visited Switzerland and ‘that was the end of my purist ethic.’
“What he discovered was that the Swiss Alps were readily accessible by mechanized conveyances, heavily used by people, and still beautiful and satisfying. Julber rode the aerial tramways; lunched at 10,000 feet on cheese fondue, white wine, and pastry; and found that his thoughts were ‘just as beautiful’ as they had been on an isolated Sierra peak with a peanut-butter sandwich.
“Returning to the United States, Julber was disturbed that his own country’s system of wilderness preservation excluded 99% of the people. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘of the too-old, the too-young, the timid, the inexperienced, the frail, the hurried, the out-of-shape or the just plain lazy?’
“Their taxes, Julber reasoned, acquired and sustained the established wilderness areas but because of the access problem wilderness users tended to be a small, wealthy, young, and leisured elite. While not as vitriolic as Robert Wernick’s charge of elitism, Julber’s was a staple of the antiwilderness school of thought….
“The problem with Julber’s philosophy is that, according to most definitions, the wilderness quality of a place would vanish when the tramways and hotels arrived. The confusion stems from equating ‘scenery’ and ‘natural beauty’ with ‘wilderness.’ The nature Julber liked was not wild.”
As this demonstrates, Nash makes his own view clear, while still presenting and addressing a wide range of other views. This book is not only good reading, but indispensable if you’re trying to follow the never-ending controversies over wilderness designation and management.
–Ed Quillen