The Abstract Wild

by Jack Turner

If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature—gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to it, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us.

How wild is wilderness and how wild are our experiences in it, asks Jack Turner in the pages of The Abstract Wild . His not very wild. National parks and even so-called wilderness areas fall far short of offering the primal, mystic connection possible in wild places. And this is so, Turner avows, because any managed land, never mind what it's called, ceases to be wild. Moreover, what little wildness we have left is fast being destroyed by the very systems designed to preserve it.

Natural resource managers, conservation biologists, environmental economists, park rangers, zoo directors, and environmental Turner's new book takes aim at these and all others who labor in the name of preservation. He argues for a new conservation ethic that focuses less on preserving things and more on preserving process and "leaving things be." He takes off after zoos and wilderness tourism with a vengeance, and he cautions us to resist language that calls a tree "a resource" and wilderness "a management unit."

Eloquent and fast-paced, The Abstract Wild takes a long view to ask whether ecosystem management isn't "a bit of a sham" and the control of grizzlies and wolves "at best a travesty." Next, the author might bring his readers up-close for a look at pelicans, mountain lions, or Shamu the whale. From whatever angle, Turner stirs into his arguments the words of dozens of other American writers including Thoreau, Hemingway, Faulkner, and environmentalist Doug Peacock.

We hunger for a kind of experience deep enough to change our selves, our form of life, writes Turner. Readers who take his words to heart will find, if not their selves, their perspectives on the natural world recast in ways that are hard to ignore and harder to forget.

Genres: Nature, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Science, Ecology, Essays, Environment

160 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1996

Reviews

[Richard Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1964, plans were being discussed for the creation of the Canyonlands National Park, near Moab, Utah. Some wanted to include the Maze in the park. The Maze is a stunning network of desert canyons, and it was extremely inaccessible at that time. Few living people had ever seen it.

Jack Turner and his buddy were young rock-climbing adventure hogs. Their plan was to fly into the Maze, land the plane on a long-abandoned bulldozer scrape, take some cool photos, and sell them to National Geographic . Both survived the botched landing. While wandering around in the Maze, they found ancient pictographs of life-sized human images. The paintings had a striking presence, and the lads were mesmerized. They had walked into a different dimension, a place alive with a strong aura of spirit power.

Today, the aura has faded. The Maze is mapped and tamed. Visitors can drive in and hike around on happy trails. The pictographs have become photo opportunities for intrepid ecotourists. The sacred wildness of the place has become banal, like a museum exhibit. For the wild painters, who lived several thousand years ago, this place “was their home in a sense we can no longer imagine,” said Turner. “Whoever they were, they knew how to express and present something we have lost.”

Later, Turner worked as a philosophy professor in Chicago, a soul-killing bad trip. One day, he read a deep ecology essay by Arne Naess, and had a great awakening. He suddenly realized that he was on the wrong path. He escaped from the nightmare, and spent many years travelling around the world climbing mountains. This included at least 16 years as a guide at Grand Teton National Park.

Deep ecology helped him understand the crucial difference between ecocentric thinking (the entire ecosystem is sacred) and anthropocentric thinking (only human desires matter). This echoes the huge gap between the wild Maze painters and the civilized ecotourists. It’s essentially the difference between sustainable and unsustainable cultures.

Wandering around the world taught him another vital lesson. He visited cultures that were similar to the Maze painters, cultures with a profound spiritual connection to the past, the future, their community, and their sacred home. All of their needs were provided by the place they inhabited. Consequently, they lived with great care, striving to remain in balance with the land.

Today, the ecosystem is being hammered. Typically, the designated villains include capitalism, greedy corporations, corrupt politicians, the evil enemy-of-the-day, and so on. Turner rejected this. The planet is being pummeled by a culture that is infested with absurd abstract ideas — more is better, get rich quick, grow or die. This culture has reduced the natural world to an abstraction, a machine that must be controlled — a jumbo cookie jar for the amusement of infantile organisms.

