The book that founded environmental history as a field. Nash traces what Americans have meant by wilderness — first a wasteland to be conquered, a place of moral danger, then, once it started running out, a national treasure and a spiritual necessity. He runs from the Puritans through Thoreau, Muir, the Hetch Hetchy fight, Leopold, and the Wilderness Act of 1964. Later editions add the criticism his framing has attracted, particularly that wilderness as an idea required pretending the land was empty when people had been living on it for millennia.
Wilderness and the American Mind