Wilderness and the American Mind
Roderick Frazier Nash. Forword by Char Miller.For the fifth edition, Nash has written a new preface and epilogue that brings Wilderness and the American Mind into dialogue with contemporary debates about wilderness. Char Miller’s foreword provides a twenty-first-century perspective on how the environmental movement has changed, including the ways in which contemporary scholars are reimagining the dynamic relationship between the natural world and the built environment.
“’Wilderness, in the final analysis, is a state of mind,’ and the author critically describes man’s attitudes toward a state of nature he feared, romanticized, felt he had to conquer and change, wished to preserve, used as a refuge from an unsatisfactory culture, and in most cases despoiled. The concepts are traced from the ancient symbol of the Garden of Eden to our present conservation controversies.” (Books of the Southwest)