THE WILD BUNCH

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

Sierra Club members just below the junction of the Green and Yampa Rivers preparing to land at Dinosaur National Monument’s Echo Park. Photo credit: James E. Cole, U.S. National Park Service, 1953.

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. In The Wild Bunch we’ll see how the preservationists’ fight for nature was also a struggle over the meaning and mythology of the wilderness West in the modern age, a campaign marked by a series of gripping showdowns in the region’s deep canyons and high valleys.