Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #403185 in Books
• Published on: 1996-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 136 pages

From Amazon.com
Much contemporary environmental literature names as enemies of the wild corporate agriculture, logging, mining, and ranching. For mountain guide/philosopher Jack Turner, these will not do. He dislikes even more the abstractions that divorce us from the natural world, which cause us to create pseudo-wild locales like Yellowstone National Park and Grand Canyon, places that resemble nothing so much as Disneyland. Wilderness advocates who do not make themselves at home in the wild, he believes, cannot hope to understand the object of their desires, for only from that "complete immersion in place over time" can there arise the "wisdom that cannot emerge from tourism in a relic wilderness." This sometimes blistering, provocative book is an eco-radical manifesto of a kind, and every reader concerned with wilderness issues should pay attention to it.

From Publishers Weekly
These eight provocative essays turn on a common theme: how wildness (once but no longer the essence of wilderness) has been mediated, micromanaged and abstracted nearly out of existence. The essays include rants against the status quo, memoirs of wild places and a tribute to Doug Peacock, who dared to live among grizzlies. Turner, a former academic who's now a mountain guide in the Grand Tetons, infuses his writing with a restless anger, best felt when read fast. At times, he exhibits a penchant for hyperbole ("Yosemite Valley is more like Coney Island than a wilderness"), and his tone can run a bit high-handed, as when he loftily compares his mountaineering to the predilections of pelicans. He is most persuasive when relying on the language of experience: coming upon a wall of prehistoric pictographs in a Utah canyon, tracking a mountain lion in Wyoming, listening to the clacking of soaring white pelicans. One essay, "Economic Nature," starkly reveals both Turner the pedant, excoriating the language of economics that controls the way we see the world, and Turner the meditative poet ("Dig in someplace.... Allow the spirits of your chosen place to speak through you. Say their names."). Both are persuasive. In the end, Turner has produced a manifesto that defends the wild by passionately restoring its good Thoreauvian name.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

This kind of writing is rare
I got this book when searching for something for my biodiversity class to read that would hook them to the subject and move them the way "Sand County Almanac" did me back in my college days. Wasn't able to read it at the time, but I picked it up this fall, thought I would read an essay at a time before bed, like I usually do with essay books. Sometime in the wee hours I realized that I had to stop reading or I would head out into the dark night and wander until I found the wilderness again. Few modern writers, or writers of any age, have so clearly and eloquently expressed what it means to love the wild, what we are about to loose, and truly why we are loosing it despite efforts to the contrary. Turner's solution is one I believe in, but rarely find seriously advocated, probably because it would work. Frankly, if you haven't gone wild, you may not "get" this book. If you want to really know what the wild is about though, read this book and if you like the sound of things, go seek it out. If you are wild, this will be one of the few books on the topic you can stand to read these days. I haven't been so enlightened since I read "The Practice of the Wild" by Gary Snyder. Five stars means a great book. Some books are beyond that, this is one for the ages.

"Can we put the wild back in wilderness?"
This is a book about wildness. Not about the wilderness where it exists. More importantly this book is about you and me and how we think about wilderness.

I have single-handed my sailboat to Catalina Island many times and watched the dolphins with fascination as they played at the bow of my boat. You cannot help feeling a sense of connection with them as you watch them only a few feet away as they share their ocean with you.

As a young man I stood on top of Mt Whitney and looked out across the many mountain ranges of the High Sierras.

I purchased this book at the visitor's center while camping in Anza Borrego State Park in California. What an appropriate place to buy this book!

I have visited many National and State Parks and National Monuments crowded with people.

So, I have experienced the wildness that Jack Turner talks about and I have also visited the controlled spaces of our current managed wilderness areas that this book addresses.

Because the author has traveled in wilderness areas worldwide and a former philosophy professor from Cornel University and a long time climbing guide in the Tetons of Wyoming this book is an absolute jewel - well researched, eloquently written and straight from the heart.

What can I now write to get you to read this wonderful book? It is more than his opinion. It is a way of thinking about the world we live in and the true meaning of wilderness.

I sometimes end a review with some original poetry. Unfortunately, I am still trying to get my mind around this book. It is such great food for thought.

Here is a quote from the book:

"Do you want to change the world?
I don't think it can be changed.

The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you will ruin it.
If you treat like an object, you will lose it.
.....
The Master sees things as they are,
With out trying to control them.
He let's them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle."

Lao Tzu

Yes, this reads like a Zen koan. Don't meditate on it too long -read this book and then keep it in your backpack or sea bag.

A book with clarity and guts.
This book is such a welcome deviation from so much "environmental" judgmentalism, finger-pointing, and theoretical whining. Its basic premise is: how can we relate to the "wilderness" we wish to preserve when we don't even spend time with it? And: what, in fact, are we working to preserve?

There is a rawness and intensity to how the writer expresses himself that has a marvelous feeling of sincerity about it. He is not afraid to point up the shadow side of the very ecological programs he subscribes to. Reading, I had the feeling of sitting next to him by a campfire somewhere, or in front of the fireplace in his home in the Grand Teton, hearing him talk from the heart about things that concern him deeply.