Roderick Nash

Roderick Frazier Nash is a professor emeritus of history and environmental studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. He was the first person to descend the Tuolumne River using a raft.

Scholarly biography

Nash received his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University in 1960 and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1965.[1] He is the author of several books and essays. His dissertation, "Wilderness and the American Mind," done under the supervision of Merle Curti, became what has come to be seen as one of the foundational texts of the field of environmental history. After teaching for two years at Dartmouth College, he was called to the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he joined historians such as Wilbur Jacobs, Robert O. Collins, Frank J. Frost, C. Warren Hollister, Leonard Marsak, and Joachim Remak. After witnessing an oil spill in Santa Barbara in 1969, he and a number of other faculty members became active within the university and founded an environmental studies program there in 1970. Since the initial 12 graduates in 1972, there have been 4,000 graduates within 300 separate majors. Nash is an advocate for environmental education and an avid white-water river rafter.

Wilderness and the American Mind

Nash's study in this book[2] concerns the attitude of Americans' toward the idea of wilderness. He discusses the different attitudes that American's have had toward nature since colonization and the changing uses and definitions of 'wilderness' in that context. Specifically, Nash describes the evolution of American wilderness conception through Transcendentalism, Primitivism, Preservationism, to Conservationism.[3] Nash states that if wilderness is to survive, we must, paradoxically, manage wilderness – at the very least, our behavior towards the wilderness must be managed.

Bibliography
  • Wilderness and the American Mind (1967).[4]
  • The American Environment: Readings in the History of Conservation (1968).
  • The Call of the Wild 1900–1916[5] (1970).
  • Environment and Americans: The Problem of Priorities (1972).
  • The Big Drops: Ten Legendary Rapids (1978). Co-authored with Robert O. Collins
  • The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (1989).
  • American Environmentalism: Readings in Conservation History (1990).
  • The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917–1930 (1990).

Also by Nash, Roderick:

  • From These Beginnings: A Biographical Approach to American History, Volume I and II.

References
  1. "Roderick Frazier Nash | American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration". aapra.org. Archived from the original on 2014-09-13.
  2. "Parks Subject of New Special". Waycross Journal-Herald. March 7, 1981. p. P5. Archived from the original on 27 September 2021. Retrieved 14 August 2011.
  3. Nash, Roderick Frazier (1973). Wilderness and the American Mind (2nd rev ed.). Yale UP. ISBN 978-0300016499.
  4. Wilderness and the American Mind. Yale University Press; 4th edition (September 1, 2001). 2001. ISBN 978-0-300-09122-9.
  5. Nash, Roderick (1970). The call of the wild: 1900-1916 - Roderick Nash - Google Boeken. ISBN 9780807605516. Retrieved 2014-01-03.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.