So, Turner’s enemies are not the designated villains. His enemies are abstractions, like the hallucinations that perceive a sacred old growth forest to be a calculable quantity of board feet, worth a calculable quantity of dollars. Abstractions are the foundation of the madness, and they are formidable opponents. They can make clear thinking impossible, and inspire remarkable achievements in foolishness.

In his book, The Abstract Wild , Turner describes why he has become a “belligerent ecological fundamentalist,” and why he stands on the side of the grizzly bears and mountain lions. “Abstraction” is a word meaning mental separation, not a concrete object. Wildness is “the relation of free, self-willed, and self-determinate ‘things’ with the harmonious order of the cosmos.”

There are eight essays in the book. One examines wilderness management, a hotbed of professional control freaks. This work is done under the banner of Science, a way of knowing that can understand processes and predict their activities. What a joke! We don’t understand friends or lovers. We don’t understand ourselves. Ecosystems are vastly more complex and chaotic.

Wildlife biologists have a history of making wildly incorrect predictions, often leading to embarrassing disasters. Their clumsy conjuring is no more “science” than is astrology. Humans should always avoid fooling around with DNA, atoms, or wilderness management. “We are not that wise, nor can we be.” Instead of trying to control nature by using a strategy based on hope, wishes, incomplete data, and misunderstanding, Turner recommends that we should get out of the way and leave the job to Big Mama Nature, who has a billion years of experience. (The experts howl!)

Another essay snaps, snarls, and spits with rage. Civilization has been brutally molesting the planet for 10,000 years, at an ever-increasing rate. Over the centuries, we have responded to these assaults on wildness by forgiving and forgetting. We’re now moving into the end game. Despite being blasted by a fire hose of depressing news, we remain pathetically timid, helpless victims. We accept a wrecked planet as normal, and refuse to utter a peep of protest.

Turner screams. Enough forgiving and forgetting! It’s time for some healthy rage. It’s time to raise hell against the senseless destruction. This is spiritual business, so it takes precedence over society’s laws. Nature is sacred, and must be defended. Destroying the planet is evil and unacceptable, even if it’s perfectly legal and great for the economy.

There are thousands of eco-books, and most tend to focus their attention on symptoms — climate change, deforestation, mass extinction, overpopulation, and so on. To control these symptoms, they suggest a variety of treatments, including new government policies, techno miracles, lifestyle changes, and rebellion. Turner has lived much of his life out of doors, and he feels a profound reverence and respect for wildness. His book is rare for presenting this perspective, which is getting dimmer with every decade.

This perspective can help us move toward healing. “We only value what we know and love, and we no longer know and love the wild,” he says. “What we need now is a culture that deeply loves the wild earth.” But the inmates of modernity have little intimate experience with wild nature, and almost no comprehension of what has been lost. Wildness is something seen on TV.

We must rejoin the natural world. This is still possible. Turner succeeded. Cool books, nature documentaries, and ecotourism cannot provide us with all we need to recover our wildness. What’s needed is direct experience with a place, over time, complete immersion — observing the bird migrations, animal mating, leafing of trees, climate patterns, and so on. A week in the mountains is never enough.

In the end, Turner presents us with a tantalizing bittersweet enigma. He reveals to us the one and only silver bullet solution that can actually heal us, and guide us back home to the family of life. But this solution is impossible, as long as there are so many people, living so hard. The shamans have much work to do, to redirect our hearts toward healthy paths. It’s time for the clans of creative folks to seize their power, work to exorcise our culture’s terrible demons, and rekindle forgotten love.

The book’s first chapter, the Maze story, is online. Click on “Read Excerpt” beneath the book cover HERE.

To view a 100-minute video of Turner, click HERE.

