Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement

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University of Georgia Press, 2004 - 373 pages
Conserving Words looks at five authors of seminal works of nature writing who also founded or revitalized important environmental organizations: Theodore Roosevelt and the Boone and Crockett Club, Mabel Osgood Wright and the National Audubon Society, John Muir and the Sierra Club, Aldo Leopold and the Wilderness Society, and Edward Abbey and Earth First! These writers used powerfully evocative and galvanizing metaphors for nature, metaphors that Daniel J. Philippon calls “conserving” words: frontier (Roosevelt), garden (Wright), park (Muir), wilderness (Leopold), and utopia (Abbey). Integrating literature, history, biography, and philosophy, this ambitious study explores how “conserving” words enabled narratives to convey environmental values as they explained how human beings should interact with the nonhuman world.
 

Contents

The Ecology of Influence
1
PRESERVING THE PIECES PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATION
31
The Closing of the Frontier Theodore Roosevelt and the Boone and Crockett Club
33
The Garden You and I Mabel Osgood Wright and the National Audubon Society
72
Our National Parks John Muir and the Sierra Club
106
PROTECTING THE PLANET MODERN ENVIRONMENTALISM
157
The Call of the Wild Aldo Leopold and the Wilderness Society
159
Toward Ecotopia Edward Abbey and Earth First
219
The Island as Metaphor
266
List of Abbreviations
279
Notes
281
Works Cited
317
Index
359
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About the author (2004)

Daniel J. Philippon is an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he is also director of the Program in Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Ethics. He is editor of a critical edition of Mabel Osgood Wright's The Friendship of Nature and coeditor of the anthology The Height of Our Mountains.

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