Idea Of Wilderness Research Articles

Wilderness from an ecosemiotic perspective

"Wilderness" is a concept which has undergone a radical change in recent years. Owing to the scale of global destruction of the wilderness and its various ecosystems, the idea of wilderness has been transformed from its original negative sense as an Other into a matter of public concern. This as replaced the understanding of "wilderness " not only as a place but as a category closely linked with the development of buman culture. As the result of human practice and representation, nature is thus also political Models and concepts of nature in the creative arts can be indicative of a certain culture's relationship with nature, as they communicate prevailing ideologies. This is particularly pertinent to concepts of nature in Canada where wilderness includes vast tracts of forests, lakes and an Arctic North, which has led to a distinctively Canadian relationship between Canadians and their natural environment. The change in the literary representations of interactions between humankind and environment in Canadian fiction - from the "double vision" resulting from the view of the wilderness both as a threatening Other and free space; to the view of threatened nature as a means of identification; and, finally, as a post-modem place of transgression and possibility - invites questions about both the semiotic threshold between nature and culture, and about the function of boundaries in the constitution of identity.

Wilderness and the wise province: Benton MacKaye's pragmatic vision

Benton MacKaye's name is rarely evoked in the fields of environmental history and philosophy. The author of the Appalachian Trail in the early 1920s and a co-founder of the Wilderness Society with Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall in the 1930s, MacKaye's unique contribution to American environmental thought is seldom recognized. This neglect is particularly egregious in the current debate over the intellectual foundations of the American wilderness idea, a discussion to which I believe MacKaye has much to contribute. Specifically, I believe that his pragmatic vision for wilderness conservation, a project supported through an appeal to the values of a reconstructed "indigenous" communal environment, owes much to the social philosophy of Josiah Royce, MacKaye's former teacher at Harvard. While the Appalachian Trail never delivered on MacKaye's goals of progressive reform and failed to unite the regional planning and conservation communities of the time, his vision remains highly relevant to our present-day deliberations about the relationship between wild nature and society at the dawn of the 21st century .

Considering the Nature of Wilderness

Roderick Nash helped to define the field of environmental history with his 1967 book, Wilderness and the American Mind . Nash’s work examines the transition of American attitudes toward wilderness from hostility to recognition of the need to create and protect wilderness as places where humans may go but should not stay. This piece considers both Nash’s work and the continued relevance and impact of his ideas. The objective way Nash describes wilderness as a pristine place through much of his work has become increasingly problematic as scholars consider the ways in which humans construct and reconstruct different and often contradictory conceptualizations of nature. Although Nash’s work does not definitively explore the idea of wilderness and its modern significance, it does provide a foundational consideration of the way Americans have interacted with the concept of a reality not modified by human industry, culture, or technology.

A la recherche de la Wilderness en Colombie Britannique (Canada)

The idea of wilderness is a powerful and understandable illusion rooted in the contrast between European and New World landscapes, the ambitions of settlers, and the rhetoric of progress. It also erases Native people, and in so doing, opens up the land for colonialism and resettlement. This article considers some of the ramifications of the idea of wilderness in British Columbia, and the contested politics of land that surround the word in this far western Canadian province.

Doing the Franklin: Wilderness Tourism and the Construction of Nature

The contemporary idea of wilderness is intertwined with the ideal wilderness experience. In the case of the Franklin River, rafting expeditions were central to the images used by conservationists to save the river from a proposed dam in the 1980s. This paper illustrates how “wilderness” shapes not only how tourism is conducted on the river, but also the understandings and values attributed to the experience. Acknowledgment of the political effectiveness of the idea of wilderness, it is argued, must be tempered by the observation that the contribution of “wilderness experience” to communal environmental understanding is at best ambiguous.

“A Retreat from Profit”: Colonization, the Appalachian Trail, and the Social Roots of Benton MacKaye's Wilderness Advocacy

In January 1935, Benton MacKaye helped to found the Wilderness Society, the first national organization dedicated to the preservation of wilderness and a group whose leadership was key to the passage of the Wilderness Act three decades later. MacKaye joined co-founders Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall as one of this country's first and most important advocates for a system of wilderness areas. MacKaye's attachment to wilderness began in the early 192oS, with his visionary proposal for an Appalachian Trail from Mt. Washington in New Hampshire to Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina. Like the wilderness idea, the Appalachian Trail remains one of our most important models for preserving natural areas and providing outdoor recreation. It has been mimicked to good effect in trails traversing the length of the Rockies and the Sierras, and in greenway and rail-to-trail efforts throughout the country. His AT proposal and his founding role with the Wilderness Society indicate that Benton MacKaye has had as great an influence as anyone on preserved open space in the United States.' Although MacKaye's AT proposal, first offered in 1921, was the beginning of an intellectual process that led him to the wilderness idea and a long career as a wilderness advocate, it was also a transitional expression reflective of a very different line of thought. During his early conservation career, MacKaye seldom spoke of wilderness preservation. Instead, he focused on the connections between labor and natural resources, charting a more radical course for progressive conservation policy. This essay examines MacKaye's early thought and shows how these intellectual threads were woven into his AT proposal. Moreover, it uses MacKaye's early career to suggest that the history of wilderness advocacy in the United States has been more complex than recent scholarship suggests. Recently, the wilderness idea has come under heavy criticism. By utilizing ecologicalscience, one group of critics has suggested that the complexity and stochasticity of natural processes invariably complicate attempts to preserve wilderness. The new

