Wild Visions: Wilderness as Image and Idea - Hardcover

by Ben a. Minteer (Author), Mark Klett (Author), Stephen J. Pyne (Author)

A stunning combination of landscape photography and thematic essays exploring how the concept of wilderness has evolved over time

Our ideas of wilderness have evolved dramatically over the past one hundred and fifty years, from a view of wild country as an inviolable "place apart" to one that exists only within the matrix of human activity. This shift in understanding has provoked complicated questions about the importance of the wild in American environmentalism, as well as new aesthetic expectations as we reframe the wilderness as (to some degree) a human creation.

Wild Visions is distinctive in its union of landscape photography and environmental thought, a merging of short, thematic essays with a striking visual narrative. Often, the wild is viewed in binary terms: either revered as sacred and ecologically pure or dismissed as spoiled by human activities. This book portrays wilderness instead as an evolving gamut of understandings, a collage of views and ideas that is still in process.

Author Biography

Ben A. Minteer is professor of environmental ethics and conservation at Arizona State University. Mark Klett is a photographer and professor of art at Arizona State University. Stephen J. Pyne is a historian and professor emeritus at Arizona State University. Roderick Frazier Nash is the author of Wilderness and the American Mind and The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics.