25. Roderick Nash on Wilderness, Old Age, and the Next Thousand Years

Ken Ilgunas (0:05)

This is the Out of the Wild Podcast with Ken Ilgunas.

Roderick Nash helped establish environmental history as a field and founded the Environmental Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara. His landmark 1967 book, Wilderness and the American Mind, traced one of the great changes in American culture, the transformation of wilderness from something feared and conquered into something admired and protected. In his later work, including the rights of nature and his vision of island civilization, he extended that history into questions about the moral rights of other species and the shape of civilization a thousand years from now. Roderick, it's an honor to be chatting with you right now.

Roderick Nash (0:57)

Thank you, Ken. Pleased to be with you.

Ken Ilgunas (1:00)

You had a look at some of my stuff, you were saying, and you liked my allusions to Thoreau. Yeah, he was a bit of a literary hero of mine and inspired me to kind of secretly live in my van for a couple years and separate myself from society. But he resonated for you too, didn't he?

Roderick Nash (1:19)

He did indeed. And it's interesting that people like you and I have picked up on him. And at the time when he was writing, let's just pick the date July 4th, 1845 when he went to Walden Pond, deliberately on July 4th to make a statement about what he didn't like, about American independence in America with slavery, with the Mexican War. But at that time, he was pretty well ignored. And as I say in the Wilderness book, it was John Muir who came later. And I believe you're speaking from a place very close to John Muir's birthplace on a rather austere, highly disciplined farm, a highly disciplinary father that he eventually broke away from when he got to Wisconsin. But Muir reaped the glory, popularity that might have gone to Thoreau.

But Thoreau came about 50 years too soon. Muir had the good sense to be born when the frontier was ending in 1890, American frontier.

And people were prepared to listen to what he had to say. He was a guy who had front page articles in the Atlantic and so forth. Thoreau had a library, as he famously said, of 700 books, 650 of which were written by himself, which as an author, you know what that means, that publisher sent them back to him in cell.

So here was a guy who was pretty well ignored and then sort of resurrected in the post frontier context.

Ken Ilgunas (3:08)

Could you think back to a time, one of your earliest wilderness experiences? I know you grew up in New York City. When did you feel you had like a serious wilderness experience?

Roderick Nash (3:22)

Good question.

And thinking just for a moment about New York City, that's where wilderness lovers come from. Places like New York City. I'm not quite sure where you came from.

Ken Ilgunas (3:36)

Niagara Falls, New York.

Roderick Nash (3:38)

Okay. A lot of people around there. People came out of cities. George Catlin, for example, came out of Philadelphia.

Biggest city at the time, one of the biggest cities in the early 1800s in America. So I came out of New York and you've perhaps seen some of my statements. One of them which is, we have to become civilized enough to appreciate wilderness. Wilderness appreciation doesn't come out of Moab, Utah, even though I've lived in Moab, Utah. Doesn't come out of places like that. Comes out of places like New York. Maybe Niagara Falls, maybe Cleveland, maybe St. Louis.

So in other words, the people who didn't have to fight wilderness anymore, who didn't have to regard it as an adversary and could begin to think about it as an asset. So the question was my own relationship to wilderness. I was a city kid. I hated living in the city. It's a terrible place to grow up. Concrete jungle, maybe a great place in your 20s, lousy place from eight years old, say to 21 But my father was a professor at New York University, and he walked to work, Washington Square, downtown New York. But my parents, luckily for me, got me out into some Western areas that were pretty special. There's a picture of me and my father riding down the Bright Angel Trail in Grand Canyon. When I was eight years old, I was placed right behind the head wrangler. Seemed like I was pretty young to do that. They told me there was a big river down there, at the bottom of the trail. I couldn't see any river. Eight-year-old, what are you talking about? What are these adults talking about? A river down there. But eventually, we did get down to that river. I didn't know it at the time, but I would later become one of the early whitewater boaters in the Grand Canyon, starting in the 1960s when there were no permits, when it was show and go, where you had perhaps a few hundred people a year, running a river that now has 25,000 or 35,000 a year running it. And so walking across the Grand Canyon as I did when I was in 11 and 12, in a boys camp in Arizona, was, I don't know if I would have called it a wilderness experience, but it certainly got me out into country where I realized my own significance, and the significance of the wild context in which I was in. When I started running the river in the 60s in my own boat, I began to realize that here was a ultimate wilderness. Here was one of the great wildernesses of the planet. Too bad they're still running motors through it, which they are, motor boats through it. But the scale of the place and the longevity of time that's displayed were overwhelmingly powerful.