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That wilderness is a necessity and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains

Nerve-shaken, overcivilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home Muir extolled the value ofīig wilderness in a prose more accessible and less judgmental than Thoreau's: "Thousands of tired, Compared with the big, rugged, wild country of the West, Thoreau's "wild" hauntsĪppeared to be less like real wilderness and more like the fringes of suburbia. Born in Scotland and raised in Wisconsin, Muir wound up inĬalifornia. John Muir took up the wilderness cause later in the nineteenth century and, early in the twentieth, But here in a nutshell he captured the essence of American wilderness preservation—publicly owned, undespoiled land set aside in perpetuity for "higher uses." The midst of it, and the Easterbrooks country, an uncultivated area of some four square miles in the north of the town." By twentieth-century standards, Thoreau's notion of a wilderness preserve was small potatoes—that is, small in spatial scale, as contemporary conservation biologists would put it. Stand and decay for higher uses—a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation." Thoreau goes on to propose as local wilderness preserves "All Walden Wood, with Walden in After complaining about the penchant of his fellow citizens to make private property out of virgin forests, river banks, and mountain tops—and to exploit them for commerce, lumber, and pasture—he insisted "that each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, either in one body or several—where a stick should never be cut for fuel—nor for the navy, nor to make wagons, but Ridiculed the conventional attitudes and values of his New England contemporaries. Wilderness preservation was trumpeted by Henry David Thoreau, a lifelong contrarian who regularly In an essay titled "Huckleberries" written shortly before his death in 1862, the first clear clarion call for Ī common possession forever, for instruction and recreation." each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest. Baird Callicott, University of North Texas The Puritan Origins of the American Wilderness Movement NHC Home TeacherServe Nature Transformed Wilderness Essay: The Puritan Origins of the American Wilderness Movement, Wilderness and American Identity, Nature Transformed, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center