Wilderness and the American Mind

Nash frames Chapter 4 by stating that “creation of a distinctive culture was thought to be the mark of true nationhood” (67) and demonstrates how the early strategies in creating the culture incorporated America’s relationship with wilderness. Nationalistic pride built on this relationship was primarily an ideal that developed in reaction to Europeans’ conflicted relationship with wilderness. Effectively, incorporating wilderness into the American character was a way to differentiate the young nation from its European ancestors. For much of its colonial existence, America had perceived wilderness with apprehension and fear. However, toward the end of the 1700s, after the nation had won independence, a transformation occurred during which it was “argued that far from being a liability, wilderness was actually an American asset” (67). This chapter is pivotal because the previous chapters illustrate how societies were historically antagonistic toward wilderness. The new nationalistic trend toward embracing wilderness was unique.

The change in focus within the arts speaks to how the transformation took place. As is so often true today, artists and writers significantly influenced popular culture in the early 19th century. Nash chronicles the many writers and artists whose work informed a growing appreciation of wilderness. As with any popular movement, the arts influenced and were influenced. James Fenimore Cooper’s Pioneers (1823) was a major literary work that became a commercial success and provided an archetype for the rugged hero in the character of Natty Bumppo. Cooper’s crafting of Bumppo involved a decisively Anti-European sentiment. In The Prairie, Cooper contended that “in contrast to the virgin New World the Old should really be called ‘a worn out, and an abused, and a sacrilegious world’” (76). The antagonistic tone here demonstrates an attempt to glorify American virtue through derision toward the old world. Europe had conquered all its wilderness and thus lost its capacity to access the moral integrity it offered. America, however, had discovered this insight, which—people assumed—gave the new country an advantage that its ancestors had lost in misplacing their priorities.

Chapter 5 is the first of several chapters that focus on a specific individual and that person’s impact on the preservation movement. While Thoreau was not the first to advance the cause of wilderness protection, his stature as a founding figure was immense. In attempting to explain why, Nash cites Thoreau’s outside-the-box style of thinking. For example, rather than writing from the vantage point of an academic distanced from the wilderness experience, Thoreau chose self-imposed habitation in the wilderness. Nash cites the famous line that conveys the motivation behind Thoreau’s Walden Pond experience: that he “went to the woods because [he] wished to live deliberately” (89). The word “deliberately” is essential to understanding Thoreau’s motivation. It suggests intentionality and an intellectual endeavor resembling meditation. Thoreau’s purpose was to gain insight and learn how to see wilderness as something other than an adversary and more than a romanticized ideal.

According to Nash, Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond did not, however, turn him into a Primitivist. Nash gives more attention in this section to discussing the results of Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond than to analyzing the book Walden itself. Nash asserts that how American culture has come to view Thoreau—as a one-dimensional supporter of nature—is not entirely accurate. The tension that existed in American culture between before, during, and after Thoreau between the wilderness and civilization was evident in Thoreau himself. In fact, one lesson that Thoreau learned from his experience at Walden Pond was to value civilization more—not that all his disdain and skepticism for civilization were justified: “Instead of coming out of the woods with a deepened appreciation of the wilds, Thoreau felt a greater respect for civilization and realized the necessity of balance” (90). The need for balance contradicts Thoreau’s one-dimensional view before his Walden Pond experiment. Thoreau further developed his philosophy to include a taxonomy of character traits and moral values that one could attribute to civilization and wilderness. For example, societal refinement was important to Thoreau and could not be gained by living in the wild. Likewise, he associated heroism, vitality, and toughness with what he termed a “wilderness condition” (92). For Thoreau, the secret to a well-rounded, fully lived life was learning how to access and apply the best of both these worlds.

Nash’s primary claim at the beginning of Chapter 6 is that the more wilderness across the US vanished, the more an appreciation of it developed. As the culture became more aware of dwindling wilderness, so did the urgency to protect it. Importantly, calls to protect the vanishing wilderness came from East coast intellectuals, a theme that Nash probes further in subsequent chapters. Led by influential literary and cultural figures like Thoreau and William Culler Bryant, the advocacy to preserve wilderness began with a decisively theoretical approach. It did not stem from those who were out on the frontier, the pioneers whose livelihoods depended on subjugating wilderness to survive. The original tension between those who saw wilderness preservation as an intellectual endeavor versus those who had what Nash calls a utilitarian view played out from the mid-1800s to the middle of the next century. As an example of the conflicting views, Nash refers to the gradual replacement of wild buffalo with roaming cattle: “While pioneers might celebrate such events, the young gentlemen from Boston felt nothing but regret at the prospect” (100). Evident in this take is the class nature of the concerned parties as well as the divide between the lived experience of the pioneer versus the perceived experience of the Northeast’s intellectual elite. Absent from this consideration, however, are the attitudes of the Indigenous peoples already inhabiting what European settlers perceived as wilderness.

One of the more convincing strategies of early preservationists like Thoreau and George Catlin was to make wilderness preservation equivalent to the preservation of civilization. As a countervailing force, wilderness was important because as the antithesis of civilization, it offered an escape and provided an alternative way of life to the increasingly industrialized society of the time. Wilderness and civilization needed each other for meaning, much as light needs dark. While intellectually based, this view was an attempt to move away from an idealistic, romanticized foundation to a more logically informed argument. As the 18th century progressed, government policy became increasingly intentional in finding ways to preserve wilderness. By the 1860s, specific areas around the US, including California’s Yosemite Valley, drew the attention of preservationists who asserted their arguments to government authorities. Once these areas were identified, the idea was essentially to encircle them and create islands of protected land within the broader civilized landscape. Nash revisits this concept in his Epilogue, where he inverts it to propose a future view of wilderness.