| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Wilderness: A New History. Edited by Michael Lewis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. viii + 290. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $99.00, paper $19.95.
Since the 1990s, scholars from a wide variety of fields have critiqued and defended the wilderness idea, creating a body of scholarship known as the wilderness debates. Historians have played a central role in these discussions, and many of their contributions are collected in this superb volume. The result is a must-read for anyone interested in how and why Americans have protected wild nature and the consequences of these choices.	1
Editor Michael Lewis organizes the book more or less chronologically. The first essay discusses Native Americans and contact, the second focuses on Puritans, with subsequent entries on farmers, Romantics, foresters, and so on. But many of the authors depart from their chronological niche. Mark Stoll, for example, begins his essay on religion with the Puritans but ends with an insightful commentary on the religious thought of twentieth-century figures Dave Foreman and Georgia O'Keeffe. Some authors adopt a synthetic approach, collating the work of other scholars into a useful state-of-the-field format. Others synoptically condense their own larger work. And still others provide entirely new research published here for the first time. Across the board, the essays maintain a uniformly high quality: the authors write clearly, advance important arguments, and regularly place their contributions in the context of both this volume and the broader field.	. . .

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