Collecting Nature

One measure of the growing sophistication of environmental historiography is that wilderness is no longer its main field. Significant scholarship has emerged that probes urban ecologies, assesses the interplay between gender and space, and examines geography, race, and social justice. The provocative insights of cultural studies have also impelled historians to track the representation of the natural in culture. Among the exciting explorations of the complexity of such appropriations is Jennifer Price's Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (1999). Add to that list Andrew Glenn Kirk's impressive first book, Collecting Nature. Its focus on the tumultuous history of the little-known Conservation Library in Denver, Colorado, becomes, in Kirk's hands, an imaginative way to speak about the central tensions rippling through the broader environmental movement in the United States. Founded in 1961, the brainchild of Arthur Hawthorne Carhart, who is perhaps best known for his advocacy of wildlands protection, the archive was to become the leading repository of materials relating to the evolution of national environmental concerns. Its manuscripts, primary documents, and secondary sources would narrate this past and its transformations. As Kirk puts it: in this library “ideas and philosophies assumed physical form” and gave literary weight and political strength to those who, like Carhart (by way of Henry David Thoreau), asserted that in wilderness lay the preservation of the American people. They used the library to advance this claim on the public consciousness

Adventure · Archaeology · Art history · Environmental ethics · Environmental movement · Environmental philosophy · Historiography · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Wilderness · American Environmental and Regional History · Archaeology and Natural History · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Law