[Darren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great message in this thin book. The author is not a great writer but can be very good at using his own style to convey layered and, yes, abstract, opinions on the reasons why our sense of the wild is changing as a species. It takes some concentration to follow him, but it's worth the effort. It's a great companion book to read before or after "Into the Wild". The author does a fine job elaborating on a simple principle: we aren't outraged about the destruction of wild places because we are divorced from the experience of the wild--a vicious cycle because the opportunities for the raw experience of wild-ness (as opposed to "wilderness") are diminishing as a result of our apathy. There are some tangential points that I completely agree with him on: humans' affinity to caging animals (not the least of which are our own species) is at once curious and sickening.

The thumbs down: The author references obscure buddhist and eastern spiritual principles/historical figures periodically, which is unnecessarily annoying. I imagine it's an attempt to inject his points with additional background and context, but it does more damage than good in my not so humble opinion.

Still one of my favorite books. I imagine that this guy is kind of scary and awesome at the same time.

[rumbledethumps · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a complicated book. The first essays are what I call nature nostalgia, wherein the author writes about this idyllic time in the past, usually the author's childhood/early adulthood, when nature was unspoiled and a veritable Eden. It then goes on to decry the current state of nature. In one essay Turner repeatedly refers to National Parks as amusement parks, and writes, "Yosemite Valley is now more like Coney Island than a wilderness." Which is nonsense.

But later in the book, he expands on the idea a bit, discussing how we currently view nature as a resource to be managed, and how we have turned wildness into wilderness, and manage it as business, just as amusement parks and zoos are managed as businesses.

He has some interesting ideas, which I will think about for a long time, but I doubt I'll ever read this book again, and instead will raid its bibliography for new titles.

[Rod Endacott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this I felt deeply resonant with his thoughts on wildness and how it is pretty much a thing of the past . . .
Maybe the cosmos is wild? But the wild I grew up knowing on Vancouver Island in the 1950's, is gone, and having hiked some of the USA's west and southwest, it's gone there too.
I don't see a future without wild. Good to share Jack Turner's words/spirit in these times. Love for the wild is life for us, and it is about to be gone.

[Christian Kiefer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ranty and angry throughout but I loved it anyway. We need more angry environmentalists, says I.

[G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Laden with undertones of misanthropic white boy disillusionment and reads like a long disgruntled article in the New Yorker. Posits that any form of land management is a desecration of wildness, which feels sort of myopic. Doesn't say much in the way of indigenous relationships with the land and when it does, says unchoice things like; "native peoples usually...fit that order, influencing it but not controlling it, thought probably not from a superior set of values but because they lack the technical means" without further expounding. Alternatively, almost ridiculously reverent of Thoreau. Raises interesting questions like what wildness is, if it exists in the US, whether national parks and conservation areas count as the wild or rather simply managed ecosystems, "is wildness less important than biodiversity", and how the presence of the wild requires we foster a relationship with nature that is both sacred and personal, such that its proliferation outweighs our hesitance to oppose secular guidelines that instruct us not to interfere with its endangerment. Stresses (rightly so) that freedom (synonymous with wildness), is not "rights and liberties, but the autonomous and self-willed". A valid and interesting critique of conservationists and wildlife management, which aim to "control symptoms", treating them like resources in a laboratory, rather than "striking at causes" behind threats facing the wild, believing success will be found if they "control more and control better" forms which suffer due to the reduction of their autonomy through human interference in the first place - suggesting instead to leave it alone. Strongest in the final chapter, where the most direct and succinct arguments against those philosophies are made and the most appeals are made to influence the reader to support its own favored approach - the hands-off strategy of deep ecology, but fails, at least for me, to be fully convincing of the irreproachable nature of the former and the superiority of the latter. Effective nonetheless in exposing a culture of excessive, perverse surveillance present in the sciences, primes the reader to be disapproving of the current model and receptive to the proposed alternative, but doesn't quite address the shortcomings of the counterargument enough to my liking (such as the irony within the idea that nature suffers due to human involvement, so we must exert more human involvement to rescue it from ourselves, or that preserving the world in its current state triumphs allowing nature to run its course).

