"Wilderness, the environmental historian Roderick Nash has argued, is not so much a place as an idea...."

“Wilderness, the environmental historian Roderick Nash has argued, is not so much a place as an idea. Nash’s essential book Wilderness and the American Mind, which traced the long evolution of attitudes toward wild places from fear and avarice to awe and nostalgia, was submitted as a doctoral thesis at the University of Wisconsin in 1964, the same year that the Wilderness Act enshrined environmental activist Howard Zahniser’s somewhat whimsical legal definition of wilderness as ‘an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.’”

- “Why We Wish for Wilderness,” Alex Hutchinson.