Planning a Wilderness

A grand story of a surprising chapter in environmental and cultural history.

By 1910, the forest region of the Great Lakes states was largely denuded, logged over by industrialists who coveted its timber, particularly the giant white pine. After unsuccessful attempts to farm this cutover region of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, some began to dream of restoring the North Woods as a place of solace and beauty, of recreation and retreat. What ensued was an extraordinary campaign to recreate the original Midwest forest-the Great Lakes Crusade that James Kates chronicles in this enlightening, deeply interesting, and entertaining account of a “natural” wonderland remade from the ground up.

In Planning a Wilderness, we see how the technical challenges that taxed the expertise of foresters, land economists, game managers, and regional planners were only one part of the enormous task. Kates tells of the equally arduous undertaking of selling reforestation to the public, a campaign in which the experts and their allies in the mass media invoked popular myths of frontier individualism.

Published in cooperation with the Center for American Places.