With a focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this chapter recounts the history of American nature writing in its many iterations. Like the essay in general, nature writing is a hybrid form. It is omnivorous, incorporating elements of travel writing, natural philosophy, ethnography, diarism, and epistolary writing. Nature writing of the period in question is filled with technical information on plants and animals, agricultural practices, and methods for hunting or navigating, but it also abounds with metaphysical speculations, theological pronouncements, elaborate landscape descriptions, and dramatic accounts of practices like hiking, camping, fishing, and farming. Authors of many of the most well-known essays had professional ties to disciplines like geology, botany, and forestry. Featured essayists in this chapter include St. John de Crèvecoeur, Meriwether Lewis, John Wesley Powell, John Muir, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, and John James Audubon, among others.

The Biodiversity Convention, expressly protecting aesthetic value as one of several biodiversity values listed in its preamble, is the last of the three treaties examined for the book. Chapter 7 revisits meanings of the aesthetic value of biodiversity developed earlier, with doctrinal approaches to treaty interpretation, to develop an aesthetic account of the photographs used in the fourth edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook – a report that was prepared at the direction of the Conference of the Parties to the Biodiversity Convention to assess progress towards the Aichi Targets. The chapter’s aesthetic analysis of the photographs suggests fragmented meanings of aesthetic value as scenic beauty, wilderness, culture and subsistence, leaving valuations of biodiversity on observable economic grounds to prevail. The chapter argues that a critical analysis of the photographs can articulate pluralised appreciations of biodiversity in terms distinct from economic gains. Such insights could serve the protection of the range of biodiversity values identified in the Aichi Targets as fundamental to implementing the Biodiversity Convention in ways relevant to future work of the parties.

This chapter examines the influence of William Bartram´s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida on the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790s and highlights the uniqueness of Bartram´s eco-centric approach to sublimity in early American thinking about the natural world. A practiced botanist and natural illustrator, Bartram delights in cataloguing plant and animal lives, but the Travels also offers a significant intervention into trans-Atlantic discourses of sublimity. Bartram´s sublime overwhelms the perceiver with plentitude rather than terror, and he narrates experiences of sublimity from amidst the rich life he delights to describe rather than at a distance. He emphasizes continuity between human and more-than-human lives. Bartram also resists the nationalistic orientation of his American contemporaries, attending to native and local epistemologies. The chapter concludes with comparisons between passages of the Travels, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and Wordsworth’s “Ruth.”

This chapter examines jeopardy objections, according to which intervention in nature should be prevented insofar as it will threaten other, more important values. Depending on the theory endorsed, these values vary, including the preservation of ecosystems or species (holism), living entities such as plants and other non-sentient organisms (biocentrism), or the “natural” and “the wilderness.” It argues that both holistic and biocentric views either rely on an irrational preference for the status quo or they build their case on implausible axiological assumptions that lead to unacceptable consequences for human interests. Finally, the so-called “natural,” understood as the result of evolution or as the natural wilderness, is revealed, at most, as possessing a kind of value that can be easily outweighed by that of nonhuman well-being. Appeals to the natural cannot in any case ground an opposition to helping wild animals across the board.

Although initially associated with English forms of horror and Gothic culture, as interest in folk horror has intensified over the past decade it has become apparent that the subgenre’s scope transcends national boundaries. It has also become obvious that there is a distinctive – and evolving – North American folk horror tradition. This chapter has three strands. The first establishes that the powerful North American suspicion of the community in the wilderness owes much to anxieties spawned during the English colonization of North America, as underlined by Robert Eggers’ 2015 film The Witch: A New-England Folk Tale. In the second section the author briefly surveys some of the most prominent post–World War II American folk horror texts. Finally, several recent folk horror texts are discussed in which the recent feminization of American folk horror is placed at the forefront, concluding with a discussion of Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019).

From William Bartram to John James Audubon to Susan Fenimore Cooper, early American writers on natural history challenged anthropomorphic thinking and human exceptionalism. Imagining human diminishment amid scenes of natural wonder, they offered a way forward in thinking about “the world we did not make” (William Cronon) that remains largely untraveled today.

This chapter addresses efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity on US public lands and in US outdoor recreation through a case study of the organization Latino Outdoors. It argues that Latino Outdoors works to upend the exclusion of Latinx peoples from outdoor recreation and public lands through constructing and disseminating a Latinx Outdoor Recreation Identity. In doing so, Latino Outdoors disrupts a US cultural logic which incorporates the labor of Latinx peoples while denying their substantive citizenship as well as their political and ecological belonging. In contrast to legacies of Latinx outdoor labor, Latino Outdoors embraces Latinx leisure, and specifically Latinx outdoor leisure. Furthermore, the organization emphasizes historical forms of Latinx environmental knowledge, and thus environmental belonging. Latino Outdoors creates new forms of Latinx environmental belonging founded on leisure rather than labor. These forms of environmental belonging operate within Latino Outdoors as a proxy for political belonging and the grounds for political action.

