This week’s reading in my American Wilderness seminar. I hadn’t read it before this class, but it’s certainly a departure from the Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Perry Miller and Frederick Jackson Turner that we read in our first few weeks. His philosophical musings on nature, wilderness, conservation and ecology are far more accessible, and perhaps (we’ll see what my class thinks) more practical. I’m also enjoying the ironic tone, his reading of history in nature, and his critiques of specialized academic disciplines–several “Ha!”s now pepper my margins. Almost as an aside: there is something immensely pleasing about holding and reading a cheap paperback of this size (lots of what I read is in larger formats, print-outs of excerpted texts, or on my Kindle).