Cultured Wilderness in Jasper National Park

The upper Athabasca River valley in Jasper National Park has witnessed considerable human influence over the past 200 hundred years. By analysing a wide variety of influences at different times during the past two centuries, this essay considers again the meaning that Canadians accord the idea of wilderness, generally, and the idea of wilderness in the context of national parks, specifically. The discussion is guided by the view that wilderness is itself a human construct, deeply informed by human values, even if those values alter from one epoque to another.

Bioregionalism as an Arctic Wilderness Idea

AbstractA recurrent question in the modem world is the place of people in nature, and bioregionalism offers some ideas in the debate over the kinds of technology that belong in Arctic wilderness areas, with a focus on northern Alaska. Some interests argue that people should only visit these areas, on foot or by paddle, to achieve a wilderness experience. Rural residents, most of whom are Alaska Natives, hold that access to these lands by motorised vehicles is essential to maintain hunting and gathering traditions. The debate over managing wilderness areas in northern Alaska originates in conflicting views of the meaning of wilderness. A bioregional vision offers some common ground in the idea of wilderness as a place of respect for non-human life forms, but political conflicts will not be easily resolved.

The nature of cultural landscapes — a nature conservation perspective

This paper explores the reasons for the growing interest in cultural landscapes in nature conservation circles. It contains a brief discourse on nature and culture, emphasizing the declining power of the idea of pristine wilderness, the realization that many disturbed ecosystems are important to conservation, that agri‐biodiversity is a resource to be protected along with wild biodiversity, and the need to find models of sustainable land use. Examples are given, at the global (World Heritage Convention), European and national levels, of the way in which the growing interest in cultural landscapes manifests itself; special attention is given to the category of protected area known as ‘protected landscape/seascape’. Finally, the author identifies the major natural qualities found in cultural landscapes which will assist in understanding, identifying and protecting those features of value.

"A Blank Spot on the Map": Aldo Leopold, Wilderness, and U. S. Forest Service Recreational Policy, 1909-1924

Though it was built upon a long tradition of wilderness thought, Aldo Leopold's wilderness idea was highly contingent, rooted in the Forest Service milieu, and tied to contemporary technological cultural developments. This paper proposes that Leopold advocated wilderness preservation to counter environmental changes wrought by these developments.

North to the West: Jack London and the Literature of U.S. Expansion in Canada

Adventure is the energizing myth of empire . . . the American adventure stories represent. . . the policies and compromises, the punishments and rewards, and the stresses and problems involved in advancing a frontier at the expense of native populations and against natural obstacles. To read the adventures was to prepare oneself to go west and take part in the national work. (Green 1984, 4) The specifically American construction of the modern wilderness idea . . . serves increasingly to justify what are effectively imperialist inter- ventions anywhere across the globe. (Cosgrove 1995, 39) In 1902, the frontier chronicler Frank Norris wrote that having gone as far west as possible, "suddenly we have found that there is no longer any Frontier." According to him, U.S. nation-builders "went at the wilderness as only the Anglo-Saxon can" until they found they had arrived at the shores of the Pacific. The frontier reopened, he argued, when a "gun was fired in the Bay of Manila, still further Westward" (1902, 1728-29). Facing a national landscape that seemed devoid of opportunities for adventure, many U.S. writers followed this expansionist move and sought new terrain in which to play out their western dramas of expansion and conquest. While some turn-of-the-century writers reconstructed American frontiers overseas, still others, such as Jack London, relocated their western settings in the Far North.1 At a time when environmental awareness was gaining popularity in the United States, these writers often discovered it was not enough to merely restage their narratives in a new setting; thus, many of them struggled to preserve frontier experiences by framing their expansionist adventures in a conservationist rhetoric. The nostalgic yearning in these narratives for an untrammeled land, an Other to the settled spaces of the western United States, reconstructed heroic acts as the struggle to save the environment; as a result, in many of these texts wilderness advocacy emerged as a form of imperial adventure in its own right.2

The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature

This will seem a heretical claim to many environmentalists, since the idea of wilderness has for decades been a fundamental tenet-indeed, a passion-of the environmental movement, especially in the United States. For many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth. It is an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness. Seen in this way, wilderness presents itself as the best antidote to our human selves, a refuge we must somehow recover if we hope to save the planet. As Henry David Thoreau once famously declared, In Wildness is the preservation of the World.' But is it? The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation-indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it is a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires. For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we

