The Wild Bunch

Ansel Adams, David Brower, Wallace Stegner, Nancy Newhall, Edward Abbey, and the Fight for a Wilder West

The Wild Bunch (in progress; under contract with Yale University Press) is about how a small but vital group of artists, writers, and activists working in the American West shaped the image and ethic of nature preservation in the middle decades of the 20th century. Specifically, it is the story of how these individuals mobilized the defense of natural beauty and the psychological and cultural power of the wilderness in response to the rapid industrialization and commercialization of the West, largely in the 1950s and 1960s. From Ansel Adams and David Brower to Edward Abbey, the preservationists came to view untarnished nature, and especially wild country, as the bulwark against the environmental assaults of large-scale energy development (esp. hydropower), postwar consumerism, and mass tourism.

The book melds together group biography, environmental history, and cultural history. As the title suggests, I view this as fundamentally a Western story, a morality tale with complex heroes and villains – at times one and the same. Although their works and campaigns often demonstrated a prickly refutation of the development of the Western U.S. in the mid-20th century, I believe this wild bunch didn’t reject their time so much as they offered an alternative aesthetic and psychological take on what made life worth living in it. Just as they were forming the iconography and ethos of the wilderness in the modern era, they were also in many ways creating a particular environmentalist vision of the American West, one that drew on earlier traditions and images but that elevated a distinctive symbolic and cultural understanding of the wilderness West for a rapidly changing U.S. society.

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