Roderick Nash: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 19:57, 20 October 2018

Revision as of 20:00, 20 October 2018

Line 11:

== ''Wilderness and the American Mind'' ==

Nash's study in this book<ref>{{cite news|url=https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=3PJZAAAAIBAJ&sjid=20oNAAAAIBAJ&pg=4335,743719&dq=roderick-nash+raft&hl=en|title=Parks Subject of New Special|date=March 7, 1981|work=[[Waycross Journal-Herald]]|page=P5|accessdate=14 August 2011}}</ref> concerns the attitude of Americans' toward the idea of wilderness. He discusses the different attitudes that humans have toward nature. While [[wilderness]] – in a strictly physical sense – has provided for the mass of the American economy, wilderness as a philosophical concept has provided America something to rally for and against, to harness and to allow to be "untrammeled". While wilderness has always had a love/hate relationship with civilization, Nash states that if wilderness is to survive, we must, ironicallyparadoxically, manage wilderness – at the very least, our behavior towards the wilderness must be managed.

Nash presents America's anthropocentric view as the main enemy to all wilderness preservation. He argues that an ecocentric view is ideal and may work in the long run, but perhaps the preservation of nature and wilderness for the sake of holding resources out for the preservation of our own species would be more salient. Yet, even this strategy is hard for people to grasp, because it requires us to reach outside the present and look to the future. Still, Nash suggests that maybe the simple preservation of the environment for the sake of our own generation's recreation and health (oxygen sinks, etc.) could provide the impetus to slow some profiteering.