Synopses & Reviews
Historians of wilderness have shown that nature reserves are used ideologically in the construction of American national identity. But the contemporary problem of wilderness demands examination of how profoundly nature-in-reserve influences something more fundamental, namely what counts as being well, having a life, and having a future. What is wellness for the citizens to whom the parks are said to democratically belong? And how does the presence of foreigners threaten this wellness? Recent critiques of the Wilderness Act focus exclusively on its ecological effects, ignoring the extent to which wilderness policy affects our contemporary collective experience and political imagination. Tracing the challenges that migration and indigenousness currently pose to the national park system and the Wilderness Act, Grebowicz foregrounds concerns with social justice against the ecological and aesthetic ones that have created and continue to shape these environments.
With photographs by Jacqueline Schlossman.
Review
"Grebowicz seeks to trouble our understanding of what a national park is and the work it does, on the land, culturally, and politically. Very much like William Cronon's seminal essay, 'The Trouble with Wilderness,' it seeks to open up the complexities too neatly bounded within and obscured by what we think when we think of a 'national park.' Her book fills a need for a creative, imaginative, accessible, and provocative text that engages critical debates in the environmental humanities."Jon Christensen, University of California, Los Angeles and Editor of Boom: A Journal of California
Synopsis
The National Park to Come examines the sense of "the national" that our national parks construct and the kind of citizen they produce in the process. Who is the visitor in these spaces? Who is the national and who the foreigner? To whose children is the ostensibly unpeopled wilderness of the future owed? At what cost, and to whom? Grebowicz explores how such politicized modes of being-in-nature are maintained on the emotional level, shaping our basic sense of coherence, futurity, collectivity, and having a life. Wilderness-as-spectacle, she argues, functions as a form of social relation even as we imagine the true experience of nature to be solitary and apolitical. The book's most pressing concern is the relationship between the foreigner and the future in the democratization of wilderness. For the questions explored here, contends Grebowicz, are precisely those that will shape the future of our entire park system.
Synopsis
This book foregrounds concerns with social justice against the environmental and aesthetic ones that have traditionally shaped our national parks and asks us to reconsider what these parks might come to mean in the future.
About the Author
Margret Grebowicz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Goucher College.