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interview
roderick nash
Many readers of this journal have been inspired by Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind and The Rights of Nature, two of the foundational texts in environmental history, but some may be less familiar with his role in establishing environmental studies as an academic discipline and with his well-deserved reputation as one of this country's premier whitewater boatmen. In this interview, we ask Nash to talk not only about his path-breaking scholarly work, but also about his passion for the outdoors and his role as an environmental advocate.
Editor and Associate Editor: We would like you to begin by telling us about your experience as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1960s and also what it was like to work with Professor Merle Curti, one of the most celebrated U.S. intellectual historians of his era. Did you begin your graduate studies as an intellectual historian or did you discover Curti and his field once you were there?
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| Nash: I met Professor Curti in 1959 when I was a Harvard history major. I was engaged in writing a senior thesis about a fugitive slave riot in 1851 that resulted in the death of a slave-owner. It amounted to a test of the so-called Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act. I was interested in the extent to which Americans both north and south anticipated the Civil War a decade before it occurred. This was a study in the history of ideas, Merle Curti's forte, and he encouraged me to come to the University of Wisconsin and work with him in the fall of 1960. I began my dissertation by investigating the Hetch Hetchy controversy of the early twentieth century, which resulted in the congressional decision to allow a dam to be placed in Yosemite National Park. Several books have recently been written about Hetch Hetchy and the issues dividing John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the early conservation movement. |
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As I got into the research I began to see that it involved the much longer and more complex story of the American relationship with wilderness. I recall telling Curti that I'd like to write about wilderness. Initially taken aback, he suggested I might want to enroll in the biology or geology programs. But after I explained that my real interest was not the physical reality but the idea of wilderness, he became enthusiastic. And instead of advising me to keep a narrow focus in the dissertation as most mentors tend to do, Curti encouraged me to look at the big picture: the "cultural context" that explained the popularity of an idea. And he was comfortable with my working in a wide array of disciplines as he had done in his Pulitzer-prize winning book The Growth of American Thought. The result was Wilderness and the American Mind, which I submitted as a dissertation in 1964. It's really intellectual history, but some think of it as opening doors to a new field: environmental history. |
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Editor and Associate Editor: Other than Curti, were there any other historians (at Wisconsin or elsewhere) whose work was especially important to you during your graduate years? Of course, we are particularly interested in scholars who triggered your interest in the field that later became environmental history, but we would also like to know about other major influences on your dissertation and on your later teaching and research interests.
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Nash: More than historians, it was ecologists and natural resource specialists from whom I learned in Madison. Some of them were students, or colleagues, of Aldo Leopold, who taught at Wisconsin in the 1930s and 1940s. I had begun to think that Leopold was a major figure in the story of evolving American thought about wild nature, even on a par with Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, but in 1960 his work was relatively little known. Needing some "summer money," I proposed to the University of Wisconsin Archives that they hire me to gather and sort his papers. It was a perfect job because I was actually doing my own dissertation research at the same time! I recall having difficulty convincing Leopold's widow that anyone, particularly historians, would have an interest in those old cartons of notes, correspondence, and papers. But she permitted me to tote them to the archives, and they became the genesis of one of the richest collections of evidence about forestry, wildlife management, and, in general, changing American ideas toward nature.
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