Golden light poured over the scrubby mountains in the west, casting palpable sunbeams across the pearly cholla needles and the white seed pods of the creosote. It sliced through the Joshua Trees, the yuccas playing grotesque silhouettes on the horizon as it began to set. The warmth of the pale rock beneath me radiated in the last of the day’s sunlight. Everything glows in the desert in the late afternoon. It is an ecosystem made by light, water and time. I felt drawn to watching the light, a kindred spirit. It spoke to me and told me things I thought I needed to know.

I’d been watching the light for 72 hours, hardly moving except to sleep or stretch or use the bathroom. I did not talk. I listened to the hummingbirds fly by, racing around the boulders and stopping to drink nectar from the flowers an arm’s length away from me. I watched a family of red-tailed hawks leave their rocky ledge to hunt and return successfully home to their family. I watched lizards flit up and down the rocks, stopping to inspect my presence and, deciding I was uninteresting, continue on their way. I realized that a rabbit lived somewhere near the base of my rock, and came out to eat in the dusky hours.

I was 20 years old and a sophomore in college. I was studying outdoor education, and as part of my coursework, a group of 16 students from my major traveled from our campus in upstate New York to the deserts of California for a 73 day Outward Bound course. Outward Bound is an outdoor education school which bases their curriculum around personal growth and field work in the backcountry. This course was supposed to be the highlight of my college experience, if not my life. I was on my ‘solo,’ an Outward Bound right of passage where we were tasked to sit alone in one spot in the desert for three days undisturbed.

We had gone into the backcountry as two tightly knit groups of eight, hiking miles every day without ever walking on a trail. We hiked in the bitter cold and blazing sun with 50 pounds on our backs. We summited mountains, we wrestled brambles, we fought our way through washes and canyons. We carried the water and food we needed to survive on our backs.

I’d never formed such deep and honest connections with a group of individuals so quickly. Within days we were sharing some of the deepest parts of ourselves to the group, crying together on mountaintops and sharing gentle eye contact as we told each other our most personal stories. We bonded instantly. Unexpectedly, the desert wilderness had opened an incredible space within ourselves to this kind of reflection and openness and gratitude. Each step we drew closer to each other and farther away from the walls we’d built to keep the rest of the world out. Each step we lived a more honest life than the one we lived ‘out there,’ in the ‘real world.’ We communicated openly and shared what bothered us and worked through our problems together. We felt every essential of life in its raw form: how much water we used in a day, how many pounds of food we ate. We realized that, in fact, this experience we were living was the ‘real world.’ It seemed primal and simple and honest, the bare necessities of life and true community with others and nothing to distract us from it.

After the program was over, I was tasked to write about my experience in Joshua Tree to fulfill the college academic requirements. Already nostalgic for the experience, I sung the praises of wilderness as peaceful, quiet, and transformative. I reflected on my childhood itch for National Parks and unfettered wandering which this trek had scratched. I touted the party line about the power of spending time in nature and how much humans need wilderness, where we can’t hear the motors and air conditioners and cars and instead hear only the insects and the birds. To me, wilderness was a place devoid of humans that I’d dreamt about my entire life, and got to experience only fleetingly. You can read the whole thing here.

As time went on and I grew farther from the experience, I began to remember more of the suffering. The emotional discomfort I felt as I journaled on that rock during my solo. The late nights and stomach issues and wet sleeping bags in the snow. And as I ventured out into the natural lands and preserves of the US, I realized that my idea of my place in this world had been flawed. The more I read and the more I learned, I began to realize I hadn’t fully understood what this time living in wilderness had been.

The “Fried Liver Gang” on film in Joshua Tree National Park. The Gang includes: Michael, Adelia, Claire, Simon, Ben, Emily, and Leah. Spring, 2020. Photos courtesy of Emily “Ramble-On” Rose.