[Elle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jack Turner ties eight passionate Nature-loving essays together in this book with Thoreau's theme, "in Wildness is the preservation of the world." With brilliant anger he makes war on abstractions, our ways of thinking we know that separate us from the Wild and either stem from or lead to a desire to control the world, all of it. Nature shows a genius for organizing for transformation through catastrophe, he says. Perhaps this is why we seek power over it. We think through knowledge we can have power over life itself, and find security, wealth, wisdom. Turner challenges what we really know, what worth it really has and for us to leave even books like his behind in order to experience the Wild, and in some sense then, to really live and really love.

Books about the Wild are one way for humans to visit it without disturbing it. Unfortunately, this means of travel does not require that the Wild still exist. Books and reports, even and perhaps especially conservation reports, can remain even when the species and the habitats they describe have vanished. Turner portrays a vanishing world and rages against the dying of this light. His outrage refreshes in its unapologetic stance.

"The plight of some loggers and ranchers, or the family with fifteen kids means little to me, even though I am committed to compassion. That is my failure. But as the Marine who helped raise me used to say, 'Anyone who sees both sides of an issue doesn't see one damn thing.' When push comes to shove, I know which side I'm on.

I am on the side of the grizzly sow and her two cubs in the south fork of Snowshoe Canyon; the mountain lion who tracked my favorite Escalante hollow; the raven cooing at me while I shave on my porch; the ticks that cling to me each spring when I climb Blacktail Butte; the Glover's silk moth fighting the window pane; the pack rat that lives in my sleeping cave on the saddle between the Grand and Middle Tetons and scurries across my sleeping bag at night; the wind roaring in the mountains; the persistent virus that knocked me down this winter; the crystalline light that greets me when I step outdoors; the starry sky. I see no need to apologize for my preferences any more than those who prefer modern urban culture apologize for their preferences. As Thoreau said, there are enough champions of civilization. What we need now is a culture that deeply loves the wild earth" (xvii).

In the Maze and Aura he describes finding petroglyphs and what is lost when they become known, visited and studied. In the Abstract Wild: A Rant he mourns wildlife management and the near complete loss of the Wild, a loss masked for most by managed areas, zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens. These he calls "enforced marginalization" and compares to prisons, madhouses, ghettos, concentration camps (34). "Knowledge gained from these experiences creates an illusion of intimacy that masks our true ignorance and leads to apathy in the face of our true loss. We are inundated by nature, but we do not care about nature.... Something vast and old is vanishing and our rage should mirror that loss" (36). In Mountain Lions, he describes his experiences with mountain lions and considers what coexistence between people and lions could look like. In Economic Nature, he rejects economics as a way of seeing and valuing the world, discussing how the way we describe the world becomes our world, how our metaphors easily change from constructs to be mistaken for the thing itself. He calls on writers, poets, thinkers to dream a new dream. In Song of the White Pelican, he marvels at the soaring and sound of these elusive birds, calling on people to let the Wild choose its relationship to us, recording our bloody history with this species, and asking why they soar while questioning if identification and anthropomorphizing them gets us closer or further away from them. He eulogizes Doug Peacock in The Importance of Peacock, for personifying one way we can restore or redeem wild relationships where wild names a kind of relationship, one not characterized by control (101). Peacock demonstrates that we have to give something back, take a non-killing stance, to start to restore the web of interconnectedness. And finally, in Wildness and the Defense of Nature, Turner argues for a new ethic, one not based on economics, but on a recognition of the limits of our sciences and knowledge and our ceding back to Nature and the Wild its right to self-organize. He quotes Lao Tsu, "Do you want to improve the world? / I don't think it can be done. / The world is sacred. / It can't be improved. / If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it. / If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it." (121). This does not mean neglect, or mindlessness, but giving back land and then removing the roads, erasing the maps, extricating all human interference. With all of his essays, he reaches beyond Muir and the preservation model, striving for a deeper ecology, not of benevolent neglect or a transmutation of economic laissez-faire or free market sensibilities to the chaos of the Wild, but an active humility that surrenders exclusive and even partial use of land and all the tools of science and measurement to try to understand it, to "letting being be."

