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WILDERNESS

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"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." This famous definition of wilderness became official in August 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed United States Public Law 88-577, creating a National Wilderness Preservation System charged with permanently maintaining the "primeval character and influence" of a portion of federally controlled land so that it "appears to have been primarily affected by the forces of nature." The Wilderness Act was the culmination of multiple congressional hearings, innumerable legislative drafts, thousands of pages of public testimony, and seven years of intensive lobbying both by established timber, pulp, oil, mining, and grazing interests as well as by the newly powerful preservation movement spearheaded by the Wilderness Society's Howard Zahniser and the Sierra Club's David Brower. On the longer view, it also represented the crystallization of a centuries-long American trend toward the appreciation and protection of uninhabited and scenic public lands into a tangible and comprehensive national policy. As of 2005, the 9 million acres originally set aside by the act had grown to more than 100 million acres spread over 667 areas in 44 states, with Alaskan preserves accounting for about half of the total—meaning that, in all, slightly less than 5 percent of the land within the borders of the United States was officially protected as wilderness.

As might be expected in a country completely resettled by waves of immigrants over more than four hundred years, the idea of wilderness—along with related notions of nature and the frontier—plays a large part in the traditional telling of American history. And although wilderness protection is not unique to American culture—the Soviet Union and its successor states, to take a notable example, extended much stricter protections for much different reasons to similarly large tracts of wilderness (zapovedniki) beginning in 1916—Americans played a relatively large role until the late twentieth century in the definition and deployment of the idea of wilderness worldwide. This mutually defining relationship between American culture and the idea of wilderness has long been the subject of intense debate among historians, philosophers, literary critics, scientists, and land managers. Among the major questions they continue to ask are: Does true wilderness really exist? Where do the values associated with wilderness come from? Whose values are they? What interests does the protection of wilderness serve? And what effects does it have on other modes of environmental concern? The answers to these questions are complex and unsettled, but their dimensions can be illuminated by the specific history of the idea of wilderness in North America.

PRE-CONTACT WILDERNESS

Of more than semantic concern is the question of whether wilderness, defined as large tracts of land in a state unaltered by mankind, could be said to exist in North America at the time of its discovery by Europeans. Various groups of natives had, after all, started crossing the Bering land bridge into the Americas more than twenty thousand years before and were well established from the Arctic Sea to Tierra del Fuego long before Columbus sighted land. Though it is impossible to generalize about so enormous a temporal and geographic slice of human history, such a long tenure implies that native peoples had likely altered their environments in ways that favored their survival. Indeed, archaeological work suggests that even nonagricultural tribes used the means available to them—most notably fire—to shape the landscape in significant ways. The mass extinction of large mammals like the wooly mammoth at the end of the Pleistocene has been speculatively linked to increased pressure by native Amerindian hunters, and highly wasteful practices have been documented among the bison-hunting tribes of the Great Plains. Environmental devastation, however, depends on a combination of shortsightedness and technological power, and though the natives were far from the ecological saints that western myth has made of them, their long-term experience with their environments coupled with the absence of extensive agriculture and mechanized industry meant that the ecosystems the first Europeans encountered, though hardly empty of human inhabitants, were more stable than they would be in subsequent years.

RELIGIOUS ORIGINS

While some of those first European explorers and settlers on the North American coast made passing reference to the relative wildness of the territory they encountered, "wilderness" as a touchstone concept first entered the American lexicon with the Puritans who settled around the Massachusetts Bay starting in the 1620s. This fact has large significance for the current connotations of wilderness in American culture, where it has always retained a religious ring even as it moved far beyond recognizably Christian dogma. For the Puritans, whose foremost frame of reference was the Christian scriptures, "wilderness" initially had more to do with the spiritual state in which they found themselves than with the physical environments they confronted. Frequently identifying themselves with the Israelites in the book of Exodus, the chosen people who were tested and formed through their wanderings in the desert, the Puritans came to understand wilderness as a name for their condition as Christian saints sojourning in the fallen world. Wilderness in this sense was another name for the totality of the adversities that beset them as a Christian community and as such could include even the highly urbanized European milieu from which they came. The Puritan leader John Winthrop (1588–1649), quite counterintuitively to modern understandings, described the Protestant emigration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a movement out of the wilderness.