Is There a Future After the Death of Progress?The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology.Max OelschlaegerEcospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America.M. Jimmie Killingsworth , Jacqueline S. PalmerThe Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination.Donald WorsterBeginning Again: People and Nature in the New Millennium.David EhrenfeldA Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement.Philip Shabecoff

A commentary on THE IDEA OF WILDERNESS: FROM PREHISTORY TO THE AGE OF ECOLOGY. By Max Oelschlaeger. Yale University Press, New Haven (Connecticut). $18.00 (pb). xiii + 477 p.; index. ISBN: 0-300-05370-3. 1991. ECOSPEAK: RHETORIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS IN AMERICA. By M Jimmie Killingsworth andJacqueline S. Palmer. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale (Illinois). $34.95. xiv + 312 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 0-8093-1750-8. 1992. THE WEALTH OF NATURE: ENVIRONMENTAL HisTORY AND THE ECOLOGICAL IMAGINATION. By Donald Worster. Oxford Universit Press, New York. $25.00. xi + 255 p.; index. ISBN: 0-19507624-9. [Book of essays which previously appeared in various journals or books or as lectures.] 1993. BEGINNING AGAIN: PEOPLE AND NATURE IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM. By David Ehrenfeld. Oxford University Press, New York. $22.00. xiv + 216 p.; index. ISBN: 0-19507812-8. 1993. A FIERCE GREEN FIRE: THE AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT. American Century Series. By Philip Shabecoff: Hill & Wang, New York. $10.95 (paper). xv + 352 p. + 12 pl.; ill.; index. ISBN: 0-8090-1558-7. 1993.

The Idea of Wilderness. From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology

The Idea of Wilderness. From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology

Book reviews

Reviewing The End of Nature McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Doubleday. 1989. 226 pp. $9.95 (paper). McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Doubleday. 1989. 226 pp. $9.95 (paper). McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Doubleday. 1989. 226 pp. $9.95 (paper). McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Doubleday. 1989. 226 pp. $9.95 (paper). Oelschlaeger, M. The Idea of Wilderness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1991. 477 pp.

The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology.

The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology.

The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology

How has the concept of wild nature changed over the milennia? And what have been the environmental consequences? In a work of intellectual history, the author presents an examination of humankind's relationship with the natural world through the ages - from early teomism through Egyptian, Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian supernaturalism to the rise of materialism and modernism.

The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology. Max Oelschlaeger

<i>The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology</i>. Max Oelschlaeger

The idea of wilderness: from prehistory to the age of ecology

The idea of wilderness: from prehistory to the age of ecology

The Desert Reader ed. by Peter Wild

362 WesternAmerican Literature speak for themselves. If his book isn’t successful “ecotourism,” “ecocriticism,” “ecoprose,” I don’t know what is. ANN RONALD University ofNevada, Reno The Desert Reader. Edited by Peter Wild. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press,1991. 236 pages, $17.95.) Peter Wild in his introduction to The Desert Reader claims his purpose is twofold: “.. . to introduce the reader to some of the best writing about the arid lands of the United States and to give an overview of how the thinking about deserts has changed over the years.” He successfully accomplishes his task by chronologically arranging nineteen chapters, choosing eighteen authors (John Wesley Powell was used twice). Following the Papago and Pima Indian lore are authors Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Pattie, Greeley, Gilpin, Dutton, Van Dyke, Austin, Lawrence, Dobie, Leopold, Krutch, Stegner, Abbey, Zwinger, and Banham. Preceding each selection is Wild’s commentary drawing insights from prior selections, placing authors in their time, reconstructing biographical relevancies, and weaving the variations of the common themes of myth and reality. Wild’s historical perspective and commentary make this a book the reader initially may consume for pleasure but ultimately find soul searching. What shall we do with the desert? The excerpts reflect the routes of myth makers, beaver trappers, explorers, geopoliticians, bureaucrats, professors, art critics, naturalists, philosophic scientists, scientific philosophers, National Park Service and Forest Service rangers, and novelists. The authors describe their adventures, examine their theories, capture the panorama, enjoy the desert for the sake ofthe desert, and finally discover themselves in desert solitude. Wallace Stegner presents the “wilderness idea”where the idea itselfis the resource. Not the gold. Not the uranium. Not the unrealized potential offuture development. As Wild claims, this book is not about conservation. It’s a book about human perception of the desert. It’s the history of desert thought, a medley of mirages and refreshing oases. Peter Reyner Banham, a British-born University ofCalifornia art history professor, pens the following sentence which concludes Wild’s book: “It’s almost as if no one should be admitted to the desert until he has completed a literary training course in the formation of right attitudes to the wilderness.’’The Desert Readermay not purport to know the right attitudes, but it does have the right authors and selections which allow readers to make their own decisions. MARYELLEN ACKERMAN Cape Cod, Massachusetts ...