The Culture of Nature

`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, author of Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism . `Alex Wilson's cultural history of postwar landscapes and designed environments is drenched in passion and commitment. The Culture of Nature is as beautiful book that addresses an ugly topic. It will very soon be a classic of ecological criticism.' Andrew Ross, author of Strange Weather . The current environmental crisis has reached far beyond the land; it is a crisis of culture as well. It penetrates our leisure time, our thinking, our art and gardens. Landscape is today a place of deeply conflicting ideas about the natural world and our relation to it. In The Culture of Nature , Wilson traces the responses of North American and Native cultures to the land. He examines the multiplicity of environments built on the North American continent in the past 50 years as its inhabitants discover, exploit, protect, restore, and re-enchant a natural world in convulsion.