Against such an abstract conception, the concrete wilderness that confronted the Puritans in North America quickly came to have a double-edged significance. As an alternative to the materially overabundant but spiritually deadening urban "wilderness" in which reformed Calvinists had wandered in Europe, the North American environment represented an austere and uncorrupted landscape where a saintlier community might flower. To be sure, the immigrants' new home presented substantial material challenges to the establishment of that community. William Bradford (1590–1657), the leader and historian of the Plymouth Plantation, seemed to be drawing on the Old English roots of the word "wilderness"—from wild(d)éornes, a compound of wild- (undomesticated), -deor- (animal), and -ness (place), meaning "a place of wild animals"—when he described the appearance of the forests that surrounded his starving settlement as "a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men" (p. 62). Marking their untamed surroundings as the antithesis of the tight-knit "city upon a hill" they were laboring so mightily to establish (as urged by Winthrop in his sermon "A Modell of Christian Charity," p. 199), the Puritans quickly set about an ambitious plan to reform or simply clear away the material wilderness to bring God's plans for the "New-English Israel" to fruition. This antipathy for wilderness and the need for environmental remaking is an important strain of Puritan thought, advocated most vociferously by Edward Johnson (c. 1594–1672) in Wonder-Working Providence of Sion's Saviour in New England (1654). But the Puritan attitude was more complex than Johnson's text suggests, and Bradford goes on to recast his pessimistic assessment of the New England environment in redemptive language drawn from the book of Isaiah: "Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity" (p. 63). In this subtler conception of New England as a temperate version of the Sinai of the Israelites, the wilderness condition is a sign of both God's displeasure with his chosen people and his particular concern with their eventual fate. Unable either to surrender to wilderness completely or to disregard its chastening message, the earliest religious immigrants to New England were caught in a double bind. In recognition of this, Bradford and others came to take on the unsettled land surrounding Plymouth, in which wilderness was a negative presence not because it threatened to extinguish settlers' worldly hopes or because it symbolized the fallenness of the world but because paradoxically it offered to gratify them with an agricultural wealth that might fracture the sense of community enforced by deprivation and fear. All three of these partial definitions of wilderness—as a place of renewal, of testing, and of dissolution—continue in modern debates about the value of the wild.

THE CONTENTS OF THE WILD

At this early stage the question of wilderness was related in complex ways to scriptural precedents and community dynamics, but the actual content of wilderness (the geological formations, flora, fauna, and so on) was infrequently considered. And when these specificities were considered in the pragmatic agricultural writings of the colonial period, they were usually discussed in a context other than "wilderness" as we know it today. To non-Puritan settlers in New England, especially those who enjoyed good relations with local natives, understanding the populated and abundant region as wilderness, with its connotations of barrenness and solitude, was irrational. As Thomas Morton (1575–1646) saw it, in the midst of his cheeky New English Canaan (1637), the American environment was "Natures Masterpeece; Her chiefest Magazine of all, where lives her store" (p. 180). Elsewhere in the colonies the mood was seldom so sunny, but there was a shared assumption that the primary question about the land was not whether it was to be the site of a religious drama but whether and how it could be made to yield its riches to human labor. As a result, most of the accounts that do survive from the southern colonies, such as Robert Beverley's History of Virginia (1705), William Byrd's twin histories of a surveying expedition along the border between Virginia and North Carolina (1709, 1729), James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane (1764), and George Ogilvie's Carolina; or, The Planter (1776, 1791), downplay the issue of wilderness, focusing rather on the more concrete and specific questions of settling the territory.

