The Books Briefing: The New Legacy of America’s Wilderness

The nature you see in documentaries is beautiful and false

“By selecting just the most stunning shots and editing people out of the picture, the [BBC Natural History Unit] creates an untouched parallel universe that’s undeniably glamorous—both beautiful and inaccessible.”

🎥 A Perfect Planet, narrated by Sir David Attenborough

🎥 Planet Earth, also narrated by Attenborough

Photograph by Katy Grannan

Return the national parks to the tribes

“The American West began with war but concluded with parks.”

📚 The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, by David Treuer

George Rinhart / Getty / Edward Curtis / LOC / NYPL / John Muir Papers / University of the Pacific Library / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

Don’t cancel John Muir—but don’t excuse him either

“A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf is a remarkable account of a man coming to understand his place in the world. It is also disturbing to read, not only because of its racist language—which could conceivably be explained away as an artifact of his time and background—but because of an insensitivity that goes beyond language.”

📚 A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, by John Muir

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE

Behind the U.S.’s buffalo slaughter

“For a long time, the country’s highest generals, politicians, even then President Ulysses S. Grant saw the destruction of buffalo as solution to the country’s ‘Indian Problem.’”

📚 The Destruction of the Bison, by Andrew C. Isenberg

LYNNE SLADKY / AP

Stories that ask whether humans and nature were always incompatible

“What’s most unusual about [Karen] Russell’s work is how paradoxically comforting it is, particularly right now, when it takes no great leap of the imagination to picture a world, orange or otherwise, without our species.”

📚 Orange World and Other Stories, by Karen Russell

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. She is currently reading Names of New York, by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.

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