Wilderness politics form the basement in American environmental history which articulates attention and simplifies stories of our understanding on the vital issue of conserving nature from crucial development of urbanization and commercialism. This usually portrays the conflict over the management or use of resources emerging in the progressive-era conservation movement of those interested only in aesthetic nature where wilderness as a movement is misunderstood. Paul S. Sutter has done much to correct these misinterpretations and misperceptions. He has achieved this through his study of the four founders of Wilderness Society referring to Aldo Leopold, Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye and Bob Marshall. He therefore presents a persuasive complex …show more content…
Past scholars have argued that wilderness preservation arose as a specific environmental cause because wilderness was becoming scarce, because some individuals began to appreciate the ethical components of nature, or because a growing urban and suburban white middle class wanted it for recreational and aesthetic reasons. Sutter concludes that these arguments are "sound but limited". Sutter focuses on the origins of the wilderness movement from the 1910s through 1930s. The author examines the issues that led to the need to formally establish wilderness reserves in the United States. He emphasizes on interests about capitalism and mass consumption, road construction in the National Parks and the role of the consumer capitalization and commercialism in expanding the allowance of building in natural areas. He, therefore, developed arguments about the purpose and definition of "wildness" and "wilderness," which are still discussed even after 100 years later. These critical ideas of Automobiles inventions were associated with problems related to ecology, ethnocentrism, biased-people class, and cultural constructiveness. Complexity, contingency and context were some of the key missing aspects in the …show more content…
The previous society founders were concerned with the argument of "discomfort with consumerism, tourism, mechanization, advertising, landscape architecture and the various other forces that re-made outdoor recreation during the interwar period". The wilderness movements came up with critical methods of commercial recreation and industrial use of resources that threatened the Automobile that undermined Americans' relationship with nature. These changes included the interwar economy, which involves the intensity use of consumer culture, democracy and commercial outdoor recreation. To explain this formation of the wilderness movement deeply, Sutter uses four biographies of these founders who individually came up with the independent need for an organization that dedicated preservation establishing absence of roads in wilderness. They brought different experiences, perspectives and ideological measures contributing to the movements and organization launching a campaign for a national wilderness system that provided to the prevailed 1964 Wilderness
From the prologue through chapter one in “Wilderness and the American Mind”, the author emphasizes the affect wilderness had on the Europeans during the colonization of America. In today’s society, we are familiar with the concept of wilderness but few of us have experienced the feeling of being encapsulated in the unfamiliar territory. Today we long for wilderness, crave it even. We use it as an outlet to escape the pace of life. However, we have a sense of safety that the Europeans did not. We are not isolated in the unfamiliar, help is usually a phone call away. Though we now view the wilderness as an oasis because we enter at our own terms, in the early colonial and national periods, the wilderness was an unknown environment that was viewed as evil and dangerous.
Although Leopold’s love of great expanses of wilderness is readily apparent, his book does not cry out in defense of particular tracts of land about to go under the axe or plow, but rather deals with the minutiae, the details, of often unnoticed plants and animals, all the little things that, in our ignorance, we have left out of our managed acreages but which must be present to add up to balanced ecosystems and a sense of quality and wholeness in the landscape.
In Mark Fiege’s book “The Republic of Nature,” the author embarks on an elaborate, yet eloquent quest to chronicle pivotal points in American history from an environmental perspective. This scholarly work composed by Fiege details the environmental perspective of American history by focusing on nine key moments showing how nature is very much entrenched in the fibers that manifested this great nation. The author sheds light on the forces that shape the lands of America and humanities desire to master and manipulate nature, while the human individual experience is dictated by the cycles that govern nature. The story of the human experience unfolds in Mark Fiege’s book through history’s actors and their challenges amongst an array of environmental possibilities, which led to nature being the deciding factor on how
Cronon, William “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90
The wild is a place to push yourself to the limit and take a look at who you truly are inside. “Wilderness areas have value as symbols of unselfishness” (Nash). Roderick Nash’s philosophy states that the wilderness gives people an opportunity to learn humility but they fight this because they do not have a true desire to be humble. Human-kind wants to give out the illusion that they are nature lovers when in reality, they are far from it. “When we go to designated wilderness we are, as the 1964 act says, "visitors" in someone else's home” (Nash). People do not like what they cannot control and nature is uncontrollable. Ecocentrism, the belief that nature is the most important element of life, is not widely accepted. The novel Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer depicts a young boy who goes on an exploration to teach himself the true concept of humility. Chris McCandless, the protagonist, does not place confidence in the universal ideology that human beings are the most significant species on the planet, anthropocentrism.
