Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement

Conserving Words looks at five authors of seminal works of nature writing who also founded or revitalized important environmental organizations: Theodore Roosevelt and the Boone and Crockett Club, Mabel Osgood Wright and the National Audubon Society, John Muir and the Sierra Club, Aldo Leopold and the Wilderness Society, and Edward Abbey and Earth First These writers used powerfully evocative and galvanizing metaphors for nature, metaphors that Daniel J. Philippon calls "conserving" words: frontier (Roosevelt), garden (Wright), park (Muir), wilderness (Leopold), and utopia (Abbey). Integrating literature, history, biography, and philosophy, this ambitious study explores how "conserving" words enabled narratives to convey environmental values as they explained how human beings should interact with the nonhuman world.

Author: Daniel J. Philippon
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 09/01/2005
Pages: 373
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.27lbs
Size: 9.24h x 6.08w x 1.03d
ISBN: 9780820327594

About the Author
Daniel J. Philippon is an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he is also director of the Program in Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Ethics. He is editor of a critical edition of Mabel Osgood Wright's "The Friendship of Nature" and coeditor of the anthology "The Height of Our Mountains."