defining terms Navigating the site:
What is wilderness, strictly speaking?
Oxbow, by Thomas Cole (1836), The Hudson River School
"The Wild-man as Superman tradition"
" 'Wilderness' has a deceptive concreteness at first glance."
p. 1
"Henry Adams completely reversed the original significance of the term," when .. in 1880, he wrote "a wilderness of men and women
p. 3
"The emphasis here is not so much what wilderness is, but what men (people) think it is."
"an accommodation to the subjective nature of the concept."
pp. 5-6
"The New World was also wilderness at the time of discovery because the Europeans considered it such. They recognized the control and order of their civilization imposed on the natural world was absent and man was an alien presence."
p. 7.
"The value system of primitive man was structured in terms of survival."
p.8
Bandalier National Monument, New Mexico. JVS 1984
Does the above picture suggest "primitive" qualities of the America's original residents?
"The identification of the arid wasteland with God's curse led taut conviction that wilderness was an environment of evil."
pp. 14-15.
The unfavorable attitude towards wilderness that Tocqueville observed in Michigan also existed on other American frontiers."
p. 23.
"Tocqueville, on the whole, was correct in his analysis that 'living in the wilds' produced a bias against them. Constant exposure to wilderness gave rise to fear and hatred on the part of those who had to fight it for survival and success."
p. 43.
"Appreciation for wilderness began in the cities."
"The ideas of these literati determined their experience..."
p. 44.
"To signify this new feeling about wild places the concept of sublimity gained widespread usage in the eighteenth century."
p.45
"...the wild sublimities of nature." Chataubriand wrote about America.
p. 49
Wilderness and the American Mind, by Roderick Frazier Nash
