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Book Review
| The American Wilderness: Reflections on Nature Protection in the United States. By Thomas R. Vale. Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2005. 292 pp. Illustrations, maps, figures, bibliography, index. $45.00.
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| Exploring the evolution of ideas and policies related to wilderness and other natural areas in the United States has formed a central theme in environmental history since its emergence as a self-conscious discipline in the 1960s and 1970s. In American Wilderness, Thomas R. Vale contributes to this venerable tradition, though more from the perspective of a geographer with a keen interest in place than a historian who has discovered a new cache of untapped sources or a compelling new story to relate. |
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Vale offers what he terms a "descriptive synthesis" of American nature protection, using a typological approach that parses out the multiple motivations and approaches of those involved in the activity (p. 4). Ultimately, he strives to counter recent claims that setting aside natural areas severs the connection between humans and non-human nature. For Vale, the "profoundly human" act of defending nature from the full onslaught of modern civilization offers a powerful tool to link people to the natural world, and those connections, in turn, "transform protected landscapes into places," sites that represent a complex combination of people and specific locations (p. 5). Adopting a stance he terms "celebratory critic," Vale attempts to walk a fine line between the two approaches that currently dominate scholarly discourse on wilderness: a more firmly established tradition that celebrates the impulse to preserve nature and a more recent trend that critiques that impulse (p. 6). |
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To achieve this aim, Vale divides his study into three sections. Part 1, which examines the larger context of nature protection in the United States, begins with a chapter that catalogs the multiple meanings—both positive and negative—that Americans have associated with wild nature, from the time Europeans first arrived in the New World to the present. Chapter 2 traces the evolution of protectionist concern, arguing for continuity between the earlier conservation movement and the more recent environmental movement. In part 2 of his book Vale turns to the diversity of efforts to protect wild nature. While not entirely ignoring private initiatives or the programs of local and state governments, he emphasizes the evolution and current status of large-scale federal nature protection projects, especially the national park system (chapter 4), the national wilderness preservation system (chapter 5), and the national wildlife refuge system (chapter 6). He praises national parks as sites that "offer hope in their place-rich landscapes of plural purpose" (p. 118), urges federal authorities to cultivate the kind of place identification for officially designated wilderness areas that is already enjoyed by many older national parks, such as Yosemite and Yellowstone, and defends the national wildlife refuge system as "equal to its more glamorous siblings" (p. 140). With chapters on "Outdoor Recreation," "Conservation Organizations," "Biological Nature, Biological Diversity," and "The 'New' Nature Protection," part 3 is the least thematically coherent section of the book, but it remains useful nonetheless. |
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Overall, Vale offers a valuable synthesis that will interest a wide variety of scholars, policy makers, and environmental activists seeking a well-informed overview of the history of American nature protection and the current debates that surround it. |
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Mark V. Barrow, Jr., is an associate professor in the History Department at Virginia Tech. He is currently completing a study of American naturalists and their engagement with the issue of wildlife extinction from the late eighteenth century to the Endangered Species Act. |
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