change happens:

• obviously technology changes
• so do our ideas and values
• in the 1960s and 1970s public concern about the environment grew dramatically
• led to new regulations but also new behaviors and values
• are we at the beginning of another such change, particularly motivated by global warming?
• or are economic problems going to derail changes to benefit the environment?
  

this book is about our ideas about wilderness (tends towards a strict definition of wilderness)

• ideas matter
• important thinkers--people who come up with new ideas that make a difference
• in the mid/late 19th and 20th centuries ideas grew up around an important book: Walden, Silent Spring
  
• but also how ideas spread to large numbers of people through opinion leaders
  
• 1. where do new ideas come from 2. how do new ideas spread and become public opinion 3. public opinion determines government action
  

shift in the United States from wilderness being hated and feared to being appreciated and preserved--how did that change happen?

First we have changes in ideas:

• writers and philosophers proposed new ways of thinking about wilderness--ideas matter
• transcendentalists
  
• key people: Marsh, Thoreau, Muir, Leopold
  
• painters and photographers played a key role in changing American ideas about wilderness
• wilderness was disappearing (scarcity theory of value)
  
• as our technology expands, our relationship with nature changes and therefore our ideas
• do we see civilization and wildness as things that should be in balance?

Where do we get our ideas?

• books, movies, TV
• news--shapes our perception of what are the critical issues
  
• we've been (mostly) convinced to take global warming seriously--that these issues will affect us
• community--what our friends think is important
  
• moral intuition (what seems right or wrong to us on a gut level)--we come to think that what we have learned is somehow human nature and everyone must agree, when in fact there is a lot of variation
  

First the ideas, then how do ideas make a difference
first the idea needs to become widespread

Then those new ideas affect practice/behavior/government action/business practices

• when people's ideas change they may change their private and business practices
  
• public opinion shapes politics and government institutions
  
• from early on the government set aside natural land, at first mostly for future human use
• creation of the Forest Service and Park Service, later the Environmental Protection Agency
  
• key people: Roosevelt, Pinchot, to some extent Muir
• changing idea in mid 20th century of how to manage the land
  
• slowly the idea grew up of preserving wilderness as wilderness, without providing services for visitors
• government regulation on the federal level only began significantly in the 1960s
  
• national environmental protection laws beginning in 1970s (see next book)
• do we set limits on the ways we control and manipulate nature?--key example for now is dam projects and how opposition to them grew
  

The situation in the United States is different from other countries

• founders of the US saw themselves as founding a nation in the wilderness
• how did early US leaders try to make the new nation hang together
  
• the US had wilderness left in the mid 19th century
• wilderness and the frontier came to be seen as shaping American character, what made America great
• those ideas about American character shaped the preservation of wilderness in the US
  
• 2% of lower 48 states is protected as wild
• but wilderness has essentially completely disappeared in Europe and Japan

Possible outcomes--as as a result of sprawl, factory farming, and increasing technology to control nature things will be different 50 years from now

• we might end up with a much poorer natural environment than we have now
  
• wasteland--the ecosystems around us collapse
• global warming may shift climate faster than plants and animals can adapt, reducing biodiversity
• we throw key ecosystems seriously out of balance
  
• garden--total human control of nature but in a positive way
• island civilization--cities surrounded by wilderness

themes:

• changing attitudes towards wilderness of writers
• where do those ideas come from?
• religion
• visual arts
• social and political needs such as unifying the nation
• experience
  
• as wilderness becomes scarce we value it
• changing public opinion
• politics: how do you put ideas into government action
• questioning modernization/progress
• maybe we don't always like the results of progress
• maybe progress could go in a different direction
• maybe we want to reject some innovations  (just because we can do something doesn't mean we should)
  
• wilderness for human use vs. wilderness for its own sake
  
• what counts as wilderness, do we want wilderness or parks made convenient for people to use
• letting nature take its course vs. human intervention
• what arguments are most effective--rhetoric
• what is the philosophical grounding for why we want to preserve natural areas
  
• is the nature world the opposite of human culture?--no, humans are a part of nature
• the relationship between human beings and human ideas and nature is complicated and changing
  

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