53 pages • 1 hour read
Roderick NashWilderness and the American Mind
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1967A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Index of Terms
Preservationism
Within the context of this book, preservationism was a movement that recognized the need to protect wilderness lands in the US. It began in the mid-19th century, and its first proponents were intellectuals such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerging largely as a theoretical concept, preservationism argued that wilderness itself had inherent value and that its destruction would have negative consequences for civilization. The application of preservationism has evolved, and because of controversies surrounding natural resource harvesting, specifically at Hetch Hetchy in California’s Yosemite Valley, it grew into a full-fledged political movement.
Primitivism
A strain of thought within Romanticism, Primitivism was the view that civilization was a negative force on the quality of life. Nash writes:
Primitivists believed that man’s happiness and well-being decreased in direct proportion to his degree of civilization. They idealized either contemporary cultures nearer to savagery or a previous age in which they believed all men led a simpler and better existence (47).
In addition to ascribing positive value to wilderness, Primitivism held a corresponding antipathy toward civilization.
Romanticism
Romanticism was a movement within the arts that emerged in the late 18th century and continued into the 19th century. Romantic writers, such as William Wordsworth, seized on the work of enlightenment thinkers such as Edmund Burke and presented wilderness as a source for proof of the divine. These writers explored the concept of the sublime: that one could witness the beauty of the divine through nature. This was a novel concept, as many at the time considered wilderness an imposing threat to civilization, and Judeo-Christian thought associated it with evil rather than God.
Transcendentalism
A school of thought that borrowed from Romanticism, Transcendentalism is associated with the American writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Transcendentalism was the belief that a correspondence or parallelism existed between the higher realm of spiritual truth and the lower one of material objects” (84). Traces of Romanticism are evident in this philosophy. Transcendentalism was highly influential in the early preservation movement, notably for John Muir.
Utilitarianism
An approach to ethics that takes a cost-benefit approach to problem solving, utilitarianism was and still is a way of analyzing the value of interference in wilderness areas. This was especially important when cultural views toward wilderness changed from seeing it as a threat to regarding it as a trait that represented the American national identity. Intruding into the wilderness to harvest resources, from a utilitarian perspective, recognized the need to protect wilderness but eventually found the potential benefit to society outweighed the environmental impact of the intrusion.