In the 1800’s into the early 1900’s a man named John Muir began to explore the western American lands. He traveled down South and up North. But, when he reached Yosemite Valley, his life changed. As said in John Muir’s Wild America, written by Tom Melham, “Following the forest-lined mountain trails, Muir climbed higher into the Sierra Nevada: suddenly, a deep valley enclosed by colossal steeps and mighty water falls yawned before him. Spell bound, he entered Yosemite Valley” (79). Muir’s travels and adventures, highlighted in Melham’s book, explain this man’s love of the wilderness. Yosemite Valley was like a wide, open home to Muir, who, lived alone and discovered new landings and important later landmarks that create the aura of Yosemite National Park. Yosemite Valley was given to the state of California in 1864, part of the continuous idea of Manifest Destiny, later, in 1890; Yosemite became one of the first National Parks (“World Book”). Uniquely, the longer Muir stayed the more that he...
The Conservation movement was a driving force at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was a time during which Americans were coming to terms with their wasteful ways, and learning to conserve what they quickly realized to be limited resources. In the article from the Ladies’ Home Journal, the author points out that in times past, Americans took advantage of what they thought of as inexhaustible resources. For example, "if they wanted lumber for their houses, rails for their fences, fuel for their stoves, they would cut down half a forest at a time; and whatever they could not use or sell they would leave to rot on the ground. They never bothered their heads to inquire where more wood was coming from when this was gone" (33). The twentieth century opened with a vision towards the future, towards preserving the land that had previously been taken for granted. The Conservation movement came along around the same time as one of the first major waves of the feminist movement. With the two struggles going on: one for the freedom of nature and the other for the freedom of women, it stands to follow that they coincided. As homemakers, activists, and citizens of the United States of America, women have had an important role in Conservation.
The wilderness can be used to measure against the man made world, a “scientific yardstick.” Throughout the entire piece he is arguing that the importance is not what we can actually see or touch, but what we think of and how we think of the wild. This letter is being written to inform them of what would be missing without the wilderness. Those who think fondly of the Grand Canyon or the Everglades and have never been there are merely working from the idea, but those who have been there know what it has to offer and therefore receive the calming and sobering state of mind Stegner refers to.
Every year, over nine million hikers and adventure seekers travel to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park making it the most visited national park in the United States. There are abundant reasons for this, but many popular reasons include over 150 hiking trails extending over 850 miles, a large portion of the Appalachian Trail, sightseeing, fishing, horseback riding, and bicycling. The park houses roughly ten thousand species of plants and animals with an estimated 90,000 undocumented species likely possible to be present. It is clear why there was a pressing interest in making all this land into a national park. My research was started by asking the question; how did the transformation of tourism due to the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park affect surrounding cities such as Gatlinburg and Sevier County, and in return, its effect on the popularity of the park?
To many families the prospect of owning land was the central driving force that brought them to the land known today as the wild Wild West. Much propaganda wa...
Magoc, Chris J. Environmental Issues in American History: A Reference Guide with Primary Documents. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006. Print.
From the lone hiker on the Appalachian Trail to the environmental lobby groups in Washington D.C., nature evokes strong feelings in each and every one of us. We often struggle with and are ultimately shaped by our relationship with nature. The relationship we forge with nature reflects our fundamental beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. The works of timeless authors, including Henry David Thoreau and Annie Dillard, are centered around their relationship to nature.
This anthropocentric theme continues throughout his narrative but is personified on a societal level. This matter is first introduced in the chapter “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and The National Parks.” In this chapter Abbey notes the expansionist nature of the industrial economy and how it is affecting the national parks. Abbey critiques arguments for uni...
... middle of paper ... ... This conflict conveys the confrontation of wild American nature with the new-coming European civilization, people like the young hunter?had no qualms about doing harm to nature by thrusting civilization upon it? P. Miller, p. 207.
Leopold’s view is a glorified dream at best. While most people do acknowledge the need for some type of ecological consciousness, the one illustrated by Leopold is far from probable. Today’s society is overrun with the desire for speed and convenience, and driven by competition. Asking the busy world to stop, step backward, and work the concerns for such things as soil, rocks, or oak trees into its contracts and agreements is a foolish notion. It has come to be that to most individuals, the sight of a city skyline that is bustling with business and life is just as pristine as the sight of a natural forest.