Historian Charts Changing U.S. Ideas About Wilderness and the Environment

Saving the American wilderness may now be deeply rooted in contemporary consciousness, as deeply as ripping up forests in the name of civilization once was for frontier settlers. In documenting that change, Roderick Nash, historian of ideas, may also have contributed to the process, showing that environmentalism is not a fad but an intellectual tradition.

Americans have long been ambivalent about the wilderness, Nash contends. They have viewed it as an evil place, harboring harmful animals and hindering man’s progress. At the same time, they have been attracted to it for escape from urban pressures or for instruction in the humility that comes from knowing that a human being is but one link in a chain of life.

Nash, professor of history and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has traced conflicting views of wilderness back to America’s European ancestors, across the Atlantic and up to today. He shows how concern for wilderness is an “ism” that has evolved over time and won’t go away because of a set or two of hostile policy-makers.

“The whole legacy of our attitude toward wilderness is this love-hate relationship or what I call ambivalence,” Nash, 46, said in a recent interview.

He tracks the early growth of the United States as predicated on clearing the woods and planting the crops and the communities that constitute civilization. But early Americans were also looking for some element of life superior to the Europe they had left, and they seized on their uninhabited spaces, their unspoiled landscapes; among the earliest promoters of wilderness preservation were urbanites who didn’t have to battle the land.

Nash himself came to the outdoors along an urban path. His father had been a pioneering professor of health, recreation and physical education (who coincidentally had met John Muir, another pioneer who inspired Nash’s studies). His father taught at New York University, and Nash now starts many of his courses by showing a slide of the brick wall across the Manhattan alley that was the view from his bedroom window for 18 years.

“I was a city kid and I could look out that window and not see a single living thing, not a leaf, not a blade of grass. I believe most of what I’ve done in terms of both scholarly work and also recreationally has been a reaction to that wall.”

His father traveled widely; by Nash’s teen-age years he had fished and camped in many Western states. Nash came to think a history could be written on the changing American attitude toward wilderness--a work that would in part explain himself. “Our best books always explain ourselves, whether they be novels or nonfiction,” he said. The result was “Wilderness and the American Mind,” published by Yale University Press in 1967 and now in its third edition.

Now he’s planning a book on the expansion of the environmental ethic--the growth of the idea that responsibility for the world around us “might not begin and end with human beings.” He’s tracing the expansion of a “magic circle”--the categories one wants to protect--from self to family to nation to all kinds of other people to plants and dogs and cats to whole ecosystems. And he will work this coming year on a public television series about the American concept of wilderness, to be on camera as a Carl Sagan of the sagebrush.

Nash became hooked on history the same way he tries to attract his own students: by going to the scene. Of his youthful travels, he says: “I know standing on the Acropolis, on that hill, I learned more about Greek culture, and Greco-Roman endeavor than I could from books. I needed the books as a start and then I needed the contact.

“That experience leads me to want to take students out to the Canyonlands, into the Grand Canyon, to study. I believe the walls of the university shouldn’t just end on the campus.” Nash, who owns a ranch near Moab, Utah, where he “raises ideas,” spends 80 to 100 days a year in the field.

Nash cites others thinking about wilderness today: poet Gary Snyder, who puts into words “what a lot of people feel are the central points of an environmental consciousness”; essayist Edward Abbey, who calls attention to the desert as a place of great value; photographers Joseph and David Muench of Santa Barbara (plus the late Ansel Adams) “have pretty much taken over from the landscape painters and have celebrated wild country.” Then there is David Brower, who helped found the Friends of the Earth. And the women: Annie Dillard, who wrote the Thoreau-esque “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”; Anne LaBastille, who writes about women and the wilderness, and Ann Zwinger, who writes about Canyonlands.

“I am very happy to see women beginning to add their thoughts because, as I wrote in my book, not many were involved earlier . . . some of the traditional roles in which women operated in this country were not conducive to being in the wilderness for purposes of enjoyment. So with a woman’s perspective, human beings in general are learning some new things about wilderness.”

Building on the efforts of earlier environmentalists, the current ecologists have made enormous gains, Nash says. “We must not be misled by someone like a James Watt (the former Interior secretary) or the indifference of a Ronald Reagan. We’ve seen the institutionalization of environmental values in such things as the National Wilderness Preservation System established in 1964. It was built upon most noticeably in 1980 by the Alaska National Wilderness Lands Conservation Act which added 50 million acres to this system and becomes, I think, the greatest single park and wilderness creation act in world history, an enormous achievement. . . . We have kept dams out of the Grand Canyon. We have a national wild and scenic river system. We have a California river system. We’ve lost some rivers like the Stanislaus, but we’ve put some in like the Tuolumne.”

Nash has watched ecological consciousness change even in the program he helped start at UC Santa Barbara after the 1969 oil spill. The early years concentrated on calling attention to problems, “perhaps overdramatically in some instances, creating obstacles to the course of development, stopping clear-cutting (removal of all timber from an area), stopping whatever it was.

“I think gradually in the last five years a new purpose has come to the fore, that is, that we should be concerned not with stopping development but making development as environmentally acceptable as possible. We all realized in the beginning that to drive to an oil protest meeting in your car using fossil-based fuel entailed a certain amount of hypocrisy. I think we began to see that we needed people with more practical skills who could develop alternative energy sources” or help reduce the possibility of more oil spills.

” I don’t see this so much as compromising the old ideals as trying to implement and make realistic the basic ideal, which is humans and nature getting along in the long term. I think environmentalists are being taken more seriously now. They’re not just a bunch of kids with long hair throwing their bodies in front of tractors--they’re often people in pinstriped suits who’ve been well trained in the legal profession or in planning schools.”