The Great New Wilderness Debate Review

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(More customer reviews)I've always considered myself an environmentalist and supporter of wilderness, based on my many wonderful personal experiences with wilderness and nature. Shamefully, however, I never did much reading on the topic of wilderness. Nor, for that matter, did I do much THINKING about the whole CONCEPT of wilderness. What do we mean when we talk about "wilderness"? Where, and with whom, did the whole idea of wilderness begin? Has the notion of wilderness changed with our changing attitudes towards the environment and our role in it?
Luckily, you don't have to read several dozen dense volumes to get some answers to these questions. Instead, you can pick up this marvelous collection of essays spanning nearly 250 years of thought on wilderness and the environment. "The Great Wilderness Debate" gave me a chance to simultaneously catch up on the "classic" wilderness texts AND many later influential essays, including plenty that I would otherwise never have read, and several unique to this collection.
The book is divided into four parts, each of which synopsizes a different strand of wilderness writing. The first section focuses on the origin and emergence of the wilderness ideal. It includes the "classic" stuff - selections from Emerson, Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Sigurd Olson - as well as essays on early wilderness preservation in the United States. A definite must-read is the Wilderness Act of 1964, which not only provided a federal definition of "wilderness" but also established the Wilderness Areas that we have today. This section alone makes the purchase of the book worthwhile.
The second section is devoted to "Third and Fourth World Views of the Wilderness Idea." The essays in this section introduced me to the fact that "wilderness" is not some kind of universally-understood concept. Instead, the American/Western/First World concept of wilderness (i.e. as a place without humans) is being imposed on a global scale. The authors in this section take issue with the colonialism inherent in forcing "our" wilderness on others, and discuss the many problems of universalizing a concept of "wilderness."
I most enjoyed the third section, a sort of philosophical WWF match where various eminent environmental thinkers - including William Cronon, Holmes Rolson III, and Dave Foreman of EarthFirst! - go head-to-head over a (seemingly) simple question: Is the "Wilderness Idea" useful in today's world? Can "true" wilderness even exist anymore? Does a focus on "pristine" areas distract us from appreciating the nature in our own backyards? It's fun to watch a bunch of hotshot environmental philosophers tussle over definitions, but it's also unnerving to think that they might actually succeed in undermining one of the few pillars supporting "wild" areas in America (however you define "wild").
Which brings us to the fourth section, "Beyond the Wilderness Idea", which attempts to go beyond the sort of "sound and fury" debate of the third section and instead to actually USE wilderness philosophy to inform environmental policy. There's a lot of discussion here about what wilderness SHOULD be and CAN be and WOULD be if only someone would listen to the philosophers. Initially, however, I found this section to be a bit of a letdown. Several of the ideas discussed here - preserving big areas, promoting biosphere reserves - have already become accepted notions since "The Great Wilderness Debate" was published in 1998, so there's a good bit of "old news." More importantly, the policies expounded here are frequently WAY too idealistic to be practical - they're nice to think about, but not something you could take to your congressman.
But what I later realized is that fundamentally "The Great Wilderness Debate" is about the philosophy and ethics of wilderness, NOT the practical policy issues. Those who would create wilderness policy would certainly do well to read this book, as these essays provide a grounding in the basic beliefs and writings that have informed the concept of wilderness. I'm sure there are plenty of great essay collections on environmental policy, but this is not one of them and is not MEANT to be one of them.
If the environmentalist movement has taught me anything, it's to THINK before you ACT. There's no doubt that "The Great Wilderness Debate" really makes you THINK about a lot of the assumptions we make everyday, about what constitutes nature, what is wild, and what is worth preserving. Consequently, I encourage anyone with a strong interest in wilderness and the environment to read this book. It's a wonderful resource for philosophy, a powerful tool for policy, and a great read for any "greenie."

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The Great New Wilderness Debate is an expansive, wide-ranging collection that addresses the pivotal environmental issues of the modern era. This eclectic volume on the varied constructions of "wilderness" reveals the recent controversies that surround those conceptions, and the gulf between those who argue for wilderness "preservation" and those who argue for "wise use."
J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson have selected thirty-nine essays that provide historical context, range broadly across the issues, and set forth the positions of the debate. Beginning with such well-known authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, the collection moves forward to the contemporary debate and presents seminal works by a number of the most distinguished scholars in environmental history and environmental philosophy. The Great New Wilderness Debate also includes essays by conservation biologists, cultural geographers, environmental activists, and contemporary writers on the environment.

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