Praise

This is a beautiful book about ugliness, which takes the innumerable facts of the degradation of nature as so many multiple starting points for the history of the production of modern space. Wilson ranges across cognate yet extraordinarily varied topics such as nature films, theme parks, tourism, world’s fairs, shopping malls, and strip-mining and nuclear plants, not merely to trace their histories but also to map out their ideologies–for it is myth and ideology that ultimately legitimize and promote the violence done to the land. It is a remarkable performance, of the greatest theoretical as well as practical-political interest.

– Fredric Jameson

This is more than an imaginative and richly detailed history of the ways North Americans construct, and are constructed by, nature. The impetus of this book is political. As such it proposes a course of action as well as reasons for anger and alarm. The Culture of Nature is intricate webs of information precisely sun, impossible to shrug off.

– Adele Freedman