In February 2000 Guy Waterman died in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. In recognition of the renewed interest in his life and work, The Countryman Press is proud to reissue this classic text, with a new appreciation of her late husband by Laura Waterman. In this environmental call to action, Laura and Guy Waterman look beyond preserving the ecology of the backcountry to focus on what they call its spiritual dimension--its fragile, untamed wildness. "Without some management, wildness cannot survive the number of people who seek to enjoy it," they write. "But with too much management, or the wrong kind, we can destroy the spiritual component of wildness in our zeal to preserve its physical side." Trailside huts and lodges, large groups seeking "wilderness experiences," federal and state regulations, and technology such as radios, cell phones, global positioning devices, and emergency helicopters, all have an impact on our experience. With humor and insight, the Watermans explore these difficult wilderness management issues. They ask us to evaluate the impact that even "environmentally conscious" values have on the wilderness experience, and to ask the question: What are we trying to preserve?

The classic environmental call to action 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Wilderness Act—the landmark piece of legislation to set aside and protect pristine parts of the American landscape. This anniversary edition of Wilderness Ethics should help put the many issues surrounding wilderness in focus.

The classic environmental call to action.

"This is some of the finest writing in Laura Waterman's long and distinguished career. Anyone who values the history of conservation, or the gnarled wilds of the Northeast, or the complexities of the human spirit will find nourishment in these pages." — Bill McKibben, author of Wandering Home "In this new book, Laura Waterman tells the full story of her unique life. It began on the campus of a boy's school and took her to mountains, growing her own food, and writing. In these pages, readers find what it's like to grow up the daughter of the scholar who put the dashes back into Emily Dickinson's poetry; how Waterman coped with that brilliant father's alcoholism; her development as a groundbreaking climber; and her homesteading life for almost three decades. In these pages she reveals how she kept her strong sense of self while living with a dynamic, lovable, and often challenging man, her late husband, Guy Waterman. She examines closely her role in his suicide on Mount Lafayette in 2000." — Christine Woodside, editor of Appalachia and the author of Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books

A compelling story of our ever-evolving relationship with mountains and wilderness. Thirty years after its initial publication, this beloved classic is back in print. Superbly researched and written, Forest and Crag is the definitive history of our love affair with the mountains of the Northeastern United States, from the Catskills and the Adirondacks of New York to the Green Mountains of Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and the mountains of Maine. It’s all here in one comprehensive volume: the struggles of early pioneers in America’s first frontier wilderness; the first ascent of every major peak in the Northeast; the building of the trail networks, including the Appalachian Trail; the golden era of the summit resort hotels; and the unforeseen consequences of the backpacking boom of the 1970s and 80s. Laura and Guy Waterman spent a decade researching and writing Forest and Crag, and in it they draw together widely scattered sources. What emerges is a compelling story of our ever-evolving relationship with the mountains and wilderness, a story that will fascinate historians, outdoor enthusiasts, and armchair adventurers alike. Laura Waterman and Guy Waterman (1932–2000) volunteered for the United States Forest Service and for hiking and conservation organizations, maintaining the Franconia Ridge Loop for almost two decades. They were awarded the American Alpine Club’s 2012 David R. Brower Award for outstanding service in mountain conservation, and the Waterman Fund to preserve wildness and service the alpine areas across the Northeast was established in 2000. Laura and Guy wrote numerous articles and books on the outdoors, including The Green Guide to Low-Impact Hiking and Camping, Wilderness Ethics: Preserving the Spirit of Wildness, and Yankee Rock & Ice: A History of Climbing in the Northeastern United States. Laura’s memoir, Losing the Garden: The Story of a Marriage, recounts their thirty years of homesteading.

What if wilderness is bad for wildlife? This question motivates the philosophical investigation in Wilderness, Morality, and Value. Environmentalists aim to protect wilderness, and for good reasons, but wilderness entails unremittent, incalculable suffering for its non-human habitants. Given that it will become increasingly possible to augment nature in ways that ameliorates some of this suffering, the morality of wilderness preservation is itself in question. Joshua S. Duclos argues that the technological and ethical reality of the Anthropocene warrants a fundamental reassessment of the value of wilderness. After exposing the moral ambiguity of wilderness preservation, he explores the value of wilderness itself by engaging with anthropocentricism and nonanthropocentrism; sentientism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism; and instrumental value and intrinsic value. Duclos argues that the value of wilderness is a narrow form of anthropocentric intrinsic value, one with a religio-spiritual dimension. By integrating scholarship from bioethics on the norms of engineering human nature with debates in environmental ethics concerning the prospect of engineering non-human nature, Wilderness, Morality, and Value sets the stage for wilderness ethics—or wilderness faith—in the Anthropocene.

The concept and values of wilderness, along with the practice of wilderness preservation, have been under attack for the past several decades. In Rethinking Wilderness, Mark Woods responds to seven prominent anti-wilderness arguments. Woods offers a rethinking of the received concept of wilderness, developing a positive account of wilderness as a significant location for the other-than-human value-adding properties of naturalness, wildness, and freedom. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book combines environmental philosophy, environmental history, environmental social sciences, the science of ecology, and the science of conservation biology.