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Wilderness is where you no longer feel powerful. You do not feel fully human but instead feel part animal. You realize that you are not in control, unlike the delusion you are taught since childhood. When you venture into wilderness alone, often you find fear: an irrational, monkey brain fear. I’d heard this sentiment echoed in books I’d read, even by authors who proclaimed the importance and healing power of time in nature. These authors would find themselves ill at ease when traveling into nature alone, despite being experienced outdoorswomen (Kimmerer, 2013 and Haupt, 2021).

And I think the reason for this is simple – when we venture into wilderness, we lose the fantasy that we as humans are indestructible, the movers and shapers of the world, with the God-ordained power to create and control our environment. Instead, this Godlike hand is replaced with the knowledge that we are part of the whole. We are but a small piece in something much larger and more significant than us. We rediscover our universal community all around us.

When I was on my solo, the overwhelming lesson I learned was that I was a visitor, an onlooker, in an established neighborhood of creatures. The hawks, the rabbit, the lizard, the hummingbird all had their homes there. I was simply passing through, with the privilege to watch and learn about their community without participating. Years later, around the kitchen table at a hostel high in the Colorado mountains, I mentioned this to a woman who had recently thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,650-mile long hike from the Mexico-US border to Canada, a trip which requires months of living full time on the trail. She amended my feelings with her own – the thing she felt after months on trail was the knowledge that this was also her home, as much her place of belonging as the wild animals and plants around her. She was part of the ecosystem.

The definition of wilderness given by the US government is “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” It continues by defining this land as “retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which… generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable” (The Wilderness Act, 1964).

Indigenous wisdom tells us that this never has been and never will be true. From the time of creation, humans have lived as an important component of every ecosystem. The “primeval character” of nature is itself a myth. When European explorers ventured into the heart of the American continent, they were met with ecosystems that had been curated and crafted by indigenous people for thousands of years. Indigenous peoples give oral histories of harvesting in reciprocity with their environment, asking permission to harvest and returning their gratitude by tending, planting, watering, and celebrating the species who gave them life (Kimmerer, 2013). In the early days of European exploration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans found indigenous communities cultivating crops and wild plants, though their farms were nearly unrecognizable to the explorers who had been raised around linear fields and neatly divided crops. It wasn’t until the second wave of westward expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that European colonizers encountered a ‘primeval’ forest, overgrown with plant diversity and teeming with more wildlife than the mind could fathom.¹

Researchers have suggested that the “overabundance” of wildlife that Europeans discovered on the North American continent when they first arrived can not only be attributed to Indigenous land management practices but also their absence – with a keystone species declining or removed via disease, forced displacement, and other impacts from settlers, the peopled pre-Colombian landscape began to change. Areas of forest previously managed by indigenous people began to overgrow, creating a ‘virgin forest’ of such abundance Europeans were stunned. Denevan (1992) argues that the ‘virgin forest’ settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries encountered was actually “invented.” Quoting Rostlund (1957), Denevan argues “‘there was undoubtedly much more ‘forest primeval’ in 1850 than in 1650.’” Indigenous practices taught a sustainable harvest so that the plants and animals would ‘last forever’ (Kimmerer, 2013). Europeans mistook this intentional care as a land of never-ending wealth and a lack of human intervention, with resources so vast they would never be depleted, and therefore must be tamed and brought into order by man.

History has proven that where the relationship between humans and nature is unhealthy, human impacts echo far beyond the domain of cities or farmland. Not only did European colonizers intentionally diminish wildlife populations by astounding numbers, including the extinction and near extinction of abundant native fauna,² but they fundamentally altered the relationship with the land. There was no sustainable harvest, reciprocity, or relationship with the natural world. Instead, a capitalistic harvest took its place: take as much as quickly for as much economic growth as possible.