Two aspects of this settlement process deserve special consideration. The first is the widespread presence, beginning in the seventeenth century and growing by fits and starts into the nineteenth century, of slavery. Most of the experience of contact with wilderness—the diking of rice paddies in Carolina, the carving out of tobacco plantations in Virginia, and the draining of swamps in Georgia—was performed by slave or indentured laborers. Very few of these were literate, and as a result a large body of wilderness witness by those who had direct contact with it has been mostly lost to history. The second aspect of settlement that interferes with a continuous history of wilderness is the relationship between settlement patterns and native tribes. In the eighteenth century the American landscape was in a sense both too full and too empty to support the notion of wilderness. Too empty in the sense that English settlers were confined to a narrow strip of land along the Atlantic seaboard (the French and Spanish had penetrated the continent more deeply), engaged mostly in seaborne trade with other colonies and European nations and thus imaginatively disconnected from the interior. Too full in the sense that, when white settlers like Daniel Boone did press into "wild" regions like the Appalachian frontier during the middle portion of the century, the native tribes were still a strong, well-organized presence. As a result, the wilderness concept's requirement of emptiness was not met by the conditions of the contact zone between European settlers and native tribes. For a significant portion of American history and through a large swath of American geography, the idea of wilderness did not exist.

The disconnect between the abstract religious notion of the wilderness and the chaotic facticity of the American frontier began to lose some of its starkness as the eighteenth century wore on. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), a New England evangelical theologian and philosopher, laid the intellectual foundation for this synthesis in his writings of the middle third of the century. Possessed with a keen interest in and knowledge of natural science, Edwards came to regard the natural world as a second site, after the scriptures, of the revelation of divine truth. For him it was thus a matter of fundamental importance to pay close attention to the specific workings of the unmodified natural world, be it the web weaving of a common spider, the course of an undammed river, or the dietary habits of the raven, as these provided windows onto the goodness and beauty of God that could instruct humans in their devotion. As a result, he approached such phenomena with a sense of wonder related to religious awe. Such thoughts never led Edwards to propose preservation of wild areas, he never went deliberately far from human settlement to experience wilderness, and the direct cultural impact of Edwards's thoughts on spiritual uses of wilderness were for all practical purposes nonexistent in his own time. The notion that the natural world reflects the divinity of its creator and that the wilderness is therefore a spiritual sanctuary is one that would, however, be resurrected a century later by another New England theologian-philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The same delay in recognition did not befall William Bartram (1739–1823), a bona fide natural historian and ethnographer whose record of exploration in the southeastern tropics had a direct and powerful impact on at least two major figures in British Romanticism. His descriptions of the subtropical forests of the American Southwest, recorded in Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws (1791) matched minutely detailed description with a mysterious mood and reverent tone that influenced the writing of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Christabel," "Frost at Midnight," and "Kubla Khan" as well as William Wordsworth's "Ruth," The Prelude, and "The Excursion." Despite its appropriation in Romantic meditations on the irrational, the immediate context of Bartram's work was as part of a much larger scientific enterprise sweeping the present and former colonies of Europe. Botanists, ornithologists, fossil hunters, ethnographers, and natural historians of all persuasions combed the continental interiors for specimens that could be sent back to European academic centers to be described and systematized according to one or another system of classification. The rationale for wilderness as a biodiversity preserve derives in large part from the detailed work of these early natural historians.

