Wild Ambitions

David Cassuto reviews Wild Ideas, a collection of ecocritical essays.

I want to like Wild Ideas. And I do like large segments of it. Compiled and edited by David Rothenberg, a professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, this collection of essays arose from a symposium on the “wild” and “wilderness” at the fifth World Wilderness Congress in 1993. It takes on several of the major bugaboos of the environmental movement, among them the difference between “wildness” as Thoreau uses the term in his famously misquoted adage, “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” and “wilderness,” a term whose meaning has changed more often than Boris Yeltsin’s Cabinet.