A very good essay on how the twin ideas of the sublime and the frontier coalesced into the American environmental movement, and how the modern idea of wilderness sets a dangerous sort of man vs. nature dualism that we’re better off without. There’s also the class/race issues, of course, and how modern outdoor experience became not a way of life but a consumptive pastime. And ironically, “Frontier nostalgia became an important vehicle for expressing a peculiarly bourgeois form of antimodernism.” Good stuff.
The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature – William Cronon
Mark Larson 