NATIONALIZING WILDERNESS

If this scientifically inflected exploration of the wilderness began as a colonial venture, it quickly became an object of national pride in the years following the American Revolution. Foremost among the powerful supporters of natural history was Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), whose Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) tabulates a great deal of the scientific knowledge produced by these early forays into the wilderness in the course of refuting an argument about the degeneracy of American fauna promulgated by the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon. At about the same time that Bartram and Jefferson were consolidating the geopolitical and scientific significance of the American wilderness, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735–1813), a French-born settler in Revolutionary America, was proposing a national identity based upon the experience of wilderness. His Letters from an American Farmer (1782), which mix vignettes about the wondrous qualities of American nature with others evincing a deep terror at the threat true wilderness posed to civilized white identity, tell of the birth of a new kind of man created at the frontier between civilization and wilderness. St. John de Crèvecoeur's understanding of American distinctiveness as arising from the unique conditions of the frontier bound American identity to the wilderness for more than a century to come; after his writings, to be American meant to have a privileged knowledge of and relation to the wild.

As scientific knowledge and the frontier mythos developed, political events gave Americans an increasing share of the lightly settled lands in the interior of North America. As president, Jefferson was also responsible for the purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803, which doubled the size of the United States and led to the most famous of the many American exploratory expeditions of the nineteenth century, the voyage of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark up the Missouri and down the Snake and Columbia to the Pacific. The political and imaginative connection between wilderness and the American identity was furthered by the reception of these two explorers into national myth and by a series of nationalistic displays of American wilderness wealth in the form of comprehensive catalogs of animals and plants. The most famous of these are John James Audubon's (1785–1851) massive Birds of America (1827–1838) and the equally ambitious study of mammals, Viviparous Quadrupeds (1845–1854), left unfinished at his death.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, writers such as William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Gilmore Simms produced, respectively, poems, short stories, and novels that explored and developed this notion of the wilderness American in the context of the United States's growing dominion over western lands. Establishing that dominion often involved doubledealing and violence against the native tribes whose claims to lands in the South, Midwest, and Far West interfered with the plans of land speculators and white politicians. In the literary works of the time, natives are depicted as irredeemably premodern; they are a people that progress will inevitably pass by, leaving behind a vacuum to be filled by white settlers. Even the most sympathetic chroniclers of native life, such as the painter and exhibitor George Catlin (1796–1872), often represented native peoples as a vanishing breed. Such sentiments obscure the fact that the emptiness that has become so definitive of wilderness is less a natural characteristic of the land than the by-product of specific historical conflicts between native inhabitants of the land and white settlers. The problematic masculinization of wilderness can also be traced to this period, as romances like Cooper's five Leatherstocking Tales (1823–1841) tended to draw a strong and influential contrast between the domestic sphere, overseen by women, and the masculine space of violence and adventure in the wilderness, itself often depicted as a female object of male brutality. Though these distinctions can be seen in an unbroken chain throughout subsequent American cultural history, they did not go uncontested in their own time. Writers like Catharine Maria Sedgwick (Hope Leslie, 1827) and Lydia Maria Child (Hobomok, 1824) countered the emphasis on wildness and racial animosity with narratives of inter-cultural cooperation on the borderlands, and Caroline Kirkland (A New Home—Who'll Follow? 1839) contributed a romance-withering assessment of domestic settlement on the Michigan frontier. Susan Fenimore Cooper, the romancer's daughter, wrote one of the best records of naturalistically aware settlement in the form of Rural Hours (1850). By mid-century, the conventions of the wilderness romance had become the target of burlesques like Thomas Bangs Thorpe's story "The Big Bear of Arkansas" (1841).

BACKWOODS TRANSCENDENTALISM

The three strands of wilderness explored above—the rapprochement between religion and nature, the intensive and well-publicized scientific investigation of the continental hinterlands, and the imaginative connection between Americanness and wildness—receive their most articulate and influential synthesis beginning in the middle third of the nineteenth century with Ralph Waldo Emerson's (1803–1882) Nature (1836). Emerson urged his readers to turn away from the old ideas of Europe and to rejuvenate their minds through contact with and consideration of the natural world they possessed in abundance. Emerson, a lapsed Unitarian minister, moved beyond Jonathan Edwards's intimation of the natural world as a secondary revelation to claim that nature was the primary source of spiritual truths. Gesturing toward the burgeoning field of natural history and the steadily enlarging continental reach of American empire, Emerson and, later, Walt Whitman identified the American future with an imaginative appropriation of its wilderness materials.