We took and took and took until anything resembling the beauty and abundance of the past was so scarce that we once again craved it. And so, as a last-ditch effort, the white men in power began setting aside “untouched” areas to preserve a small population of huntable game. On their weekends, they yearned for the “old days” when game was infinitely abundant and they played mountain men for the weekend, living off the land. They created National Parks and Ducks Unlimited (Huggins & Skulski, 2022). The American public seemed to share the nostalgic (or perhaps imagined) memory of what the land had been when their ancestors had first arrived, and the wealthy flocked to the parks and the designated beautiful and ‘wild’ places. After another half a century, the environmental movement of the 1960s and 70s sought to restore more balance, to attempt to fill both the hole in the ozone and the hole in the collective spirit that longed for the natural world. And so the Wilderness Act was penned.³

They hoped – they believed – that they were setting aside ‘pristine’ lands that would allow an escape from the modern world they’d created, where one could go to fill that longing, that need for communion with wild nature. And because of the white man’s track record, it had to be an impermanent relationship. There was no way there could be an altruistic or reciprocal relationship with nature. Given the opportunity, we would take. And so we could only visit, only glimpse, before we must leave.

I’ve ventured into these ‘pristine’ lands. I spent a month at home in the backcountry of Joshua Tree. I’ve lived full time in ‘Proposed Wilderness’ summer after summer in little-known Dinosaur National Monument as a river guide. I’ve resided down dirt Forest Service roads and on wide open tracts of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land, camping out of my car for months at a time. I’ve explored nearly half of America’s National Parks. I’ve fallen in love, passionately and instantaneously, with a river canyon.

It’s true I’ve always yearned for that remoteness. To sit and listen and hear nothing but the sounds of nature. Not a human for miles around. I’ve come close to finding it. But there is almost always a contrail in the wild blue sky.

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¹Many of these ideas are synthesized in the podcast “Model Citizens: Fair Game (Part 1)” by Future Ecologies. (Huggins & Skulski, 2022). They are further expanded upon in “The Pristine Myth” by W. M. Denevan (1992).

²Famous cases of astounding overhunting include the passenger pigeon, once fabled to have flocks so abundant they would blot out the sun for days (Burke Museum, 2014) being hunted to extinction by 1914, and the American Bison, which was hunted by railcar for sport and for the intentional destruction of indigenous groups’ food staple. Originally thought to roam in herds of 30-60 million, by the end of the slaughter only about 300 individuals remained. (National Park Service, 2024).

³Of course, this is a gross simplification of a movement that successfully preserved 112 million acres of land from development and exploitation (Wilderness Society).

As a river guide in Dinosaur National Monument, I’ve spent many summers living inside of America’s “best idea.” I’ve come to know the monument, to love it, and to call it home. Most of Dinosaur is managed as ‘proposed wilderness’ – a distinction that does not change the management practices, but instead simply means congressional approval has not yet designated the lands as wilderness under the Wilderness Act.

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On course in Joshua Tree, sitting on a hill just east of Quail Mountain in the midst of my Outward Bound bliss, I observed in my journal:

“The wilderness cannot be written about without the presence of humanity that we’ve written in every corner. The sound of an airplane high overhead and the contrail it leaves in the clear sky. That road in the distance and a building at the end of it, unidentifiable. That haze in the distance that is most surely us. And those tarps down in the valley. Our tarps. Our impact. Our footprints are down there, too. Impermanent but resoundingly ours, our impact on this world.”

Though my later writings would praise the wide open space and the quiet of mind I found in these wilderness areas, I couldn’t in the moment overlook the unusual number of contrails left by planes overhead bound for Palm Springs, or the seismic boom of bombing practice from the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center just 40 miles away. On the summit of Pinto Mountain, another hiker years before had astutely observed in the summit register⁴: “Too many damn planes.” In the moment, the last summit hike of our program, after a magical morning and an imminent exit to the ‘real world,’ I was a bit annoyed by his irreverence. You were on the summit of a mountain, after all! There was no trail to the summit. You looked out over two deserts and miles of designated wilderness. Couldn’t you just enjoy it for what it was?

