In the essay “The Puritan Origins of the American Wilderness Movement,” the authors examine how the concept of “wilderness” shifted from being the object of contempt in the Puritan’s view to that of admiration and protection by the nineteenth century. First, early Puritans’ perception of wilderness was quite negative: it was portrayed as a ‘howling wilderness’ full of ‘ravening beasts of the forest’ and Native Americans labeled as Satan. The wilderness was a “howling” desert that had to be cultivated and settled, as Miller pointed out in his book, Errand into the Wilderness. However, this perception has changed over time. Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1758), who is considered a transitional figure, regarded nature as having been created with “images …show more content…
Where modern students may read the wilderness as the setting of the adventure or the place of spiritual getaway, the essay makes readers rethink this as a colonial construct that erased the Native American people. To the Native Americans, the land was not a wilderness but a home. Furthermore, in Rachel Carson’s 1962 essay titled: “Rachel Carson and the Awakening of Environmental Consciousness”, early settlers could have never foreseen the poisonous way in which the Earth’s environment has been treated. The settlers’ perception of nature was shaped by the imperative to conquer it due to the need for survival and for religious purpose. The Puritans considered the wilderness as an evil desert and could not have seen the impacts of chemical technologies which came centuries later to pollute the environment. To add, Rachel Carson documented the effects of pesticides, especially DDT, on the ecosystem. She stated that man’s interference with nature would be disastrous in the long run. Carson’s portrayal of ‘a time when bird song would be silenced and spring barren’ was a portrayal of the new age, an age which the early settlers hardly contemplated. She explained how chemicals were not only toxic to pests but were disturbing the balance of ecosystems. This is well captured in her rhetorical question, “Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface