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Robin O’Sullivan reviews American Wilderness: A New History at History News Network. Plenty of juice here, including editor Michael Lewis’s swipe at “citizens who passionately oppose oil-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, yet brashly drive hundreds of miles in gas-chugging vehicles to hike in national parks,” but I was especially struck by this passage in the review:
Once again I am NOT arguing that either wilderness or gun ownership is good or bad. Save that debate for somewhere else. I am suggesting that there’s a deeper parallelism. Conservatives tend to think of gun ownership as a kind of protection of freedom and order against lawlessness (from above or from below); perhaps liberals tend to think of “untrammeled” wilderness in the same way. But surely our protection isn’t individual (holding a gun or retreating into the wild) but social: an educated, knowledgeable citizenry with a real stake in the social customs (like live-and-let-live) and political institutions (like the Constitution) that maintain order and freedom.
