Wilderness and the American Mind - Softcover

Nash, Roderick Frazie; Miller, Char

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300190387 ISBN 13: 9780300190380

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2014

Synopsis

The classic study of changing attitudes toward wilderness during American history and the origins of the environmental and conservation movements

“The Book of Genesis for conservationists”―Dave Foreman

Since its initial publication in 1967, Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind has received wide acclaim. The Los Angeles Times listed it among the one hundred most influential books published in the last quarter century, Outside Magazine included it in a survey of “books that changed our world,” and it has been called the “Book of Genesis for environmentalists.”

For the fifth edition, Nash has written a new preface and epilogue that brings Wilderness and the American Mind into dialogue with contemporary debates about wilderness. Char Miller’s foreword provides a twenty-first-century perspective on how the environmental movement has changed, including the ways in which contemporary scholars are reimagining the dynamic relationship between the natural world and the built environment.

About this title

About the Author

Roderick Frazier Nash is professor emeritus of history and environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is regarded as one of the founders of environmental history in the United States. Char Miller is the W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Wilderness and the American Mind

By RODERICK FRAZIER NASH

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2001 Yale University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-300-19038-0

Contents

Foreword by Char Miller, vii, 
Preface to the Fifth Edition: Fifty Years in the Wilderness, xvii, 
Prologue: The Condition of Wilderness, 1, 
1. Old World Roots of Opinion, 8, 
2. A Wilderness Condition, 23, 
3. The Romantic Wilderness, 44, 
4. The American Wilderness, 67, 
5. Henry David Thoreau: Philosopher, 84, 
6. Preserve the Wilderness!, 96, 
7. Wilderness Preserved, 108, 
8. John Muir: Publicizer, 122, 
9. The Wilderness Cult, 141, 
10. Hetch Hetchy, 161, 
11. Aldo Leopold: Prophet, 182, 
12. Decisions for Permanence, 200, 
13. Toward a Philosophy of Wilderness, 238, 
14. Alaska, 272, 
15. The Irony of Victory, 316, 
16. The International Perspective, 342, 
Epilogue to the Fifth Edition: Island Civilization, 379, 
Bibliography, 387, 
Index, 393, 

CHAPTER 1

Old World Roots of Opinion

The land is the Garden of Eden before them, and behind them adesolate wilderness.

Joel 2:3

European discoverers and settlers of the New World were familiarwith wilderness even before they crossed the Atlantic. Some of thisacquaintance was first-hand, since in the late Middle Ages a considerableamount of wild country still existed on the Continent. Farmore important, however, was the deep resonance of wilderness asa concept in Western thought. It was instinctively understood assomething alien to man—an insecure and uncomfortable environmentagainst which civilization had waged an unceasing struggle.The Europeans knew the uninhabited forest as an important partof their folklore and mythology. Its dark, mysterious qualitiesmade it a setting in which the prescientific imagination could placea swarm of demons and spirits. In addition, wilderness as fact andsymbol permeated the Judeo-Christian tradition. Anyone with aBible had available an extended lesson in the meaning of wildland. Subsequent Christian history added new dimensions. As a result,the first immigrants approached North America with a clusterof preconceived ideas about wilderness. This intellectual legacy ofthe Old World to the New not only helped determine initial responsesbut left a lasting imprint on American thought.

The value system of primitive man was structured in terms ofsurvival. He appreciated what contributed to his well-being andfeared what he did not control or understand. The "best" trees producedfood or shelter while "good" land was flat, fertile, and wellwatered. Under the most desirable of all conditions the living waseasy and secure because nature was ordered in the interests of man.Almost all early cultures had such a conception of an earthly paradise.No matter where they were thought to be or what they werecalled, all paradises had in common a bountiful and beneficent naturalsetting in accord with the original meaning of the word inPersian—luxurious garden. A mild climate constantly prevailed.Ripe fruit drooped from every bough, and there were no thorns toprick reaching hands. The animals in paradise lived in harmonywith man. Fear as well as want disappeared in this ideal state of nature.