The chief critical challenge to this view is that it continues to view people as if they are not part of the Wild or Nature. When he asks, in one of the essays, "what is my habitat? where do I belong?" I sense that he has not worked this out yet. He urges people to put down books and paradigms, their ways of knowing and what they think they know, to explore and experience the Wild on its own terms, as one species among many, not as the Lord of all of them. Yet his vision of saving the Wild does seem to be one of preservation, which would exclude people from trekking through the Wild in any significant numbers, or even at all. His solution may work for rare and isolated individuals, but would unravel en masse. Plus, it assumes a Western stance of not only the sense of the individual but also of alienation from Nature. I find his passion convincing in many ways, yet finish the book no closer to having worked out my own ecological ethic. Nevertheless his anger removes some of the weight of my paralysis and reminds me of how urgent the loss is and of all that is most precious beyond our ability to measure it. I welcome his perspectives and insights and hope that we will strive to find our habitat and place of belonging, and that it won't be as the anti-keystone species.

[Zach Fitzner · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Abstract Wild is a fantastic read. The writing is superb and the convictions hard to ignore. Jack Turner with deep thought, a background in philosophy and a life spent in the outdoors delivers his ideas with force. For those who dedicate much of their lives to environmentalism, The Abstract Wild is a must read.

Turner delves deeply into the problems with wildlife management, economic conservation and other mainstream issues. The logic and passion of his ideas will make even the most ardent of mainstream conservationists question whether there’s something not quite right about their practices. An eye opening book reviving the Thoreauvian roots of environmentalism and calling into question the reductionism of modern conservation biology, the writing is also captivating to those not familiar with science or philosophy.

[Guy Pauley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my third or fourth read of this epic collection of philosophical nature essays by Jack Turner. I feel like I'm just starting to get a good grasp on his ideas. It helps to have read some from his "mentors" Lao Tzu and Thoreau or contemporaries such as Peacock or Abbey. I would call Turner the hub of the wheel: he brings all of those voices together pretty coherently. Some would call Turner angry or an alarmist. I would venture to guess that in private conversation about the subjects of wildness or control of natural systems he makes these essays look mighty tame. We should be alarmed and angry.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Turner's writing inspires me to be more gutsy in what I say and mean. I'd give 5 stars for the titled essay alone.

[Marla · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is your experience and definition of wildness? Turner makes an impassioned case that it's not identical with wilderness. I have a clearer picture of the choices and impacts humans have made.

[Lucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to read this for class and it was pretty good

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This powerful collection of essays belongs in the hands of any person who spends their free time outdoors. Jack Turner has compiled eight essays that navigate the complicated and changing relationship between society and wilderness/"wildness".

He is definitely an angry, cranky and passionate pair to Edward Abbey. And, while the spirit of his thematic exploration may be similar to some of Abbey's, the sense of urgency to get out and experience wildness as a reality instead of an abstract is much greater. (Also, Turner is not quite as funny in these essays as Abbey typically is.) He has much harsher things to say about national parks and designated wilderness areas than Abbey did (believe it or not!). Nonetheless, what he has to say about these spaces is truly thought provoking and challenging. Especially if you are someone who loves to spend time in these places.

Of particular interest to me was his essay "Economic Nature." Here, he posits that the prevailing primacy of economic language has defiled our relationship to nature. As someone who loves languages and their impact on our point-of-view, I found this essay fascinating.

Turner's essay "The Song of the White Pelican" is, to my mind, truly beautiful. In telling the reader about the white pelican, he also discusses love, passion and release. The essay also opens with a quote from Psalms, "I am a pelican of the wilderness." Can you open an essay with a more haunting, beautiful and thought provoking quote? (Probably...but, its particular use here was very effective.)

