ABSTRACT
As a new academic field takes shape, its founders mine history for precursors and Wilderness and the American Mind by Roderick Nash (1967) was the mother lode. Nash’s classic is much more than a history of the North American wilderness idea; it is a history of American environmental thought from the period of British colonization to the mid-1960s. Not insignificantly for this volume, Nash begins with an analysis of the wilderness idea in the Holy Bible and in the writings of the bible-besotted Puritan clerics, with which the canon of American literature begins. Among the many authors Nash reviews whole chapters are devoted to Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold. This triumvirate thus became the giants of environmental philosophy on whose shoulders the new breed of self-identifying environmental philosophers proudly stand.