If paradise was early man's greatest good, wilderness, as its antipode,was his greatest evil. In one condition the environment, garden-like, ministered to his every desire. In the other it was at bestindifferent, frequently dangerous, and always beyond control. Andin fact it was with this latter condition that primitive man had tocontend. At a time when there was no alternative, existence in thewilderness was forbidding indeed. Safety, happiness, and progressall seemed dependent on rising out of a wilderness situation. Itbecame essential to gain control over nature. Fire was one step; thedomestication of some wild animals another. Gradually manlearned how to control the land and raise crops. Clearings appearedin the forests. This reduction of the amount of wilderness definedman's achievement as he advanced toward civilization. But progresswas slow. For centuries the wild predominated over the precariousdefenses thrown up against its influence. Men dreamed oflife without wilderness. Significantly, many traditions located paradiseon an island or in some other enclosed area. In this way thewild hinterland normally surrounding and threatening the firstcommunities was eliminated. Wilderness had no place in the paradisemyth.

The wilds continued to be repugnant even in as relatively advancedcivilizations as those of the Greeks and Romans. The celebrationsof nature, which abound in classical literature, are restrictedto the cultivated, pastoral variety. The beautiful in naturewas closely related to the fruitful or otherwise useful. The Romanpoet of the first century B.C., Titus Lucretius Carus, spoke for hisage in De Rerum Natura when he observed that it was a serious"defect" that so much of the earth "is greedily possessed by mountainsand the forests of wild beasts." Apart from the areas man hadcivilized, it "is filled full of restless dread throughout her woods,her mighty mountains and deep forests." Yet Lucretius took hopebecause "these regions it is generally in our power to shun."

Turning to history, Lucretius drew a grim portrait of precivilizedlife in the wilderness. Men lived a nightmarish existence,hounded by dangers on every hand and surviving through the ancientcode of eat or be eaten. With obvious satisfaction, Lucretiusrelated how the race escaped this miserable condition through theinvention of clothing, metals, and, eventually, "ships, agriculture,city walls, laws, arms, roads." These enabled man to control wildnature and achieve relative security. Cultural refinements and "allcharms of life" followed the release from the wilderness.

When Lucretius, Horace, Virgil and their contemporaries confessedtheir love of "nature" and expressed a desire to leave thetowns for a "natural" way of life, they meant the pastoral or ruralenvironment. Lucretius, for one, applauded the efforts of the firstfarmers whose labor "forced the forests more and more to climb themountain-sides." This made room for the cultivated landscape thatwas so highly prized. It consisted of "fields, ... crops, and joyousvineyards, and a gray-green strip of olives to run in between andmark divisions, ... adorned and interspersed with pleasant fruits,and fenced by planting them all round with fruitful trees." If thiswas the ideal, wilderness could only be forbidding and repulsive.

While inability to control or use wilderness was the basic factorin man's hostility, the terror of the wild had other roots as well.One was the tendency of the folk traditions of many cultures to associatewilderness with the supernatural and monstrous. There wasa quality of mystery about the wilderness, particularly at night, thattriggered the imagination. To frightened eyes the limbs of trees becamegrotesque, leaping figures, and the wind sounded like a weirdscream. The wild forest seemed animated. Fantastic creatures ofevery description were thought to lurk in its depths. Whether propitiatedwith sacrifices as deities or regarded as devils, these forestbeings were feared.

Classical mythology contained a whole menagerie of lesser godsand demons believed to inhabit wild places. Pan, the lord of thewoods, was pictured as having the legs, ears, and tail of a goat andthe body of a man. He combined gross sensuality with boundless,sportive energy. Greeks who had to pass through forests or mountainsdreaded an encounter with Pan. Indeed, the word "panic"originated from the blinding fear that seized travelers upon hearingstrange cries in the wilderness and assuming them to signifyPan's approach. Related to Pan were the tribe of satyrs—goat-menof a demoniacal character devoted to wine, dancing, and lust. Theywere thought to appear only at night and then solely in the darkestparts of the forest. According to Hellenic folklore, satyrs ravishedwomen and carried off children who ventured into their wildernesslairs. Sileni and centaurs completed the Greek collection of forestspirits. These monsters had the torso and head of a man and thebody and legs of a goat or horse. Usually, they were represented ascarrying a club in the form of an uprooted tree which also servedas a reminder of their favorite habitat. In Roman mythology satyrlikefigures appeared as fauns and also lurked in thickly woodedregions.