The next morning, we lingered at the wilderness boundary. Our instructors had approximated where the border was on the map, and drew a line in the sand. It was early dawn, still dark enough to cast our little group as faint apparitions, and a steady desert rain fell. The creosotes sparkled in the beam of our headlamps, thick with raindrops and the smell of their oils reacting to the water. “The desert smells like rain,” we said, quoting Gary Paul Nabhan’s book (a part of our course materials). We had come to know the land as one defined by water, not absent from it.

Time slowed down on that rainy morning. We burned sage and passed it around the circle. We were silent in the weight of the moment. We had changed out here, cried and hugged one another and learned the most fundamental things about ourselves. We’d found a home and a community. We held hands and stood at the line in the sand. We just waited and waited. Our instructors watched, a little surprised and impatient with how long it was taking us. We couldn’t say goodbye. No one wanted to move first. It was as if we knew what world awaited us on the other side. In reality, of course, we had no idea what we were about to leap into.

When we finally stepped into the front country hand in hand, we had unknowingly crossed into the world of the first chaotic month of the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools were beginning to close, businesses were beginning to shut down or move online. Just a week after leaving the backcountry, we were on planes without masks (how could we have known back then?) to a world of indoors and isolation. Our 73 day course was cut short with 55 days to go. Only when the entire world shut down, when planes were grounded and people celebrated weddings and funerals over video call, did the skies in Joshua Tree finally clear. There weren’t too many damn planes. The skylines of major cities around the world were visible for the first time in years. These clear skies made headlines. When the people stopped moving, it seemed humanity finally realized how widespread our impact really was.

In reality, we’d never been in another world at all. We’d never been in a world “untrammeled by man.” We’d only been here, on Planet Earth.

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⁴A summit register is a booklet placed on a summit of a mountain for hikers to log their ascent. It is often full of observations, brief memoirs, doodles and poetry.

On the summit of Pinto Mountain (left) and Monument Mountain (right), adventurous humans have declared their presence. Whether by leaving offerings of rocks, trinkets, or writings, mountain climbers catalogue their success for future explorers. Right: Leah and Ben flip through the Monument Mountain summit register.

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On a sunny afternoon in early fall, a year and a half after leaving the backcountry of Joshua Tree, I found myself walking through a beautiful Northeastern forest. In my senior year of college, I had begun to call this forest home. Four years earlier, the ecosystem had been a stranger, an unknown. I’d grown up in the arid foothills of Colorado, full of yucca and hesitant lodgepole pines. The only forests I knew were single-species aspen groves or pine and fir forests with needle-strewn floors and a simple few species.

At first, I’d been enchanted by the diversity of the eastern woods. Deciduous forests and all their inhabitants were a novelty to me then. They quickly became a friend. I’d spend hours wandering alone in the forestlands owned by the college, marvelling at mushrooms and moss and ferns littering the forest floor. So many types of plants! Such diversity!

On this afternoon, the forest smelled rich and earthy. The group of students gathered at the trailhead, talking in energized voices. As we passed from the road into the woods, the light dappled and grew darker. The group became hushed as if entering a cathedral. We passed through an archway of beeches, their trunks dancing yellow in the sunlight filtering through the canopy. Beyond the welcoming entryway, the forest grew muted. Everything tinted green from the ceiling of leaves. We stopped at a shaded grove of trees about as thick as my wrist, growing timidly next to a small pond. They were chestnut trees, my professor explained. A rare relic of a time gone by.

Chestnut trees used to make up 25% of the Northeastern and Eastern forests in places (Queens County Farm Museum). They were an incredibly important source of food for all creatures of the forest, including indigenous peoples. European settlers enjoyed the nuts and used the wood for all kinds of building projects. The distribution of chestnuts wasn’t random. Dense groves of the tree were intentionally cultivated by indigenous people. It wasn’t the ‘farming’ that Europeans would have recognized. But humans were planting and fostering an important food staple, both for themselves and for the other creatures that lived in the forest.

