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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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