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.
Key Figures
John Muir
Nash dedicates an entire chapter to the famed preservationist and the Sierra Club’s first president. A tireless, energetic, and assertive supporter of wilderness protection, Muir tended to view his experiences in the wilderness from a spiritual perspective, and his outlook was significantly influenced by Transcendentalists such as Thoreau and Emerson, with whom he was friends. Muir was among the leading opponents of the Hetch Hetchy dam project, and while his opposition suffered a stinging defeat, the political momentum that he helped generate only grew after that. His impact on American preservationism is monumental.
The separate chapter allotted to Muir is significant, as he is one of the more famous preservationists in American history, and his name is even now synonymous with the movement, which might not have evolved without his relentless advocacy. From a functionalist perspective, Nash’s devoting chapters to Muir, Thoreau, and Aldo Leopold is a framing technique. By focusing on one figure, Nash illustrates where the movement stood in their era. Just reading the chapters consecutively would directly indicate how the wilderness protection debate evolved over the 19th and 20th centuries. With Muir especially, Nash reveals a decisively pro-wilderness position. Muir was almost one-dimensional in supporting wilderness protection and would represent one end of the debate binary. As the chapter on Muir progresses, Nash introduces other notable figures whose position on the continuum differs dramatically.
Robert Wernick
A writer and vocal opponent of the preservation movement, Wernick criticized the growing worldview that elevated wilderness at the expense of devaluing civilization. Nash highlights a New York Times editorial in which Wernick mocked supporters of preservation and implied that because such people tend toward being uncivilized, they should not be trusted or given legitimacy. Effectively, this was a smear tactic by Wernick that marginalized an entire group of people.
If John Muir represents the preservation movement in the book, Wernick represents the staunchest opposition. The following passage cited by Nash exemplifies Wernick’s views: “Humans should ‘look after our own interests as best we can, and no more consider the feelings of the eagle and the rhinoceros than they consider ours’” (239). For Wernick and those who thought like him, the argument favoring wilderness preservation was absurd on its surface. Wernick could not see how humans, as participants in the natural world, should sacrifice prosperity for the health of a disinterested abstraction. In some ways, Wernick’s views were logical, and his staunch opposition actually benefited the preservation movement because to counter his claims, those in the movement needed to find equally logical rebuttals that they could back up. While Nash certainly discusses other critics of the movement in different eras, Wernick’s unapologetic tone in support of civilized progress over the health of wilderness provides perspective and contrast that informs Nash’s framing technique.
Theodore Roosevelt
Former US President Roosevelt was a prominent supporter of conservation. While his love for hunting influenced his support, and his motivation differed from that of pure preservationists like John Muir, his understanding of the necessity of wilderness protection helped validate the movement. His influence at the turn of the 19th century, in the wake of the end of the American frontier, was significant, and his friendship with John Muir legitimized Muir and his push for wilderness preservation, especially in California.
Roosevelt’s response to the Hetch Hetchy project illustrates his complicated relationship to the preservation movement. Although he concurred with Muir that the Yosemite Valley was a unique place that should remain free from human alteration, as president, Roosevelt was first a politician and also had to accept the political realities of the time: “Roosevelt appreciated the importance of water, lumber, and similar commodities to national welfare and as President felt responsible for providing them” (162). Roosevelt represented the competing interests between cultivation and preservation in some ways, and he tended to play both sides of the fence. As a rhetorical strategy, Nash’s discussions of Roosevelt and his conflicting views on wilderness help highlight the national tension that existed at the time of the Hetch Hetchy proposal. The ways that Roosevelt had to balance the needs of civilization with the needs of wilderness protection became commonplace in the wake of Hetch Hetchy and beyond.
