Week 1: An American Wilderness

I really enjoyed both Nash and Steinberg's writings on nature, but Nash's explanation of the progression of how people first define wilderness and then how they feel about it as a chronological experience was much more logical to me and clear. Both authors take a somewhat chronological approach, but Steinberg begins with the first Native Americans and their impacts on the environment without focusing on the concept of wilderness really, while Nash begins with early colonization by Europeans and how they viewed North America and the large amount of wilderness. Nash starts out with relating nature to religion and continues that relationship through by first demonstrating how religion would have made people think wilderness is scary and dangerous and later as religion changed, so did attitudes toward nature and wilderness to seeing the unknown and wild as romantic, welcoming, godlike, and even an great opportunity to make the United States stand out in the world. The wilderness was also a source for much needed things for survival that could be tamed and made useful. I also liked that Nash in the prologue established that the concept of wilderness could be seen as a spectrum where not all people define it in the same way. This idea is then also carried throughout and very clear as he shows how de Tocqueville saw the wilderness in America as more exciting than Americans did. Nash's idea that people's attitude toward wilderness changes as they change, seems to also be supported by Cronon when he says that men and women experience nature differently; I think that is because of how they interact with nature just like over time how people changed how they interacted with nature.   Women interact with nature for survival of the family while men typically see the economic benefits of nature.