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.
Themes
Preservation Versus Utilitarianism
The perceived need to preserve and protect wilderness versus the view that cultivation of wilderness is central to humanity’s betterment is the primary tension that this book explores. Across almost all eras of US Post-Independence history, the ways that these two ends of the spectrum played out and sometimes balanced is at the heart of the book. In every chapter but the first two, Nash examines how the needs of a growing civilization tempered the preservation movement’s momentum. The chapter on Hetch Hetchy perhaps best exemplifies this tension. While preservationists made the ethical appeal that such a pristine wilderness should remain free from human interference, those who supported the dam project pointed out the need for access to water in the growing metropolis of San Francisco. Both sides were justified in their positions, and Nash remains objective in framing the debate. Within this tension is the question of how humanity and the natural world can best coexist.
Unlimited exploitation of nature and its resources, however, was not an explicitly stated goal of many utilitarian proponents. In many ways, preservationism is a balancing force, a needed antithesis that forces a reckoning with the human potential for permanently changing the environment. Likewise, limitations to preservation arose to meet human civilization’s basic needs for survival. As this tension played out in the late 20th century, the definition of basic needs became a battleground. While some preservationists conceded the need for access to water, many argued that the need to tap into oil reserves in Alaska, for example, was not equivalent. This question still lingers in the early 21st century and will likely continue to linger. In any case, the growth and influence of the preservation movement is a modern development that has changed how people view nature and interact with it. What’s best for society is always a question when human progress is the goal, but preservationism forces us to consider the true cost of progress. In the Epilogue, Nash present his own best idea, which he calls “Island Civilization,” to help fuse the two vantage points by recognizing the human need for natural resources but leaning toward the biocentric position that nature has a right to exist for its own sake rather than to serve humanity.
Conquering Wilderness as a Moral Imperative
Particularly in Colonial America, many couched the job of wilderness conquest in moral terms. Since the wilderness represented the unknown, early Americans, influenced by Puritan ethics, tended to see evil in it. They tended to see the wilderness as a metaphor for that which lies hidden in all humanity. For these reasons, a true adversarial relationship was the norm, one that sought to subdue wilderness physically and metaphorically. Commenting on this tendency in Colonial America, Nash claims, “For the Puritans […] wilderness was metaphor as well as actuality. On the frontier the two meanings reinforced each other, multiplying horrors” (35). Facing an entirely new environment, the uncertainty would have been profound. However, this perception of wilderness left a legacy, both literally and figuratively, of lasting ramifications on how US citizens interacted with their wilderness for generations to come.
The projection of old-world values onto new phenomena began in the Colonial era. For example, Nash points out that “contact with the North American wilderness only supplemented what the Puritans already believed. In this sense the colonists’ conception of the wilderness was more a product of the Old World than of the New” (35). This kind of thinking did not disappear entirely from the evolving generational discussions to determine best practices for balancing the needs of civilization with the needs of protecting the land. The adversarial relationship between wilderness and civilization has its roots in the influence of the Puritan worldviews prevalent at the country’s inception. Although the fear and apprehension with which colonial Americans viewed wilderness dissipated by the 20th century, the binary views persisted. For example, Nash provides commentary from Robert Wernick in 1965. Its tone was derisive against those who support wilderness protection, claiming that “they affect old rumpled clothes, unshaved jaws, salty language; they spit and sweat and boast of their friendship with aborigines” (238). Wernick implied a moral failing on the part of those who supported wilderness protection, framing them as uncivilized: “Everything good, in his view, depended on beating back and holding at bay the power of wilderness both in nature and in the human heart” (238). The traces of Puritan thought are clear in Wernick’s views, which saw human dominion over the Earth as God-granted. The execution of gaining this dominion was therefore morally justifiable.
Wilderness Preservation as a Means of Civilization Preservation
For much of the first two chapters, Nash explores the roots of the wilderness/civilization debate. As Chapter 3 unfolds, he presents the pivotal transformation toward a more appreciative view of wilderness. The gradual recognition that wilderness conquest came at a high cost had its roots in enlightenment science and reason. Once reason supplanted fear, the impetus was for citizens to take different views toward wilderness. This process began as a widescale intellectual exercise that seeped into popular thinking. Thoreau and Emerson took the concept further, using logos, pathos, and ethos to make rhetorical appeals in convincing ways. They and others of the Transcendentalist movement acted as a conscience that before their moment in history had been quiet. Thoreau once claimed that wild places should be protected “for modesty and reverence’s sake, or if only to suggest that earth has higher uses than we put her to” (102). An implied acknowledgement was the growing recognition that US citizens must reckon with the destructive force that civilization could have on the environment. In addition, Thoreau believed that protecting the wilderness was crucial to the health of civilization because of the value of wilderness to those who had become cogs in the wheel of progress.
John Muir expressed similar sentiments. He felt that “going to the woods is going home; for I suppose we came from the woods originally” (127). Total annihilation of wilderness would therefore devastate the nation’s vitality. For Muir, the spiritual uplift of wilderness had no equal in the civilized world—and he argued that for the general spiritual health of the nation, places like Yosemite should never be overrun by civilization. Likewise, Aldo Leopold felt the need to protect wilderness, but his approach was less spiritually minded than Muir. Instead, Leopold emphasized the ecological, scientific perspective and the interconnectedness of all species in that the removal of one would have downstream impacts on all. Understanding humanity’s place in the order of things depended on the study of places not spoiled by human interference. The risk of losing such places, for Leopold and from an ecological point of view, was potentially catastrophic and would irreplaceably sever humanity from its own history. Preservationists throughout the 19th and 20th centuries built convincing arguments that the health of human civilization did not depend on conquest of the entire wilderness but on how humanity interacted in positive ways with the environment.
