Wilderness and Political Ecology

Environmental law and philosophy assume the existence of a fundamental state of nature: Before the arrival of Columbus, the Americas were a wilderness untouched by human hand, teeming with wildlife and almost void of native peoples. In Wilderness and Political EcologyCharles Kay and Randy Simmons state that this "natural" view of pre-European America is scientifically unsupportable. This volume brings together scholars from a variety of fields as they seek to demonstrate that native people were originally more numerous than once thought and that they were not conservationists in the current sense of the term. Rather, native peoples took an active part in managing their surroundings and wrought changes so extensive that the anthropogenic environment has long been viewed as the natural state of the American ecosystem.

Michael S. Alvard is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Texas A&M University Jack M. Broughton is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah and Adjunct Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Utah Museum of Natural History William R. Hildebrandt is a principal owner of Far Western Anthropological Research Group, located in Davis, California Terry L. Jones is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo Charles E. Kay is an adjunct assistant professor in political science and a natural resource policy associate with the Institute of Political Economy at Utah State University Paul S. Martin, Emeritus Professor of Geosciences at the Desert Laboratory of the University of Arizona in Tucson Thomas W. Neumann is a private-sector archaeologist based in the greater Atlanta, Georgia, area whose research has focused in the eastern and midwestern United States William Preston is currently a professor of geography at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo Gerald W. Williams is the national historical analyst for the U.S. Forest Service in Washington D.C.