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

Former U.S. Secretary of the Interior James Watt may have seemed only a passing nightmare in his day, but he acted out of a very old tradition of American attitudes toward the land and its proper use. So did Henry David Thoreau. So did Edward Abbey. Americans have been arguing about the environment since the first boats landed at Jamestown, and by all appearances they'll keep right on arguing into the next millennium. The Idea of Wilderness packs the centuries-old story into a lively narrative with its full complement of heroes--Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold--a few choice villains of the robber-baron and bureaucrat persuasion, and a few middling souls like Gifford Pinchot, founder of the United States Forest Service. Max Oelschlaeger writes persuasively on the philosophical and religious underpinnings of various environmental positions, showing that indeed there's nothing new under the sun.