Wilderness and the American Mind

This chapter begins Nash’s generally chronological account of how the concept of wilderness has evolved. He briefly ventures into the prehistorical realm at the outset of the chapter and discusses how the creation of early societies was an exercise in survival. In this way, Nash explores a possible cause for the creation of the “civilization is good/wilderness is bad” construct: “If paradise was early man’s greatest good, wilderness, as its antipode, was his greatest evil” (8). In a world where threats to survival were constant, the need to see things in this binary way was essential. Security and safety of the individual and the group depended on differentiating between what was a threat and what was a haven. Naturally, since the wilderness represented the unknown, people viewed it as a threat and, hence, feared it.

Nash proceeds to discussing how ancient civilizations viewed wilderness. Importantly, while describing the ancient Greeks, Nash points out how this civilization distinguished wilderness from nature, or the pastoral. The Greeks and others viewed the pastoral as beautiful and pleasurable because it was land that humans had tamed and did not pose the same kind of ominous threat as the truly wild regions that humanity had not yet subdued. Nash then transitions into exploring the impact of folklore on how early civilizations viewed wilderness:

While inability to control or use wilderness was the basic factor in 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 associate wilderness with the supernatural and monstrous (10).

Clearly, the perception of wilderness evolved in such a way that humans projected their fears onto it.

Later in the chapter, Nash examines how the Judeo-Christian view of wilderness perpetuated the idea that wilderness was terrible, threatening, and even evil. Much like the Greeks, who appreciated the pastoral, early Christians and Jews came to believe that nature differed from wilderness. In the Bible, the Old Testament’s Garden of Eden was a source of inspiration for followers because it presented a world free from malevolent wilderness where nature was tempered, soft, and gentle. In this context, people equated wilderness with evil—and to bring about a paradise on earth, humanity must subdue it. Interestingly, this antagonistic attitude toward wilderness was not the norm for Eastern societies in Asia. Rather than viewing wilderness as a monster to be tamed, some Eastern societies deified it and revered it as much as Western societies loathed it.

Nash opens this chapter by discussing Alexis de Tocqueville’s impressions of America’s relationship with wilderness. Nash cites de Tocqueville’s trip to the Michigan wilderness in 1831 and recounts how some of the resulting comments illustrate an adversarial relationship with the American wilderness at the time. Nash then moves into a discussion of how the pioneers’ battle to conquer the West was conflated with a moral struggle against evil. He refers to this as a “morality play” (25). He compares the European and American wilderness, noting how only clusters of wilderness were left in Europe, while vast, pristine, and raw swaths of wilderness existed in the US. The exercise of developing this vast wilderness was daunting and required tremendous effort. Nash chronicles some of these monumental challenges and the people who helped lead the action to settle the frontier from colonial times into the early 19th century.

Next, Nash discusses the physical and actual threat that wilderness imposed on early American citizens. He mentions wildlife and how people regarded animals of the Americas with fear. In some cases, the North American wildlife that people encountered in the 17th and 18th centuries was novel to Europeans, as it did not exist in their former homelands. In addition, the unknown that wilderness represented endowed it with mythic proportions. Superstitions arose as inhabitants tried to make sense of what they did not know, and wilderness came to symbolize the beast within: “Immigrants to the New World certainly sought release from oppressive European laws and traditions, yet the complete license of the wilderness was an overdose” (29), so the physical act of defeating and subjugating wilderness was also a moral act of subduing humanity’s dark side. Those who appeared to have a less disdainful outlook on wilderness generated suspicion. Nash mentions two notable figures—Yale president Timothy Dwight, and J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur—who argued that the more men pushed into wilderness, the less civilized they became. To keep moral boundaries clear, a utilitarian argument justified the need to push into wilderness as “a means to an end.” Although expansion into the frontier was an endeavor fraught with danger, both actual and perceived, the utilitarian view justified it because everything in it could be useful to help civilization.

The chapter’s first statement, that “appreciation of wilderness began in the cities” (44), sets the tone for its remainder. Nash traces the roots of this appreciation through literary traditions rather than through the people who were out in the wilderness. Romanticism as a literary and arts movement laid the foundation for enlightenment and a new way of looking at the concept of wilderness—as an extension of the divine—and views began to change. Nash touches on enlightenment thinking in the sciences and its effect on how people viewed Earth’s—and their own—place in the cosmos. While the pastoral Garden of Eden ideal universally appealed to Judeo-Christian worldviews, it came with the caveat that the land had been tamed. Conversely, true wilderness was chaotic and, according to Nash, came to represent its own kind of beauty during and after the height of the enlightenment. That chaos could be beautiful was a novel concept until this point. Intellectuals began to posit the idea of the sublime, which suggested that people could experience the divine through the natural world—a concept that the Transcendentalists of the mid-1800s picked up and advanced. Nash discusses various developments in how people attempted to experience the sublime, including Primitivism—a belief “that man’s happiness and well-being decreased in direct proportion to his degree of civilization” (46). This outlook on wilderness created new ways of viewing Indigenous populations, and the racist myth of the “noble savage” arose out of it.

Nash discusses the scientific trend toward studying wilderness rather than regarding it with terror. He mentions a litany of scientists, including William Byrd and William Bartram, who helped create an empirical approach to wilderness and whose rationalism supported the growing belief in embracing wilderness rather than fearing it. Despite the momentum that these new views of wilderness generated, however, many still saw things the old way. Those whose livelihoods depended on wilderness—trappers, loggers, and others whose work involved subjugating the wild and being out in it—did not have a romantic outlook toward nature like those who viewed it from afar. The tension arising from this conflict in views is a theme that Nash revisits throughout the book, and he uses it to close the chapter, bringing it full circle from the opening statement.