Roderick Nash quotes:

Environmental history fit[s] into the framework of New Left history. [It is] history "from the bottom up," except that here the exploited element [is] the biota and the land itself.

Wilderness is not so much a place, but a feeling about one.

Environmental history... refer[s] to the past contact of man with his total habitat. . . . The environmental historian like the ecologist [s]hould think in terms of wholes, of communities, of interrelationships, and of balances.

It is really not the wilderness that needs management (it has been doing quite well, after all, for a couple of billion years), but people.

Take away wilderness and you take away the opportunity to be American.

Wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works. It not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul. The solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exultation.