It only took about 50 years for the American chestnut to essentially disappear from its native forests (Nickens, 2012). A fungus introduced from Asia in the late 1800s worked quickly and without mercy. By 1950, the tree was functionally extinct in North America and remains so to this day. The few small trees that can grow in the wild usually emerge from the buried roots of diseased trees, succumbing to the parasitic chestnut blight after a few years of life. The chestnut extinction has been compared to the passenger pigeon or bison in its severity and totality (Faison & Foster, 2014).

Standing in the forest, my professor began to explain that the forest around us was a phantom of its former self. Looking around at the thin chestnut trees, I realized that they were a relic of a tree that once grew six feet in diameter, that once flourished in groves that fed the basis of the ecosystem. The forest around us had no trees bigger than a foot or two across, and none of those larger trees were chestnuts. In an instant, my world changed. This new forest friend I had made was an imposter – solace for my soul, yes, but incomplete. A shadow. In fact, said my professor, each of these trees is no more than a few decades old. Settlers had cleared this land for farming, only recently allowing it to lay unattended to regrow a strange new forest. This particular spot we were standing in felt different – it was a few decades older than the forestlands owned by the college that I had so often explored. It was ancient compared to the forest all of us were used to. Still, it was in its youth. It echoed none of the former glory of old-growth woods. Instead, the trees were small and frail.

We stood at the base of a deep well in the earth, mounded on one side. This was where an old giant had fallen. The mound had been the root ball raised from the forest floor, long since decomposed. The hole was where the tree had displaced the ground. The old tree itself was, of course, nowhere to be seen. But as my professor explained the shapes of the ground, the lessons we could learn from the soil itself, suddenly my eyes opened. I could read the forest. This new friend opened itself up to me. It told me stories. It explained the way it had lived for generations, only to become this living shadow. For the first time, I felt a deep solastalgia for the woods I would never know. I’d come to love these Northeastern forests. I hadn’t realized that they were nothing like the home they had once been to so many creatures.

When we set aside land to preserve it, when we designate wilderness, we are creating a commodity. Nature is a resource (though undervalued by most) that is beneficial for our well-being. I imagine that many of the greatest environmental writers of history have felt a deep, insatiable solastalgia, an unfulfilled desire to see the world return, to wander through old growth forests teeming with abundance, to float through hidden canyons and find rock temples that no longer exist today.⁵ So, they championed the only thing they could think of – parks.

The National Park System is often called America’s best idea.⁶ It lives large in the public imagination as a democratic pastime and a national treasure. Anyone can visit the parks and experience their wonder – it’s a cheaper alternative to Disneyland. They seem to live at the heart of the nostalgic American road trip, entwined with the ideals of freedom and exploration that are advertised as fundamental to the American psyche. They inspire a fantasy of mountain men and John Muir-esque wanderers, self-sufficient and living off the land.⁷ They celebrate beauty and the diversity of the American landscape (isn’t this what we say our country represents?).

Since childhood, I’ve been obsessed with the National Parks. I’d felt an incredible reverence for them. I made them a part of my identity, collecting special-edition patches and happily advertising how many parks I’d been to for any school friend who would listen. I was indoctrinated with the ideals of freedom and wilderness and endless wandering. I understood them as places of conservation success stories and the epitome of environmentalism. That worship oozes through my former ideas and essays on wilderness.

But when we set aside a wild place after it has served its purpose for us, after we’ve decided those mountains are too steep or don’t have enough gold to make it worthwhile, we are preserving a ghost. The parks are nothing like the flourishing, intertwined home they’d once been. They are islands of old trees surrounded by clear cuts. They are refuges for game species that have no natural predators left. They are a shell of their former self.

And they are missing a keystone species.

