Wilderness And Transcendentalism

In Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash explains the affect wilderness had on people throughout the years. Once viewed as evil and filled with wild, unknown people and creatures, the wilderness caused people live in fear. Over time, through Romanticism, America's divine and distinctive culture and Transcendentalism people became more appreciative of the wilderness as they realized it had far more to offer than danger and sin.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, movements and shifts in culture and beliefs including, Romanticism, the Enlightenment, primitivism and deism, began to transform the Europeans’ view of the wilderness. When settlers first came to America, they portrayed the lands as a vast expanse with nothing

He brought about a new viewpoint of wilderness and civilization. Instead of viewing wilderness with a double-mindedness standpoint, he interpreted it more thoroughly with the idea of Transcendentalism. “The core of Transcendentalism was the belief that a correspondence or parallelism existed between the higher realm of spiritual truth and the lower one of material objects” (Nash, 2014, pg. 85). To go beyond viewing the basic experiences, people were still able to learn about God through nature, however, they viewed it with their intuition and imagination. They could view this everyday through nature because it was always surrounding them. Wilderness was valued as an entrance into the divine plane; its source of strength of vitality and vigor, and can provide people with their ability to not be clouded by thought. Civilization was characterized as the opposite; it was distracting, materialistic, superficial, unjust and corporate. However, Thoreau believed that if someone is in the wilderness for too long, it could become overwhelming and you will begin to feel the sense of bewildered and stripped of guidance. He believed that there had to be some way to get the best of both worlds without the feelings of civilization overpowering the sense of solitude that wilderness should offer. Even though wilderness is still believed to be mainly good and have much to offer, civilization is still viewed as the place of longing that needs to be