Wild Abandon’s introduction establishes the book’s methodology, introduces key terms (identity politics of ecology, ecological authenticity, and dissolution), and traces the origins of environmentalist identity politics to the American New Left. Movement radicals sought “natural” alternatives to the “artificial” postwar liberal order, often articulating this opposition in terms of repression and elevating self-liberation to the forefront of their program. However, ecology’s simultaneous political debut, and the field’s attention to the biophysical interrelationships that both constitute and undermine individuals, challenged selfhood’s apparent sanctity. For some radicals, ecology suggested that self-identity merely constitutes yet another repressive formation to discard. Because selfhood is socially constructed, the ecosystem as a whole comprises one’s most essential identity. This appeal to ecological rather than personal authenticity constitutes the identity politics of ecology, which is less a movement than a rhetorical tendency. Conversations between adherents to this perspective and a variety of other identity positions play out in literary texts from the 1960s to the present.

“The Death of the Supertramp” examines the extent to which psychoanalytic concepts inform contemporary expressions of the American wilderness myth. It does so by focusing on the much-publicized death of Christopher McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996), as well as his cult following. McCandless takes to an extreme an idea popular within the deep ecology movement: that by quitting human civilization one might recover a repressed, authentic sense of wholeness. McCandless equates this lost unity with the expansive scope of the ecosystem as a whole rather than a bounded sense of self. Krakauer’s account demonstrates the centrality of Freud’s developmental schema to the young man’s logic: McCandless believes that his civilized ego represses a natural, more expansive psychic condition. It also suggests that this influence introduces a certain political quiescence to both wilderness discourse and mainstream environmentalism in general. In dismissing the importance of his self-identity – the ego that gives him reason to stay alive – McCandless does the most authentically ecological thing possible: he dies, consequently allowing his bodily matter to circulate.

This chapter explores the importance and usefulness of considering outer space as an environment from the perspective of environmental sociology. It identifies that, whilst 'outer space' may imply a space outside of the human environment, global society is increasingly dependent on space technology. Although our notions of 'the environment' are often limited to terrestrial natures, this chapter follows other recent arguments in advocating a closer examination of how different 'environments' are being produced in outer space. The chapter focusses on three different, though inter-related, ways in which the outer space environment is materially, discursively, and imaginately produced. First, it considers outer space as an 'abundant' environment, in which outer space is seen as an infinite supply of resources for economic expansion. Second, it considers outer space as a 'risk' environment crowded with debris that threatens the sustainability of Earth's orbit in particular. Third, it considers outer space as a 'wilderness' environment to be valued either because of its intrinsic worth or because of the role it can play in addressing human destructiveness. The chapter concludes by expressing hope that the lessons learnt from terrestrial environmental sociology can improve our relationship with the space environment in pivotal times.

The chapter begins by differentiating between two English preconceptions of the American environment, wilderness and waste, and characterizes first-generation colonization as a pastoral retreat supported by English georgic assumptions and practices. The chapter then compares puritan and Algonquian conceptualizations of the natural environment, notably including differing conceptions of property, and discusses the influence of puritan justifications of colonization on John Locke’s theorization of land as alienable property. The chapter goes on to trace environmental changes wrought by colonization, including transformations effected by nonhuman agents as well as human agents, and locates these transformations in the climate context of the Little Ice Age. Domestic animals created environments in which certain English plants flourished while indigenous plants declined. Because English grain crops did not prosper in New England, however, the colonists adopted the indigenous grain, maize, and scaled up the indigenous forest-fallow cultivation system to unsustainable levels. Unsustainability in turn invited frontier expansion. The essay concludes by briefly investigating the tension in puritan thought and practice between worldly engagement and spiritual transcendence on both a national level, where it is evident in millennialism, and an individual level, where it shaped puritan poetics.

Chapter 5 argues that preoccupation with travel, topography, and geography merely formed the basis for even more ambitious projects that did, however, show the limits of what practical patriotism might achieve. When combined with a providential belief in the potential of the land, the application of geographical and botanical knowledge to the countryside meant that spaces which had hitherto been considered ‘empty’ or ‘wild’ could be filled with new meaning. Reformers were concerned with the role of people (Indians, but also Europeans, Africans, and Caribbeans of African descent, as well as enslaved people) in managing landscapes. They increasingly discussed questions of what we might call ‘biopower’ after Foucault, conceiving of labour and the management of the population as a resource. In this, reformers paid particular attention to the possibility that humans might influence environments in more profound ways than just by building roads. They hoped that human errors that had made Caribbean environments ‘unhealthy’ in the past could be reversed by building better-ventilated settlements, or regulating military barracks to help soldiers behave like agricultural settlers and make this land productive.

This chapter examines passages in Hebrews where the Son is portrayed as the speaker of Scripture quotations (Heb 2:10–18; 10:1–10). In Hebrews 2, the Son, perhaps responding the Father in Hebrews 1, pledges to praise God among his human siblings. He likewise expresses his own faith in the Father. In Hebrews 10, the Son presents himself as a willing offering who has entered the world to do the Father’s will. In each case, Jesus speaks to the Father and demonstrates his status as an exemplary representative among humanity.