Indigenous management left a lasting impact on the land. Humanity was not just a link in the food chain but the stewards of the ecosystem. They viewed their world as alive, animate, and worthy of relationship.⁸ With this mindset, they were able to steward the land in a way that benefited their own societies and also the wildlife and other natural communities around them. They were able to take the resources they needed while ensuring that there was enough left behind to create a sustainable harvest in the future. They left a lasting impact of cultivated and cared-for land that would last in perpetuity.

Today, we leave a lasting impact as well. We’ve created an inescapable behemoth of overconsumption and ‘progress’ racing full speed towards oblivion. There’s one thing we will not be able to recover simply by setting aside a park or planting trees. We do not feel a part of the land. I do not come from this land. It is not the land of my ancestors. Nor has our culture taught us how to be in relationship with it – or any land for that matter. Relationships like this have been relegated to hippie spiritual mumbo-jumbo or evoked with images of the crying Indian in full headdress and hand-carved canoe in a trash-strewn river, a relic from another time. We have put a price on every object, living or otherwise, in our world. We have extracted every ounce of economic value that we possibly could. Even in a National Park, every experience with nature, every moment of awe, is priced at $25 per vehicle.

In a land full of immigrants, how do we connect to a world that was never ours? How do we re-establish relationships with a living world that we have designated as a commodity? My college education suggests: witness. Outward Bound’s model is to expose young people to this world in hopes that they develop their own relationship. My work as a river guide espouses the same thing. I know that the experience we had out there in Joshua Tree was meaningful. I know that I will always feel a personal connection to the park and its wide open desert and its sandy washes. I have met its creatures, can greet on a first-name basis its flora and fauna. Whatever we found out there was profound in its own sense. But it was an empty husk of what we should have felt in that place. We were not so much a part of the land as walking over it.

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⁵Indeed, nature writing since the 1960s has displayed a stark transition from celebrating the sublime and simply documenting observations of nature (Thoreau, Muir, and others), to documenting loss, destruction, and the deep existential sadness that follows. This transition likely started with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, considered a groundbreaking environmental warning. Wallace Stenger, Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, and others quickly joined this loss-driven narrative.

⁶Wallace Stegner is attributed to this tagline, and it was further popularized by Ken Burn’s extensive documentary series about the National Parks titled “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.”

⁷Notice here the saying “living off the land” as opposed to living with it. The European exploitation narrative is truly all-encompassing.

⁸This animacy is reflected in indigenous languages, which is described at length in Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Chapter 6. How different would our worldview be if we gave personhood to trees, rocks, and lakes? How difficult would it be to view something as a commodity if our language gave it animacy?

My solo spot. A small personal tarp, a few large boulders, and endless views of the light dancing over distant mountains.

Ben and Michael survey the path ahead. As part of navigation training, two student each day took the responsibility of reading the map and picking the ‘trail’ to our next camp site.

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I have found myself craving wilderness again. The more time I spend in cities, the more I ache for the wide open desert. I’ve ventured in by myself, but the old primal fear greets me every time. I am all alone, after all. No community to carry me if I fall. No one to notice I was missing for at least a day or two. No cell phone service that I’ve become so reliant on for survival. I haven’t ventured alone into a true wilderness area. The areas I’ve found instead are just as isolated and beautiful and full of life. Potholes of water carved into the rock create the life of the desert, not only providing a pool to quench one’s thirst but creating cryptobiotic soil and gardens of grasses, cactus, and junipers in their wake. I’ve found silence so vast it is only interrupted by those ever-present planes. In these moments, there is nothing to do but think, to mourn the world we’ve lost and wonder what I can learn from our teachers. We have never been separate from nature. We have never had the privilege of being “a visitor who does not remain.” Indigenous people have known this for millenia. When did Europeans forget? And now that we’ve come here to a new land, how do we remember?