Though Emerson's vision of nature owed more to natural history museums like the Jardin des Plantes in Paris than to the American backwoods, his essay provided the framework for subsequent writers and thinkers who delved much more deeply into the problems of wilderness. The most notable of Emerson's followers in this regard is Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), who took Emerson's injunction to look for wisdom in nature to an extreme. Interested in natural science throughout his life (from an early essay, "Natural History of Massachusetts," through later ruminations, including "Autumnal Tints," "Wild Apples," "The Succession of Forest Trees," and "Huckleberries"), Thoreau addressed the paradoxes of living in contact with wild nature most forcefully in Walden (1854). Although Thoreau stands as one of the deepest thinkers on the question of environmental ethics that form so large a part of our contemporary concern about wilderness, it is worth noting that Thoreau's forays into wilder territory than his Concord home (trips to Minnesota, Canada, and Maine) did not inspire him as did his life on the margins of the settled lands. A trip to Mount Katahdin, documented in The Maine Woods (1864), famously left him in terror of "vast, Titanic, inhuman nature" (p. 640).

Alongside this explosion of literary treatments, the mid-nineteenth century witnessed the development of a visual language of wilderness. The Hudson River School, a name given to a loose assemblage of more than one hundred landscape painters in the latter two-thirds of the century, created and popularized paintings of large-scale landscapes bathed in luminous light in upstate New York, the Ohio frontier, the Far West, and South America. The dean of this group, Thomas Cole (1801–1848), is renowned for his panoramic depictions of atmospheric disturbance over landscapes along the Hudson and Ohio Rivers. Asher Durand (1796–1886) focused on somewhat more intimate, vertical pastoral landscapes. Frederick Church (1826–1900), perhaps the most accomplished American landscapist of the nineteenth century, focused like Cole on sublime landscapes from Niagara Falls to the Andes. Together their work provides a grandiose and ravishing vision of American wilderness as a unique aesthetic resource, and the familiar emphasis of modern-day wilderness preservation campaigns on the scenic properties of wilderness draws heavily on the tradition inaugurated by the Hudson River School. Two of the later artists in the tradition started by Cole became closely associated with the first two national park preserves. Thomas Moran (1837–1926) made his name with spectacular paintings of Yellowstone, set aside as the first official national park in 1872. Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), a German immigrant, became famous with his portraits of California's Sierra Nevada, called by John Muir in appreciation of its aesthetic distinctiveness "The Range of Light," with a particular focus on Yosemite, which was designated a national park in 1890 though it had enjoyed state protection since 1864.

THE BEGINNINGS OF PRESERVATION

These early preserves were termed parks because their major function was to serve as recreation for human visitors, most of them wealthy industrialists. The plans for the building of trails, bridges, and camps in Yosemite were first drawn up by the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), better known as the designer of New York's Central Park and Boston's Emerald Necklace. Often these parks brought a wave of development (roads, accommodations, sewers, and so on) that threatened to destroy the wilderness values they made accessible, a major paradox of national parks to this day.