In early folk belief, the wildernesses of central and northern Europealso swarmed with supernatural beings. Some were worshipped,but generally with the fear characteristic of the attitude of theunsophisticated toward the incomprehensible. Others receivedclassification as demons and cohorts of the devil. In the Scandinaviancountries, for instance, it was thought that when Lucifer andhis followers were expelled from heaven, some landed in the forestsand became Wood-Sprites or Trolls. Many of the medieval Europeanmonsters were lineal descendants of the man-beasts of classicalmythology. Russian, Czech, and Slovak folklore spoke of a creatureliving in forests and mountains with the face of a woman, bodyof a sow, and legs of a horse. In Germany, when storms ragedthrough the forests, it was widely believed that the ghostly WildHuntsman was abroad with his pack of baying hounds, riding furiouslyand killing everything in his path. Man-eating ogres and thesinister werewolves were also identified with wild, remote regions.While in certain circumstances forest beings, like the elves, couldbe helpful to men, most were considered terrifying and added tothe repulsiveness of wilderness.

Among the Anglo-Saxons, from whom most of the first Americansdescended, there were long traditions of locating horriblebeasts in the wilderness. The Beowulf epic of the eighth centurybrought together many of these legends. The heart of the story isthe conflict between two gigantic, blood-drinking fiends and thetribes that Beowulf led. As the action unfolds it is apparent thatwilderness was a concept loaded with meaning for the early MiddleAges. Throughout the poem the uninhabited regions are portrayedin the worst possible light—dank, cold, and gloomy. The fiends aresaid to live "in an unvisited land among wolf-haunted hills, windsweptcrags, and perilous fen-tracks." Bravely Beowulf advancedinto this wilderness and below "a dismal grove of mountain trees"took his revenge on the monsters.

The most important imaginary denizen of the wildernesses ofmedieval Europe was the semi-human Wild Man. His naked figure,covered completely with thick hair, appeared widely in the art,literature, and drama of the period. Immensely strong, he wasfrequently portrayed in the tradition of the classical sileni and centaurs,grasping an uprooted tree. According to folk tradition, theWild Man lived in the heart of the forest as far as possible from civilization.He was regarded as a kind of ogre who devoured childrenand ravished maidens. The character of his mate varied from placeto place. In the Austrian Tyrol and Bavarian Alps, the WildWoman was imagined to have enormous size, tough bristles, immensependulous breasts, and a hideous mouth that stretched fromear to ear. Further north in Germany, however, she was thoughtto be smaller and somewhat less fearsome in appearance. Her principaloffense was stealing human babies and leaving her own offspringin their place. Along with the other forest demons, the WildPeople invested the gloom of the wilderness with a terrifying eerinessthat proved difficult to dispel.

The Judeo-Christian tradition constituted another powerfulformative influence on the attitude toward wilderness of the Europeanswho discovered and colonized the New World. The authorsof the Bible gave wilderness a central position in their accountsboth as a descriptive aid and as a symbolic concept. The term occurs245 times in the Old Testament, Revised Standard Version,and thirty-five in the New. In addition there are several hundreduses of terms such as "desert" and "waste" with the same essentialsignificance as "wilderness" and, in some cases, the identical Hebrewor Greek root.

Uninhabited land where annual rainfall was less than fourinches dominated the geography of the ancient Near East. Sucharea included a strip of land beginning just west of Jerusalem andparalleling the Jordan River and Dead Sea. From here the desertsprawled southward into the Sinai Peninsula and Arabia. Withoutadvanced technology, men could not survive for long in such aninhospitable environment. In order to distinguish it from the"good" land which supported crops and herds, the ancient Hebrewsused a number of terms which have been translated "wilderness."

Even in places where the rainfall was above the crucial fourinches, existence was precarious. An unusually dry season couldwither crops and turn arable land into desert. In these circumstancesmen naturally hated and feared the wilderness. Moreover,since the amount of rain was beyond human influence or understanding,it was reasonable to give its variance a religious explanation.Drought and the resulting wilderness were thought of as thecurse dispensed by the divine power in order to show his displeasure.God's approval, on the other hand, meant an abundance oflife-giving water. The baptismal rite, for instance, was a symbolicceremony that the climate and geography of the Near East mademeaningful.

