The Books Briefing: The New Legacy of America’s Wilderness
In nature documentaries such as A Perfect Planet and Planet Earth, the wilderness seems free of human influence, Emma Marris wrote in a recent story for The Atlantic. Sweeping, unpeopled vistas and close-up shots of animals render the world in an enhanced, almost unnatural, high-definition style.
Such visions of untouched, wild lands are nothing new; John Muir, an early conservationist, even, And Muir’s ignorance of this was telling: While the conservationist took an egalitarian attitude toward plants and animals, his book New settlers to the U.S. further manipulated this environment. Teams of European hunters that certain Native tribes relied on as part of an effort to control Indigenous people—a disturbing pattern that Andrew C. Isenberg outlines in .