While it would be hard to agree with every point that Turner makes, this book presents passionate arguments with a lot of authority. It is definitely worth a read if you are concerned about land ethic.

[Liz Lockerby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Turner has a very in-depth knowledge of both the natural world and our effect on it. He is able to relate this knowledge in a way that cultivates empathy and a desire to go experience his version of the Wild - a tantalizing quality that is present in the more visceral moments of life.

He presents a modern world that has, in many ways, suffered a sort of sundering from the true wild, and wilderness, that made up such an important part of our ancestors' lives. It is a bleak outlook that highlights the hypocrisy of current conservational practices, and emphasizes the all-consuming need for control and order that modernity represents.

However, he does give the reader a first step towards improvement: changing your individual outlook and thought process in regard to conservation. Use vocabulary that promotes involvement instead of management; focus on the importance of place instead of your importance to that place; seek out intimate, meaningful, unregulated contact with the environment and its inhabitants. Change yourself so that you can positively influence others.

Overall, Turner's essays are an excellent critique of modern conservation biology, and should be read by anyone looking for a different lens with which to view the out-of-doors.

[Bert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to Jack Turner through an interview in Sun Magazine. “The Abstract Wild” is a broad, more detailed representation of the thoughts expressed in that article.

Turner is an interesting writer, one who admits to having been pushed by friends to write and share his philosophies. And though these essays can be tinged with anger at times (which Turner points out himself) his argument makes so much sense it’s a wonder he isn’t screaming throughout the entire book. “Something vast and old is vanishing and our rage should mirror that loss,” he writes.

What’s missing, for Turner, is our intimacy with the wild. Without intimacy we can’t develop the deep ecology needed to love and preserve what remains of these places. We’ve come to be fooled by creations, our parks and preserves. These are designed spaces, not wild, and Turner is the magician’s spoiler who lifts the curtain that shows how the illusion is performed. To see and appreciate what is left of our wilds, start with this book, and then as Turner urges “think of our life in nature, -- daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, -- rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world!”

[Frank Bierbrauer · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the very best non-fiction books I've ever read. It is one of the top three which also includes: The Wholeness of Nature by Henri Bortoft and Animal Forms and Patterns by Adolf Portmann.

This book by Turner, a Rocky Mountain guide, is a set of essays on "the wild", what it means to people, what it means to corporations and what it truly is. It is still the best book I've ever read on the wild. What it means to be in the wild in a truly visceral way, in that deep down in your guts way, in that unsafe way, the way which leads you to be a better human being. Only when a human being is challenged does he/she truly grow and the wild presents opportunities for such growth all the time. This book shows how this might be possible. Some glimpses include what it feels like to be hunted by a mountain lion, a truly unique feeling.

There are no words which can say what this book does you.

[John Fredrickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a terrific and unexpected find. I did not, and still do not, know anything about the author, but this will change. I use a 5-star rating to indicate that this is a book to return to for another read.

The book starts out with a passionate exploration of what it means to be wild and how this relates to our wilderness lands. We tend to fence off 'wilderness', making it contained and more safe, but this diminishes what it means to be wild. The author discusses Thoreau and what Thoreau makes of 'the wild', though it turns out that we don't really know what Thoreau meant. The discussion of Thoreau was the first signal to me that this book was deeper, and the author far more knowledgeable, than I had expected.

The discussion throughout the book is simultaneously practical, philosophical, and political all at the same time. The final chapter was amazing, and deserves a re-read soon.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a long book in the manner of pages but it is an important and visionary book of man's relationship to Nature. It is a sad and terrifying book if you love the wildness of lands and all that it offers to the world. The author carefully creates a portrait of what humans have done to Nature, the environment and the planet. How we have destroyed the wildness that was once so abundant on the planet and how we have turned our backs on the ethics of meeting Nature halfway. This is a book I could read over and over again and still find more treasures inside with each read. This is an important book that tells more about the darkness of humans and their incessant need to control Nature.