Despite these class-bound and environmentally destructive effects, the emerging park system was symptomatic of a sea change in attitudes toward the wilderness. If an earlier embrace of wilderness understood its natural beauty and sublimity as a symbol of present and future national greatness, by mid-century the optimistic conjunction of progress and wilderness had begun to break down. The industrialization of the eastern cities, with its correspondent increase in pollution, poverty, crowding, and disease, coupled with the disruptive extension of the railways into every corner of the nation, produced a backlash of preservation sentiment that would extend far into the twentieth century. Although when Thoreau famously wrote that "in Wildness is the preservation of the world" ("Walking," p. 665) he was speaking of a state of mind rather than a concrete place, he had recognized early on that actual wilderness was something under threat from the forces of industrialization. At several points in his life Thoreau mused about the value of maintaining woodlots as a philosophical resort for town dwellers ("Walking"), of managing human affairs for the value of nonhuman life ("The Bean-Field"), and even of setting aside virgin forest as a permanent preserve. Even before Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper had displayed a sensitivity to the problem of wilderness destruction in his major novel of settlement, The Pioneers (1823). These early stirrings aside, the Vermont polymath George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) was the first to consider systematically the sensitivity of natural systems to "disturbing agents." His Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864) drew out the disastrous consequences of the ongoing exploitation of the wilderness as a resource and placed it in historical context stretching back to ancient Rome. The broad-based justifications for wilderness preservation that would enter into the wilderness management philosophies of the twentieth-century land manager and environmentalist Aldo Leopold are anticipated in Marsh's work.

It was only at the very end of this period that the change in attitude began to have definitive effects in the way of policy. Scientists with varying levels of preservationist spirit began to flock to the Sierra Nevada in the 1860s and 1870s: John Muir came to Yosemite in 1868; Clarence King wrote his account of Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada in 1871; Joseph Le Conte performed geological surveys of the mountains in the 1870s. In the desert southwest, John Wesley Powell was blazing the trail into the Colorado drainage in 1869, and Charles Dutton drew attention to the Grand Canyon from the 1870s. In the East, the movement for the preservation of New York's water-shed in the Adirondacks began to gain steam under the direction of the surveyor Verplanck Colvin during the 1870s. The great era of preservation beginning with John Muir and extending through the Wilderness Act, with all that it owed to the foregoing cultural and material history of America, was yet to come.

See also Borders; Exploration and Discovery; Nature; Nature; Romanticism; Walden

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Bartram, William. Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws. Philadelphia: James and Johnson, 1791.

Bradford, William. Of Plimoth Plantation. 1651. Reprinted as Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647. Edited by Samuel Eliot Morison. New ed. New York: Knopf, 1952.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo's Nature. Boston, J. Munroe, 1836.

Johnson, Edward. Wonder-Working Providence of Sion's Saviour in New England. 1654. Reprinted as Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence, 1628–1651. Edited by J. Franklin Jameson. New York: Scribners, 1910.

Marsh George Perkins. Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. New York: Scribner, 1864.

Morton, Thomas. New English Canaan. 1637. With introduction and notes by Charles Francis Adams Jr. Boston: Prince Society, 1883.

St. John de Crèvecoeur, Hector. Letters from an American Farmer. London: T. Davies, 1782.

Thoreau, Henry David. "Walking." Atlantic Monthly 9, no. 56 (1862): 657–674. Reprinted as Walking. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.

Thoreau, Henry David. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden, The Maine Woods, and Cape Cod. New York: Library of America, 1989.

U.S. Congress. Congressional Record, 88th Cong., 2nd sess., 1964. The Wilderness Act of 1964, Public Law 88–577.

Winthrop, John. "A Modell of Christian Charity." In The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings. 1938. Edited by Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson. Reprint, Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2001.

Secondary Works

Branch, Michael P., ed. Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing before Walden. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004.

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau,

Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Callicott, J. Baird, and Michael P. Nelson, eds. The Great New Wilderness Debate. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998.

Cronon, William, ed. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: Norton, 1996.

Edwards, Thomas S., and Elizabeth A. De Wolfe, eds. Such News of the Land: U.S. Women Nature Writers. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2001.

Evernden, Neil. The Social Creation of Nature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Gatta, John. Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Hallock, Thomas. From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral, 1749–1826. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Knott, John R. Imagining Wild America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

Krech, Shepard. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: Norton, 2001.

Merchant, Carolyn. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. London: Routledge, 2003.

Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. 4th ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001.

Oelschlaeger, Max. The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991.

Steinberg, Ted. Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Warren, Louis S., ed. American Environmental History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003.

Michael G. Ziser