The Old Testament reveals that the ancient Hebrews regardedthe wilderness as a cursed land and that they associated its forbiddingcharacter with a lack of water. Again and again "the great andterrible wilderness" was described as a "thirsty ground where therewas no water." When the Lord of the Old Testament desired tothreaten or punish a sinful people, he found the wilderness conditionto be his most powerful weapon: "I will lay waste the mountainsand hills, and dry up all their herbage; I will turn the riversinto islands, and dry up the pools.... I will also command theclouds that they rain no rain upon it." The cities of Sodom andGomorrah became parched wastes of salt pits and thorny brush as apenalty for the sins of their citizens.

Conversely, when the Lord wished to express his pleasure, thegreatest blessing he could bestow was to transform wilderness into"a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs."In the famous redemption passage in Isaiah, God promises that"the wilderness and the dry land shall be glad ... for waters shallbreak forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert." To "givewater in the wilderness" was a way God manifested his care. Itwas a fitting image for a people so fearful of the desert.

The identification of the arid wasteland with God's curse led tothe conviction that wilderness was the environment of evil, a kindof hell. There were several consequences. Like that of other cultures,the Hebraic folk imagination made the wilderness the abodeof demons and devils. Among them were the howling dragon ortan, the winged female monster of the night called the lilith, andthe familiar man-goat, seirim. Presiding over all was Azazel, thearch-devil of the wilderness. He was the key figure in an expiatoryrite in which a live goat was brought before the chief priest of acommunity who symbolically laid upon it the sins of the group.The animal was then led to the edge of the cultivated land and"sent away into the wilderness to Azazel." The ritual has significancenot only as the origin of the conception of a "scapegoat" butas a demonstration of the Hebrews' opinion of wilderness.

This idea of the immorality of wild country is also evident in theOld Testament treatment of the paradise theme. From what littlewe are told about the Garden of Eden it appears to have been, inthe tradition of other paradises, the antipode of wilderness. "Eden"was the Hebrew word for "delight," and Genesis represents it as apleasant place, indeed. The Garden was well watered and filledwith edible plants. Adam and Eve were relieved of the necessity ofworking in order to survive. Fear also was eliminated, since withone exception the creatures that shared paradise were peaceableand helpful. But the snake encouraged the first couple to eat theforbidden fruit and as a punishment they were driven out of theGarden. The world Adam and Eve now faced was a wilderness, a"cursed" land full of "thorns and thistles." Later in the Scripture,Eden and the wilderness are juxtaposed in such a way as to leave nodoubt about their original relationship. "The land is like the gardenof Eden before them," wrote the author of Joel, "but afterthem a desolate wilderness." And Isaiah contains the promise thatGod will comfort Zion and "make her wilderness like Eden, herdesert like the garden of the Lord." The story of the Garden andits loss embedded into Western thought the idea that wildernessand paradise were both physical and spiritual opposites.

The history of the Israelite nation added another dimension tothe Judeo-Christian understanding of wilderness. After the Exodusfrom bondage in Egypt about 1225 B.C., the Jews under the leadershipof Moses wandered in the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula foran alleged forty years. The Old Testament account emphasizes thehardships encountered in this "howling waste of the wilderness,"yet the desert experience was immensely important to the tribes ofIsrael. During these years the God their fathers had worshipped revealedhimself as Yahweh and promised to be their special protector.In the heart of the wilderness on Mount Sinai, Moses receivedthe Ten Commandments which created a covenant between Yahwehand Israel. Thereafter the Lord demonstrated his protectivepower by the miraculous provision of water and food. He alsopromised that if the Israelites remained faithful to the covenant,he would allow them to escape the wilderness and enter Canaan,the promised land of milk and honey.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Wilderness and the American Mind by RODERICK FRAZIER NASH. Copyright © 2001 Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300190387
• ISBN 13: 9780300190380
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 5
• Number of pages: 448