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of Deep Ecology's manifestos and I enjoyed Jack Turner's description of how any managed geography is no longer wild. These enlightening essays are tightly written and so thoughtful that I continue to savor. Fortunately, I had to purchase this book rather than get a library loan, so I'll have opportunities to reread.

Part is more difficult in 2022 than when the book was written 30 years previous — this difficulty is a mistrust of science. Understandably, Turner doesn't want wild nature to be confined, shackled, poked, or intruded upon. These days, this rings of keeping local control and ignoring all but anecdotes.

I'll reread this short book to remind myself that wild changes for me and it changes me; that is, responsibilities to nature and my own experience.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting book - reminiscent of the language of Gary Snyder and the philosophy of Neil Evernden. It makes a person want to be more wild.

"Because effective protest is grounded in anger, and we are not (consciously) angry. Anger nourishes hope and fuels rebellion, it presumes a judgement, presumes how things ought to be and aren’t, presumes a caring. Emotion remains the best evidence of belief and value. Unfortunately, there is little connection between our emotions and the wild" (p.21).

[JMM · Rating 5 out of 5]

In The Abstract Wild, Jack Turner explores the human relationship with nature (or rather, our increasingly diminished relationship). His descriptions of personal experiences--in lonely Utah canyons, on Grand Teton summits, and in various encounters with mountain lions--lend power to his philosophy and arguments. He has set my mind spinning, and placed questions in my heart about how I want to live in this world. This short book is challenging, exciting, wide-ranging and important.

[Mathew Gross · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the book that serves as punctuation for all natural history writing of the 20th century. Stands alongside A Sand County Almanac as a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand humanity's relationship to nature in the modern world. Another reviewer wrote that Turner is "not a great writer," to which I must emphatically disagree: these are some of the finest essays I have ever read, on any subject.

[Meghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Turner's background in academia is evident in this book, but it's still accessible. It read more like a collection of essays than a cohesive book to me. It is full of important ideas and is constructively critical, in my opinion, of traditional conceptions of wilderness, wildness, nature, preservation, and environment. A must read for anyone interested in conservation, sustainability, and environmentalism.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the 1st philosophy book I have read in a long time. It was an interesting argument for the intrinsic value of "wildness". It seemed like the natural thing to read now that I am living in the middle of nowhere, and pointed me in the direction of Doug Peacock's book. I would recommend this book to anybody who love the natural world.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is very interesting and captivating especially if you are into nature and conservation. I agree with Jack Turner, he should have lived in the 1880's and early 1900's in Africa. Where everything was wild from the people to the animals, but white people just had to destroy that. Anyway a good book.

[Dayton Martindale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great critiques of economistic and scientific management approaches to wilderness and wildness, and some beautiful passages. But while he is a deep ecologist, he sometimes overemphasizes his own personal (very masculine) fulfillment from wildlife as opposed to that wildlife's intrinsic right to autonomy. It's wonderful to include both aspects, but this felt skewed towards the former.

[Richard Kravitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't believe that I was in such a good space the year before my demise began.

Another amazing and deep book on our need to get back to nature.

Just re-read this, 20 years later. Pretty hardcore, Turner doesn't think much of the Conservation movement or of science as preserver of the wild.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just read this on my trip in Montana. It was amazing book, in which Jack Turner describes the positives of radical environmentalism. The idea that you just leave the wild alone, and let it be wild. His essay detailing the problems of economics, was extremely eye opening. I highly recommend this.

[Monte · Rating 5 out of 5]

changed my life - i read my own mind in his pages.

[Betsy Clark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty abstract. It was alright but I have some pretty differing opinions of this man. Not saying it wasn´t worth reading. A little bit of a clunker to read. You´ll get through it.