Today I have driven out to a BLM site a hundred miles from any town. In all directions stretch only desert and rangeland. The red rocks catch the light, reflecting and dancing under the stormy sky. Today the forecast promises snow, but the wind has died down and the world feels more at peace than it did yesterday. When the sun hits my face I lean my head back and bask in it, a gift from the world on this chilly February day.

I’ve started a new tradition. In the mornings I rise from my cozy blankets in the back of my car and go for a short walk in my pajamas. I practice greeting the world. I try to do it my way, though I feel a bit like I am stealing a ritual that isn’t mine. But I can’t deny that I feel at home here. I do know this place. I haven’t figured out how to give back yet, but I’m starting with giving gratitude.

As I walk, I say good morning to the people I know. “Good morning, Juniper.” “Good morning, Pinyon Pine.” “Good morning, Yucca!”

Even the rocks get a greeting. Even the sun. It feels childish at first. Hard to take seriously. But perhaps this is simply because I did it as a child. Back then, I knew all creatures were worth greeting.

When I’m by myself in wilderness, I can’t help but feel afraid. I don’t wander as far as I might otherwise. I don’t climb the rocks like I would with a friend. I get to camp earlier and go inside sooner. But when I greet the plants as I pass, I remember that I am not lonely out here. I am part of a community. Though I may not be a permanent resident, though today I am just a visitor, I am not separate. And I am certainly not alone.

A snowy morning in Joshua Tree National Park mid-course. The morning of our resupply dawned damp and cold. Stuffing wet sleeping bags into our bags with fingers stiff with cold, we packed quickly in hopes of warmer weather further down the road.

Burke Museum. (2014, September 9). From billions to none: The passenger pigeon. https://www.burkemuseum.org/news/billions-none-passenger-pigeon

Denevan, W. M. (1992). The pristine myth: The landscape of the Americas in 1492. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82(3), 369–385. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1992.tb01965.x

Faison, E. K., and Foster, D. R. (2014). Did American chestnut really dominate the eastern forest? Arnoldia, 72(2): 18–32. Referenced from https://arboretum.harvard.edu/stories/did-american-chestnut-really-dominate-the-eastern-forest/#:~:text=A%20recent%20paper% 20by%20Jonathan,17.5%25;%20and%20hemlock%2011%25.

Haupt, L. L. (2021). Rooted. Little, Brown Spark.

Huggins, A., Skulski, M. (Hosts). (2022, May 20). Model citizens: Fair game (Part 1) [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from https://www.futureecologies.net/listen/fe-4-4-model-citizens-pt1.

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions.

Laliberte, A. S., Ripple, W. J. (2003). Wildlife encounters by Lewis and Clark: A spatial analysis of interactions between Native Americans and wildlife. BioScience. 53(10), 994–1003. https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2003)053[0994:WEBLAC]2.0.CO;2

Nabham, G. P. (1987). The desert smells like rain: A naturalist in Papago Indian country. North Point Press.

National Park Service. (n.d.). America’s best idea today. https://home.nps.gov/americasbestidea/

National Park Service. (2024, March 4). People and bison. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bison/people.htm#:~:text=Railways%2C%20rifles%2C%20and %20an%20international,1%2C000%20animals%20by%20the%201890s

Newburger, E. & Jeffery, A. (2020, April 23). Photos show impact of temporary air pollution drops across the world from coronavirus lockdown. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/23/coronavirus-photos-show-effect-of-air-pollution-drops-from-global-lockdown.html

Nickens, T. E. (2012, August 31). The lord of the forest: the American chestnut. Our State. https://www.ourstate.com/american-chestnut/

Queens County Farm Museum. (n.d.). American chestnuts. https://www.queensfarm.org/chestnut/

The Wilderness Act (September 3, 1964).

Wilderness Society. (n.d.). The Wilderness Act. https://www.wilderness.org/articles/article/wilderness-act#:~:text=The%201964%20Wilderness%20Act%2C%20written,areas%20from%20coast% 20to%20coast.