Summaries

Nash (8-9) 
In the opening chapter of Wilderness and the American Mind, Nash describes wilderness as mans greatest evil and the complete oposite of paradise.  He discusses how man needs to take control of the land through deforestation and raising crops.  This process was familiar to early english explorers and ultimately shaped how settlers were able to survive in colonial america. Man has definitely come a long way from such primative thought however.  We've gone from viewing the wilderness as an evil setting to embracing it and trying to preserve it in just a few hundred years.  Because it is indeed civilization that creates wilderness.

Merchant (132-133)
Carolyn Merchant takes a different approach in her first chapter regarding wilderness.  Tracing wilderness back to a time period even before english settlement of the new world.  She takes wilderness from a biblical perspective and the first wilderness known to man, "the garden of eden".  She pokes holes in the christian religion when she recalls the counts of Benjamin Franklin and his recollection of english explorers interaction with native americans.  How we told them the biblical story of the garden of eden and they responded in the only way they knew how.  By describing themselves as one with wilderness, that this is how they always lived and need to live in order to survive without having some spiritual being prosecute them for their actions. 

Nash (25)
Nash describes the discovery of the New World as a notion to Europeans that an "earthly paradise" lay somewhere to the west.  A place bountiful of "fabulous riches, a temperate clime, longevity, and garden-like natural beauty".  Europeans embraced the new world because it opened new doors for them.  Not only from an economical stand point, it also opened their eyes to something which they typically secluded themselves from the past.  The enviornment was hostile to the explorers at first because they werent use to such conditions, and subsequently many didnt make it through the first winter.  But later expansion westward, and experimenting with different crops made the weary explorers turn heads in the old world.