Turner spent decades guiding in the Tetons and this strident book stems directly from it. His argument is that we’ve replaced actual wild experience with representations of it — nature documentaries, photographs, managed parks, permits, interpretive signs — and that the abstraction is precisely what allows the destruction, because you can’t love a place you’ve only seen a picture of. He goes after conservation biology, ecotourism, the Park Service, and the photographers, and includes himself in the indictment. It’s short, it’s cranky, and thirty years on it has aged into being obviously right about the mechanism. I excerpted it in Adventure Journal in 2025—what was true then is true now.
The Abstract Wild